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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Memory
Lose
Compliant
Memories
Amnesia
Loses
Dictators
Anything
Conceal
Without
Dictator
Make
Collectives
Would
Collective

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I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
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I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).
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I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case.
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I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
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I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
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I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
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--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.
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Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
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Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
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Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
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I do not click on random youtube videos.
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I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
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I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).
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[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
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The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is doormat.
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I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.
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The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.
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While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
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Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)
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I've reached an age at which I'd rather pay more for something that just works than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we've got left.
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