Charlie Stross

I was late-breaking. Sold my first short story to Interzone at 20, but hung fire on novels until the 21st century—I'm the last member of the 1980s "Interzone Generation" to break through. (Think Kim Newman, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, etc. Then me, trailing behind, 15 years late to the party ...)

Ahem: that was in "Tourist", the third story in the cycle, originally published in Asimov's SF in 2002.

Glaringly obvious this was a risk from WAY back. (I first saw someone with a wearable computer and a HUD strapped to his face in 1996.)

Just like how all of these techbros are rabid transphobes while claiming to love the Matrix. And also while never watching the Animatrix.

Musk also named his drone ships after Iain Banks' Culture ships. Not realizing that the ships of the Culture were autonomous individuals and Iain was, in Musk's terms, a commie.

It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends

And this is why the Labour/Tory duopoly is crumbling visibly by the month.

It was the press wot did it!

I am reminded of pretty much the ENTIRE middle east, including Iran, where by "stomping on the left" the Ba'ath (or the Shah) left an opposition vacuum which was occupied by the worst possible religious fanatics. (Who were untouchable by the secular Ba'ath, like the Lutheran church in the DDR.)

Well, that *was* the one novel I wrote in a mad fit of hypergraphia in 18 days from start to finish! So "horked up" is about right. I'm just surprised it sold. (I'd been unable to write for two months before then, due to travel committments then a medical issue: when it wore off, the dam burst ...)

I think we can safely ignore that possibility ...

The KGB got renamed and re-orged in 1991: in Russia it became the FSB, with substantial continuity of operations and remit. Other former SSRs, eg. Belarus, still have spin-offs called the KGB.

I horked up a novel back in 2014 with a plot that hinges on its (middle-aged female protagonist) developing invisibility as a superpower; based on spousal observation.

Midlife female invisibility is a *wild* thing to observe in action! (And infuriating.)

Footnote: I think the SNP's current problems stem from Sturgeon's brilliance: as with Thatcher in the 1980s, an overly effective leader suppresses—either deliberately or accidentally—the emergence of front-rank talents who might rival them.

There is, but it's regional: the SNP. (And it's less so today than it was under Nicola Sturgeon.)

-> I was going to add “but they’re not getting near No 10” but they’ve been streamlining their platform to mesh with Reform’s this week. Coalition or C&S would be a nightmare.

Timeless: youtu.be/ZRc0by2vZ7k

There's also the whole "soy boy" hate on soya milk/phystoestrogens conspiracy theory bullshit, which CLEARLY isn't racist white-supremacist bullshit from start to finish, OH NOES

That was a nice twist, but I tend to think of the Dresden Files as having a bad case of Wile E. Coyote world-building. (But then, nobody ever starts a 12+ volume series in the expectation that they'll still be writing it in 20 years time!)

Something vampire fic seldom plays with is vampires playing with human expectations based on human fic about vamps—and with humans manipulating vampires' behaviour via their (the vamps) own awareness of human beliefs about vampires.

Oh boy.

oh wow. this finally happened to me. a piece I wrote lifted wholesale by the Daily Mail, lightly rewritten and without any links back to my original piece of writing.

most amazingly, a weird use of the word 'pacing' suggests to me that they did it with ChatGPT.

archive.ph/LFmzR

I love my country. I just happen to love most of the bits racists hate, and I hate what they’re doing to it. I want better for it and for us.

They're photocopies of Blairites the way Cameron and Osborne were photocopies of Thatcher/Major.

I am scared to imagine what kind of blurry photocopy-of-a-photocopy of Johnson Labour will come up with after their 2029 defeat (or worse, their narrow 2029 victory on a populist Reform-lite platform.)

Ah yes, Labour, party of the left.

Labour stopped being a party of the left some time between Neil Kinnock resigning as leader and Tony Blair becoming PM. (Nobody mention John Smith.) And even under Kinnock they were a bit iffy. But that was a different age (no real internet, for one thing.)

I CAN'T watch gory films! (Not only the eye trouble that stops me watching most TV/film—also, too much imagination!)

The gendering and performative submissiveness of AI characters—AND their symmetry and colouration—holds up a mirror to our cultural expectations.

And what it shows us about ourselves is something really ugly ...

I've been back in 2019—for three days of business meetings—and to the worldcon in Chicago in 2022, when things seemed to have calmed down. Now? Who the fuck knows when it'll be safe, if ever.

I can't speak for Mark, but I cancelled my future US visiting plans for the foreseeable future on November 7th, 2024. I'll reconsider only after Trump is out of office, and keep the policy if his successor is Vance or another MAGA.

But also, Starship has a completely different fuel cycle—full flow staged combustion of methane and LOX, while the Merlin engines in Falcon are much more traditional open cycle kerosene/LOX burners. Starship's cycle was designed to support use of fuel/oxidizer generated in situ on Mars (eventually).

What I want to know is, what if there are multiple publishers—and they all claim?