Jury Service is the first of two novellas Charlie Stross and I wrote about Huw, a technophobe stuck on Earth after the Singularity (the other one being Appeals Court). They are both being published, along with a third, yet-to-be-written novella Parole Board by Tor Books as Rapture of the Nerds. — Read the rest

Tor.com's got a new Charlie Stross "Laundry" story, part of his series of stories wherein Cthulhu meets James Bond, as part of its Cthulhu month — there's also a podcast of the story!

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

One of the highlights of this year's World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal was sf writer Charlie Stross chatting with sf fan and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman. Charlie's work touches on many economic themes, and Krugman's reputation for finding economic lessons in everyday life is well deserved; the combination was dynamite. — Read the rest

Charlie Stross has just wrapped up a 12-part, 25,000-word autobiography explaining how he came to find himself writing some of the weirdest, freshest, wildest post-cyberpunk fiction in the field.

I was stressed out for most of two years. I'm an alpha-type personality to begin with, but this wasn't funny.

Charlie Stross and I are doing a benefit talk for the Open Rights Group on May 1 in London, entitled "Resisting the all-seeing eye." Hope to see you there — Stross is a ball, and ORG is a damned worthy cause, especially in this era of ubiquitous surveillance. — Read the rest

The Crooked Timber politics blog is holding a literary salon on the works of Charlie Stross, with commentary from a variety of writers and specialists in different disciplines, including Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman and sf writer Ken Macleod.

But what makes Stross's version different from everyone else's is that he's noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn't a fantasy.

Rick sez, "GeekSpeak/Talk of the Bay on KUSP will have Charles Stross live, in-studio for your questions on Tuesday, July 29, 10-11AM PDT. You can also email questions to agony@trashotron.com. Listen to the interview live. Call us at 800-655-5877! We want to hear your voices on the radio!" — Read the rest

Wagner James Au sez, "Extropia, a large and prestigious futurist/transhumanist city in Second Life, will host Charles Stross at Sophrosyne's Special Salon, this Saturday, June 21, from 1-2:30 pm Pacific. Charlie will discuss the Singluarity in fiction, cutting-edge technologies, his Hugo-Award finalist novel Halting State, about virtual worlds and augmented reality, and his upcoming novel Saturn's Children. — Read the rest

Craig sends in this "video of Charlie Stross's visit to Google's headquarters where he gave a reading of his book, 'Halting State'." Halting State — a novel about a heist in a multiplayer online role-playing game — is one hell of a fantastic book and Charlie's a GREAT reader. — Read the rest

For the past two years, Charlie Stross and his wife Feorag NicBridhe have been planning their Big Trip to Japan for the World Science Fiction Convention that's just gone by. Now Charlie — an accomplished sf writer and keen observer — has written up a charming and fascinating set of observations from his trip. — Read the rest

Charlie Stross has just posted the prologue and first three chapters of his kick-ass heist novel about a robbery in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, "Halting State":

"I'd just come out of the post-IPO debrief meeting with Marcus and Barry, they're our CEO and CTO.

Charlie Stross's latest novel Halting State starts out as a hilarious post-cyberpunk police procedural, turns into a gripping post-cyberpunk technothriller, and escalates into a Big Ideas book about the future of economics, virtual worlds, the nation state and policing, while managing to crack a string of geeky in-jokes, play off a heaping helping of gripping action scenes, and telling a pretty good love story. — Read the rest

My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross, a Hugo-winning SF writer, published the text of a lovely little speech he's just given about the nature of the future. From the section labelled "Putting it all together" and onward, it's pure gonzo-Strossian skiffy goodness:

10Tb is an interesting number.

Rick Kleffel's awesome science fiction podcast Trashotron has just posted an interview with Charlie Stross, my frequent collaborator and author of the forthcoming sf supernatural thriller The Jennifer Morgue.

Bob Howard–a T-shirt–wearing computer geek and field agent for the super-secret British government agency The Laundry–must save the world from eldritch horrors, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, in this fast-paced spy thriller.

Appeals Court, the gonzo novella that Charlie Stross and I wrote as a sequel to our story Jury Service, has just been published under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license on the Infinite Matrix:

The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert-systems were trained by angry, resentful trade-unionists in ransom for their pensions.

Snip:

The actual estimates for insured structural damage caused by Hurricane Katrina are currently around US $25-30Bn. The current loss of life estimates are in the hundreds (although I'd be unsurprised if the eventual death toll does not eventually top 9/11 by quite a margin).

I'm supposed to be on holidays, but I would be hideously remiss if I failed to note that my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross just won the Hugo award for best novella for The Concrete Jungle. Charlie, it couldn't have gone to a more deserving soul (and I scoured the afterparties for you but missed you somehow, so take these congrats in lieu of a celebratory drink!) — Read the rest

Paul Di Filippo wrote a great April Fools' article for Locus on my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross becoming posthuman:

"Charlie was teetering on the precipice of transhumanism for the whole last year," said his friend and collaborator Cory Doctorow. "His lifestyle and cerebral/neurological capabilities had been ramped up through intensive ideation and selective smart-drug use to an exquisite pitch just short of the Singularity.

The January issue of Locus Magazine, the science fiction trade magazine, has a cover story on me and Charlie Stross, my friend and collaborator. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it.

Link

(Thanks, Amanda! — Read the rest

The current ish of Popular Science (August 2004) is on stands now, with a great piece on Charlie Stross and me as science fiction writers who are doing good work on the Singularity (alas, the piece isn't online yet, but it's easy to find in shops). — Read the rest