 | Charles Stross http://www.antipope.org/charlie |
| Notable Works: Glasshouse, Accelerando,
Singularity
Sky, The
Atrocity Archives, Timelike
Diplomacy | |
Charles Stross Uploads His Mind To HardSF.net
2006-06-28"I don't write fiction as a vehicle for propagandizing scientific concepts. If there's any polemical content in what I write, it's political and social."
HSF: What inspired you to incorporate the hard sciences into a fictional story?
CS: I'm not sure I ever did. You'll find my stories littered with the detritus of fantasy -- faster than light travel, time machines, mind uploading, nanotechnology. Some of these fantasies are less implausible than others, to the extent that they might be possible; but I wouldn't say I deliberately decided to incorporate the sciences into fiction in any systematic way.
HSF: How important is it to you, if at all, that the reader actually learn scientific concepts from your stories?
CS: It isn't. It's more important to me that they don't pick up and start believing stuff that's obviously unreal, but that's still not central to what I do. But I don't write fiction as a vehicle for propagandizing scientific concepts. If there's any polemical content in what I write, it's political and social.
HSF: Do you think the seemingly abstract and intangible hard science theories affect your ability to sell hard sf literature?
CS: What does affect me, as a literary working stiff, is the fact that genre SF is outsold 2:1 by genre fantasy, and that genre fantasy is in turn outsold about 5:1 by romance. By definition, if I write in the SF field I am putting on the hair shirt of reduced royalty payments. More interestingly, I'm writing for an audience that is actually vanishingly small. About 25% of the Earth's population speak or read English (far fewer than that as a first language), and about 2% of the fiction sold is SF. So before I even get started, I've got to accept that I'm very unlikely to move mountains or found schools of thought or anything like that.
Just as well I'm just a fiction writer rather than some kind of evangelist, isn't it?
HSF: Do you feel that hard sf is the only real type of science fiction? Or is there room for "soft sf"?
CS: I think the whole distinction is nonsensical. I write fiction, period. To the extent that any kind of science that is represented in it, I try to get it right, or at least plausible. But the rhetoric of "hard sf" versus "soft sf" strikes me as some kind of ludicrous hang- over from the origins of Hugo Gernsback's new genre, back when it was the agitprop -- political propaganda -- arm of a political movement, Technocracy.
HSF: How might one make hard science fiction more appealing to a "mainstream" audience?
CS: I think hard SF has been outmaneuvered by fantasy, in the guise of Star Wars, Star Trek, and big media with special effects in general. 30% of Hollywood's output these days is marketed as SF (complete with exploding alien spaceships, no less), and yet the proportion you could reasonably class as hard SF isn't even small -- it's so tiny you can count the films on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, engage with what the potential readers or viewers are interested in. That's how to get them interested.
But frankly, I think the tide pool that hard SF occupied is to some extent drying up. Hard SF emerged in a specific context, during the 1930s -- a time when people whose parents had crossed the praires incovered wagons were trying to figure out how to deal with electricity and flying machines, and then with computers and atomic power and space ships. It formed a useful educational tool, broadening outlooks, and showing that this stuff might in some ways be relevant to human lives. Today, we're surrounded by gizmos. There are probably more computers in my apartment today than there were in this entiry country (Scotland) in 1960. Science fiction has imploded into thepresent, with global climate change affecting us directly, space ships making soft landings on the moons of Saturn, face transplants in France (hey! wasn't that the plot of a Fu Manchu novel sixty years ago?) and virtual reality worlds with GDPs bigger than Austria.
I believe the current relative ascendancy of fantasy compared to SF is actually symptomatic of our core readership screaming "MAKE IT STOP!" and retreating into the consolatory comforts of a time when we knew what the hell was going on. Alvin Toffler pinned the tail on the donkey back in the 1970s -- it's called future shock. And it has replaced sense-of-wonder in most people's lives.
HSF: What do you think will be the most discussed scientific topic in the coming decades?
CS: The usual -- there's very little new in SF today.
Global warming will continue to be of interest; it doesn't matter whether you believe it's anthropogenic or natural -- it's the elephant in the living room, and we've got to learn how to live with it. So far, only Kim Stanley Robinson has really gotten to grips with that topic in the US -- KSR is consistently one of the most interesting "hard" SF writers currently working the field, even if he's ideologically at loggerheads with the old-fashioned Stalinist mankind uber alles attitude of the hard SF tide pool in general.
Nanotechnology ... sooner or later we'll get past the magic nano pixie dust foo-foo stage where we seem to have been stuck for a decade. And then there'll come a time when Eric Drexler's prognostications look as quaint and old-fashioned as Jules Verne talking about the City of the Automobile back in 1890. It'll boil us slowly, like the proverbial (and fictional) frog.
Physics today looks to be about where it was in 1895, i.e. everything wrapped up except for some annoying loose ends, like why electrons don't spiral into the atomic nucleus and neutralize themselves, or where 70% of the mass of the cosmos is hiding. The first question triggered the crisis that gave us quantum mechanics and general relativity; the second will give us ... who knows what? I'm pretty sure it won't be string theory, but I'm not willing to bet on what else will go out the window when the board finally gets tossed in the air. Hell, right now, just writing a story that postulates black holes -- that hoary old staple of cosmology and hard SF since the 1960s -- looks like a dodgy gamble, like writing a USA/USSR technothriller set in 2010, back in 1988.
HSF: Do you generally write what you know about, or do you intentionally write in unknown territory?
CS: I mostly write about what I know, but I have an eclectic, random, and magpie-like set of enthusiasts for learning new stuff. (Plus, my university background covered some useful stuff -- pharmacology, biochemistry, some physics, computer science.)
HSF: Which do you consider a bigger personal accomplishment: your contributions to science or to literature?
CS: My contributions to literature -- because I don't think I've made any to science! Very few people do. Even your average doctoral thesis is just a single pixel in a mosaic the size of the Great Wall of China. At least literature is easier to make a mark in.
HSF: Are you working on anything right now?
CS: Right now I'm writing a Mundane SF novel. Mundane SF is this somewhat dour British movement that eschews gimcrackery like aliens, FTL travel, time machines, and so on. I'm writing a detective story set in Scotland in about 12-15 years' time. It's about a computer game, and the heroine is an accountant. This seems pretty wild and whacky to me. And as one of the characters remarks, "it isn't virtual reality until you can mount a coup d'etat in it -- and make it stick in the real world."
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