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
writing ideas stories
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
writing ideas care
If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?
writing years ideas
I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.
ideas yellow people
The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
art ease entirely fiction form genre human ideas literary literature primarily pure rather science tool writers
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
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.
multiple published
My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
foreground humour matching principle response tend work
I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
reading writing style
Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
writing years long
If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.
fiction flash
I don't do flash fiction.
mother influence
Biggest influence: my mother.
war believe writing
There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?
book writing firsts
Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.