Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Strossis an award-winning British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 October 1964
generating mystical skill
Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.
adapted aerospace boldly brick fiction hit ill outer profoundly science space until wall
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
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The social context of the UK is more open to the future, the old pessimism has been scrubbed and there's a view that you can engage with the future again. There is quite a lot of optimism in British science fiction, much less of the sackcloth and ashes and 'we're all going to die' attitude that it used to have, whereas the Americans have become more entrenched and fearful since 2001.
attractive crude explain fiction lived science strong
Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.
multiple published
My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
heads reasonable
I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
country full history incidents might visit
History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!
bring broaden condition definition doomed fiction human insight key needs remain science study
I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
good keeping news remember talk trying walking week
I was walking around for a week or so trying to remember not to talk about it. And, you know, keeping good news to yourself isn't always easy.
areas few narrative novels remaining
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
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The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
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Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.
became black climbing earliest fairly front hour image kids man morning sat sort suit ungodly watching white
One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.
best clear fiction itself life merely outcome precisely reader showing suspect
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.