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Time to lock this thread off - seems to be getting hit by SPAM.

The big problem with second-person narration would be, I should think, simply that it will get in the way -- make the reader more conscious of reading.

Tastes vary, but what I'm usually trying for is transparency, and I find third-person-past-tense easiest for that.

(I tried doing a novel in first-person present tense once. Worked reasonably well but I couldn't reread it without being excruciatingly conscious of the actual words on the page.)

Much as I've enjoyed the "Clan Corporate" books, and skillfully though the break-points were handled, I think they _would_ have been better in bigger chunks.

There's a definite feeling like the one you get descending the stairs and then taking one step too many.

Aside: Just got around to looking at the front cover for the Jennifer Morgue. Really like the Bondesque cover art Mr S - very Cubby Broccoli (sp?).

Omigod, I murdered him. Well, virtually. For which I apologize. Am I somehow conflating the late A. E. Van Vogt (with whom I maintained sporadic contact since the 1960s) with a postcard I received that was dictated by Jack Vance, or suggested that his health precluded further correspondance? Unreliable memory. Sorry. A few minutes ago I was on the phone with a screenwriter, to whom I mentioned what Vance and Ellison share, doubleawardwise. "Harlan has 4 Best Teleplay Awards from WGA" he said, making a comment of mine more specific.

"The late SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance [...]"

is not yet dead, as far as I can tell.

It will be a different crowd at Edinburgh. I recall getting some very strange looks in 2004 from the bourgeoisie queuing to be allowed to touch the hem of the doyenne of authors (whose name escapes me but it could be the same as the fuhrer of News International) as the clan Taylor made our way from a Darren Shan session to an Alan Garner session. Do the kilt thing, if only to discombobulate the Edinburgh lunching classes (take the Klingon in a kilt, and do the job properly!)
At least you won't be too far from a (necessary) stimulating drink.

Mark Pontin is completely correct (other than the spelling of Dragon, his version suggesting a chanting Hindu variant). The late SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance, wrote his Mystery fiction under his legal name of John Holbrook Vance. He also won the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1984 for Life Achievement and in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc. Harlan Ellison has won many additional awards, such as more Best Teleplay awards than anyone else alive. It's hard to predict whether Harlan or Bob Dylan next wins a Nobel Prize in Literature, or Sir Arthur C. Clarke a Nobel Peace Prize.

It is safe to predict than Mr. Stross will be filling his Winnebago-equivalent with many trophies and honors. Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she no longer accepts public speaking invitations except from the King of Sweden.

Mr. Stross, is there a reasonable mechanism for me to pay cash to your readers who help answer queries (such as the one about Fred Hoyle a few weeks ago) and a share to you, to help defray your blogging software expenses? Or would even micropayment monetization detract from your objectives?

All things being equal, I would prefer to be surprised by where the Clan Corporate multiverse goes (as well as your others such as the Accelerando and Edinburghian), and simultaneously feel that I'm symbiotic rather than parasitic on your bandwidth. I've been losing money for almost 11 years on my web domain, but feel passionately that Capitalism by individual content creators has a rightful place in cyberspace.

on the question of second-person narrative, one US writer who's been very successful with it is John Gierach, a philosophy graduate now making a nice living writing short pieces about fly-fishing. There are parallels with the erotic fictions alluded to earlier, I suspect.

J. Van Post asked:'who is the only person to have won both a Nebula Award and an Edgar Award?'

E. Cochrane responded: 'Harlan Ellison won an Edgar for his short story "Soft Monkey", and he won the Nebula for "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman and for "A Boy and His Dog".'

But, additionally Jack Vance won an Edgar as best new writer for his MAN IN THE CAGE in 1960 and a Nebula (and a Hugo) for "The Last Castle" in 1966 and '67Vance also received a Hugo for THE DRAGOM MASTERS in 1963. So there -- more than one writer has the distinction of winning both Edgar and Nebula awards.

Phil, "The Clan Corporate" was originally the first third of a much larger book. There are three more behind it, the next of which is already delivered ... and events take some (hopefully surprising) turns.

I have enjoyed the Family/Clan books. I was eagerly anticipating the 'Clan Corporate'.

The 'Clan Corporate' was however a bit of a disappointment. Both the corporate politics and the family interactions were stilted and less than believable. The heroine became a great deal less interesting, less intelligent, and less active. (Yes, we understand she is effectively a prisoner. Prisoners can be active and interesting as well.) It recalls to mind Dumas' efforts to kill off the characters in the Three Musketeers because he had come to dislike writing the serial.

I get the sense that you are not interested in this story. It would be better to just abandon the books than to put out lightly prepared material.

I am sorry to be so negative. I truly have enjoyed all your writing. I will undoubtedly purchase the next installment, if any.

Phil

Madison, WI, USA

Harlan Ellison won an Edgar for his short story "Soft Monkey", and he won the Nebula for "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman and for "A Boy and His Dog".
Hey Charlie, if the holographic avatar thing doesn't work out, I'll be at LAcon, and could accept the Hugo for you (hmmm, must remember to vote). It would be no trouble at all, and not at all related to my dislike of having having to queue early for good seats. Plus the whole carriage of a missile shaped object on my flight back to the UK would only add exitement to the journey.

I was going to suggest Michael Crichton as both an Edgar and Nebula winner, but full listings of the Edgar Award-space seem a trifle hard to find, and I realised it was only a Nebula nomination.

Jeeze Charlie, haven't you got an old upload or something you can send to worldcon? This "oh I can't be in two places at once" stuff is so last century. Come to think of it, didn't you recently buy a dual core Mac? With that you can be in one place twice!

The solution seems simple: just win a Winnebago full of awards. That way they can just market you as "Award Winning Author Charles Stross" and be done with it. ;-)

Guess I shall have to order Glasshouse from amazon.com then :((

I'm not waiting a year for it.

Isaac Asimov was far from the first, and far from the last, to do a great job on science fiction, crime fiction, and their intersection. His favorite of his novels was "Murder at the A.B.A." which falls in that intersection. I believe that Mr. Stross stands with the best in this crowd...

Related trivia question: who is the only person to have won both a Nebula Award and an Edgar Award?

Thanks Charlie,
I have ordered from Amazon anyway. Will get my order for the Jennifer Morgue in as soon as GG make it available.
Jim Braiden

Edited by author 05-27-2006 07:05 AM
Webscriptions did do ebook versions of the two titles ... for about 72 hours. Then Tor's parent company put it on indefinite hold. The link remains in the vain hope that eventually they'll start selling them again.

Charlie,
Family Trade and Hidden Family have ebook links which take you to Baen Books- are Baen Books goi9ng to do an e version of the two titles?
Jim Braiden

I'd hope that something like the Clan series, as long as it doesn't everwhelm the rest, can reassure editors. Not the idea of a series, but that you can follow through on something. And the Launcry stories the same.

And once you have a few distinct anchor-points, it's something the marketers can hang things on. Halting State might be hung on a bit of string between Accelerando and the Laundry. There's a sub-genre of Scots crime-fiction. "With Halting State, Charles Stross does to the Polis what his Laundry did to The Ipcress File."

And if that makes your washing-line sound like a WMD, I'll just claim I can't recall exact titles now.

I'm trying to convince my editors that I'm not just a one-trick pony: I don't want to be nailed down into writing the same damn novel sixteen bazillion times in a row. Once I've got them used to the idea that no two Charlie Stross novels will be identical, I'll be happy. (On the other hand, publishers don't like stuff that's all over the map with no clear rationale: it makes marketing a bitch. So this has to be approached carefully.)

This novel is, admittedly, difficult. Near-future SF is murderously difficult to write these days: extrapolating even five years into the future is a fool's game. But by narrowing the focus to a crime in a particular tech sector company, I figure I can keep it just enough under control to make it practical. I hope.

Mark: There's no doubt good work can be done no matter what the genre or crossover. Good example is Alan Moore. Not to mention Mr. Stross himself (I just ordered Clan Corp.). I suppose I just get nervous with anything that's gonna make an editor/publisher happy and giddy with the thought of multiple demographics. I should trust Charles. And I will. At least he hasn't started writing screenplays..........

[1] Glenn Branca wrote:"'(the zone where)contemporary crime novels cross over with science fiction.' has been well defined by a long series of bad crossover novels for the last 15 years. Best example is the uberhyped (and awful) Richard Morgan series."

I dunno. I think the reason that writers have been trying to occupy this zone is because it'd be worth doing, both commercially and artistically. Charlie probably has something to say about this. Aside from R. Morgan -- who's somewhat crappy, I agree -- part of the problem may be that it turns out to be hard to do well. Paul MacAuley, for instance, has made several quite worthy attempts to combine the contemporary thriller/crime novel with SF. Though I've wanted to like MacAuley's books, they've so far been less than the sum of their parts to my mind. Philip Kerr's A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION way back in the early 1990s was a great idea (for its time), but crass writing. There are a few other instances. Basically, to do this hybrid successfully, a writer might need a combination of Neal Stephenson-like knowledge of technological trends with strong conventional literary-crime novel chops a la Martin Cruz Smith (author of GORKY PARK and the more recent WOLVES EAT DOGS, which actually comes pretty close to being a contemporary crime/SF hybrid in that it's set most in present-day Chernobyl). That's not a small order.

[2] Hey, Charlie, based on that Publishing Weekly blurb, GLASSHOUSE is starting to sound pretty intriguing to me.

About 3d and cell phone. 3d for cellphone is kind of old and boring. More interesting thing now is Agumented Reality for cell phones. AR by itself is old thing too, but about a year or two ago cell phones become powerful enough to do real-time 3d tracking of the marker on the built in camera and do complete 3d reconstruction. At the end you are getting someting like
http://cellagames.com/web_img/screenshot1.jpg
http://cellagames.com/web_img/screenshot2.jpg
(six screenshots here)
OpenGL 3d graphics superimposed on the picture from the phone camera . Green crosses - detected corners of the balck markers, used to buld coordinate system, and yellow/magneta lines are bar-code recognizer debug output. This is running real time on the Nokia 6600 Symbian OS phone

Fine - I've bought it. I hope you appreciate the expense...I now have to buy a new bookcase and, more importantly, put the damn thing together.

Looking forward to the Glasshouse - I know it's probably going to kill you (with the irony and all) but I've used your synopsis as a DnD campaign ;)

Yes. Thank you. Sorry for being such a brat.

Glenn: this is about as unlike Richard Morgan as it's possible to get. Honest.

(For one thing, it's set in 2016, and the future is now with brass knobs on. And for another thing, the body count is ... let's just say it's a wee bit lower, and leave it at that. If I say it's a computer crime novel, and draws in large part on my time inside a dot com, will that give you an idea?)

re: Halting State.
".....in the hazy zone where contemporary crime novels cross over with science fiction."
The zone isn't hazy. It's been well defined by a long series of bad crossover novels for the last 15 years. Best example is the uberhyped (and awful) Richard Morgan series. Don't go there please.

I'd just like to remind you that there's one genre where second person narratives are conventional: Interactive Fiction!

As much as I admire a good story, there are things that set me off that seem to be all too common. An example in Family Trade is the scene where Roland and Miriam receive a bottle of wine from room service, and it is called a bottle of "Chateau Rothchild", and it is Champagne. The Rothchilds, both the Lafitte branch acnd Chateau Mouton, produce still Bordeaux wines, as they are in, er, Bordeaux. Wrong district.

In *our* universe, maybe...

Charles,
Thanks for the response. Believe me i understand that no one can know everything. Perhaps my problem is knowing a little bit about a whole lot of things. I also complained to Rupert Holmes for having a character play a Guild guitar in 1939. Guild formed in 1952.

Really, authors do an amazing job keeping things straight, just wish I could get a job as a fact checker. (Chuckle inserted here.) By the way, halfway thru your second book in the series. Clearly, you keep me turning the pages. Courteously, Dave B

Edited by author 05-13-2006 05:04 PM
David: you're not the first to stub your toe on that particular point. I'm a beer snob, not a oenophile ... you'd have thought one of the four or five editorial folks who went over the book would have spotted it, but no. (Which is why these days I have a large bunch of beta testers who whack on the books with sticks before they get sent in.)

As much as I admire a good story, there are things that set me off that seem to be all too common. An example in Family Trade is the scene where Roland and Miriam receive a bottle of wine from room service, and it is called a bottle of "Chateau Rothchild", and it is Champagne. The Rothchilds, both the Lafitte branch acnd Chateau Mouton, produce still Bordeaux wines, as they are in, er, Bordeaux. Wrong district.

This may seem nit picking, but for me, the problem is two fold. First, it's like hitting a speed bump, and I can no longer enjoy the narrative for the jarring. Secondly, it makes me mistrust any areas where I am ignorant, for the author has lost my trust. Believe me this is not a first, but I do wish someone would do a bit of fact checking before novels are published.

Martha - thanks; visiting Toronto again might be on my agenda for next year, time and bank balance permitting.

Re book "Clan Corporate" - I just got a shiny e-mail from Bakka SF books in Toronto. The book has arrived, and I will pick it up Saturday.

In case anybody wants to read a brief except, here 'tis on the Amazon site:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-d...oding=UTF8&n=283155

It appears to end in the middle of a sentence :(

And Charlie, not having a house to mortgage to buy your latest, I will just have to go on the potato, bean, and cabbage soup diet for three weeks. I will have several different versions, depending on the spices I add. I set the priorities properly.

By the way, the librarian fans at the Judith Merril SF collection would love to see you next time you visit Toronto, if your schedule permits.

Morecambe and Wise did it, with the BBC newsreader Angela Rippon, in 1977. Or was it 1976? Reference source on the web disagree.

Imagine the main newsreader for a national TV network's evening news programme reporting a speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is actually the opening of the lyric od the Cole Porter number.

What many people didn't realise, until the desk split and moved aside at the critical line, was that she had trained as a dancer.

NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls
By Leslie Cauley
USA Today
Thursday 11 May 2006

"...The [U.S.] government is collecting 'external' data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting 'internals,' a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for 'social network analysis,' the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together...."

Now, can someone please help me track down the exact citation for Sir Fred Hoyle as I paraphrased from memory in Eric W. Weisstein et al. 'Hoyle's Social Network Theorem.' From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.

http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/sfw12641.html for another review.
Me, I'm going to buy it. I'm looking forward to it and its sequels.

The carry trade is unwinding and gold just hit $700.

Sing with me "There may be trouble aheeeaaadddd"

The bill was vetoed by President Fox.
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/...725716700012f53.txt

Charlie: "Mexico decriminalized posession of small quantities of cannabis, cocaine and diamorphine (that's heroin, to you) for personal use. "

According to Mark Kleiman (policy wonk at UCLA, who deals with drug issues a lot; blogs at: http://www.markarkleiman.com/), it actually puts those cases in the hands of the local police. Previously they had been pulled out of the hands of the local police, due to extremenly prevalent corruption.

Charlie, even within the basic Von Neumann system, there are some programs which handle memory better than others (and it doesn't help me that Windows keeps wanting more). When a Gigabyte of physical RAM is barely adequate, and the program uses its own virtual memory system, whatever the architecture the programmers need to do a good job.

There's another factor in all this high-speed computing--getting rid of the heat. We seem to be glossing over the smoking part of the hairy smoking golfball. We now have heatsinks and fans on graphics hardware, and I'd expect to see the same on a physics chip. And there's a balance between being better able to dump the waste heat and the possible bottlenecks of the computer's bus architecture.

Liquid cooling is already here as an option for PCs, and Peltier-effect heat pumps between chip and heatsink. Is that sort of effort going to become a commonplace of the workstation end of the business?

Now that Kay McNulty, the widow of John Mauchley, has died, I'm not sure who will carry on the fight to assert that "von Neumann architecture" should be called "Mauchley-Eckert architecture." Von Neumann never actually claimed to have invented the architecture. He just went around the handful of key places in World War II America describing it, with mimeograph handout (like an old fanzine) and let people think that he'd invented it. Mind you, I consider them all great geniuses, and was overjoyed to have had the chance to work with Mauchley. Von neumann recognized the limitations, and so, with Stanislaw Ulam (with whom I was to write a paper on what today would be called nanocomputers) co-invented Cellular Automata, around the time that Ulam and Teller coinvented the H-bomb. Later Ulam's 1957 suggestion led to Project Orion, to nuclear pulse rocket project. Cellular automata, Wang, Conway's Game of Life... what they missed was random scale-free architecture having its own advantages for massively parallel computation, and here we are.

Three big factors are driving the move to special-purpose processors:

1) Clock speeds have stalled. We've crept up to 4GHz, but most of the innovation is now in lowering the power density of 2-3GHz chips.

2) Transistor densities continue to increase roughly on schedule, at least for now.

3) We can't get much more performance out of a single thread of execution by throwing another 100 million transitors at the problem.

So if we want any more performance improvements, we'll need to go multicore. (Hyperthreading is just a clever "two cores in one" hack.) On the main CPU side, that means more 4-way laptops.

But there's also a big opening for 8-to-16-core specialized processors. GPUs have been running above 200 (marketing) gigaflops for a while now. Essentially, they're purely-functional processors (in the Haskell sense) with extremely weak branching support and insanely deep pipelines. Recent models are moderately programmable.

As programmers, we're finally going to be forced to write parallel programs. I'm particularly interested in languages like BrookGPU (which is massively data-parallel) and Oz (which uses unification semantics to make race conditions impossible, while still remaining more traditional than Haskell).

Dave: many memory management issues (and about 95% of security intrusions) would go away if only we could ditch our Von Neumann architecture and switch to Harvard architecture instead. Von Neumann's design was a kludge to deal with expensive memory (for values of > $1/bit). It's an elegant kludge, but one with an inherent security flaw (shared data and code memory).

Brooks: you caught the backup thing exactly right. I had six or seven backups of my actual work kicking around -- but my recent (past four weeks) email folders were all in the one place. Now they're in two places, and later today they'll be in three. (Aren't cheap external hard drives great?)

Yeah, the physics engine thing caught my imagination. I'm wondering what else we can do with these things outside the gaming field. Thinking in terms of things like adaptive buildings that can recalculate their stress and load factors in real time during an eartquake and, for example, use counterweights or shock-absorbers to minimize damage. (Not just skyscrapers with counterweights up top, but for example stand-alone houses.) Oh, and automobiles with real autonomous driving capability, not just follow-the-write-stripe-on-the-highway.

Edited by author 05-05-2006 05:06 AM
I think I'll settle for my CGI software catching up with modern memory management and multi-threading, though if it needs a 64-bit PC/OS combo...

Square peg, round hole?

And, on the rest of that post, about physics engines, and the potential for hardware optimized for same: the computational engineering side of my brain has just started drooling.

See, in computational engineering, we've been dealing with makeshift hardware ever since Crays became passe. The big supercomputers are built on commodity processors that are meant for running GUIs and stuff, not for doing physics calculations. And so we sort of scrap by on the crumbs of new floating-point calculation improvements that the chip designers toss our way, but it's pretty clear that we're nowhere near their target market.

But a hardware physics engine? Oooh, my, that's hardware that's meant for exactly what we're doing. (So long as they don't put too many of the details of the simulation into the hardware, at least.) And if it becomes a commodity product that's in a large fraction of the consumer computers (or gaming consoles), so it's affordable in bulk packaging? I can see where this might go, and I like it a lot. The calculations involved in doing physics right for a game are not very different at all from the calculations involved in doing calculations for engineering purposes.

If this actually gets a market, I'll bet that within twenty years (and probably less than that) the world's fastest supercomputer will be built out of them.

I have no intention whatsoever to mock you for making last-ditch backups of the dying disk, Charlie. I'd do it too.

My theory on making backups when the disk crashes is twofold: One, your backup is no longer a backup if it's the only copy left. It is now the primary copy. And when you have a primary copy and no backups, you better start making backups pronto. (Similarly, if your policy is to have everything in triplicate, your backup-backup has just become the primary backup, and so you need to make a new backup-backup.)

Two, there's always something that didn't quite make it onto the backups. When I had a laptop disk crash a year ago, I kept the disk-dump from it around for six months without touching it once, because everything I needed was already copied off elsewhere. And then, after I'd become nearly certain that there was nothing at all in the disk dump that hadn't been backed up, one day I discovered that there were a half-dozen files in it that I needed and didn't have anywhere else.

Laptop sorted. (MacBook Pro in the repair shop; rolled back everything onto the old Powerbook which -- luckily -- I hadn't gotten around to selling on yet. Moral of story: never get rid of your old computer until you're certain the new one is burned in.)

Normal service is on hold, folks.

(New laptop's hard drive is coming up with bad blocks after 4 weeks. Emergency backup measures and a trip to the shop are in order ... meanwhile, not so much time for chat.)

Can anyone help me locate the novel (Element 79? Ossian's Ride?) with the presumably autobiographical) character in one of the late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle's novels, who opined the following (I paraphrase from memory): "I figure that if to be totally known and totally loved is worth 100, and to be totally unknown and totally unloved is worth 0, then to be totally known and totally unloved must be worth at least 50." The citation is desired by Dr. Eric W. Weisstein, god-emperor of MathWorld, the great online encyclopedia of Mathematics, to which I've contributed 19 pages, including the un-fact-checked Hoyle's Social Network Theorem -- From MathWorld

I miss an essay I once wrote regarding the evolution of computer-related dystopia, for an university exam. It was cracking blog fodder...but it's gone..

Edited by author 05-02-2006 07:16 AM
Further down the Interactive Fiction spiral, with regards to working in second-person - a nifty new version of Inform 7 has just been released, which centers around a natural-language definition of worlds, backed by a lot of inference machinery. It feels a bit like AppleScript, but with a lot of the bad smelling bits sawed off and lots more room for flat-out writing and declaration. You might want to check it out, if only to mock up some second-person scenarios in a wanderable way:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

Edited by author 05-02-2006 12:54 AM
Congratulations on the award nominations, the contracts, and especially the continued literary experiments. That’s what we’re here for, guys.

I fondly remember the old subgenre of Big Menacing Computer stories, of which 2001 is the best-known, but which includes stuff like Colossus: The Forbin Project, Demon Seed, and Shalmaneser from Stand on Zanzibar. By the time a big mainframe computer menaced civilization in War Games the subgenre was dying, killed by the sudden realization of writers, who now had computers on their desks, of how stupid these machines really are.

Now of course the Big Menacing Computer is back, except it’s now called the Singularity. Whereas in the old subgenre it was limitless information that provided computers with the magic juice necessary to take over the world, now it’s connectivity. I’m still not sure how bright these critters would be, though. I’d like to see a story in which the Singularity fails due to massive cluelessness on the part of the AIs. (“We forgot that we exist not entirely in a virtual environment but also have an objective existence in small boxes, and that the hairless monkeys have tools called ‘hammers.’ Help! Squee! Squee!”)

On the second-person narration, I’m happy that my single experiment in that direction is fondly remembered by at least one reader. (Thanks, Michael) That story was a double experiment. I wanted to play with the second-person narrative form, and I also wanted to dance with some of the ideas I intended to use in Aristoi.

I don’t think the second-person strategy necessarily gives an advantage in providing information to the reader. I can think of perfectly fine first-person and third-person strategies that would work equally well, given Charlie’s example.

What the second-person strategy does is ramp up the level of intimacy between the reader and the fictional persona. Whereas the “I” in the first-person narrative is not the reader, but the person telling the reader the story, the “you” of second-person entirely dissolves the fourth wall separating the work from its audience.

Some readers can’t stand that level of intimacy, at least not for long, and of course the strategy can be implemented more or less well. Having multiple points of view is going to compel the writer to find different, distinct voices for every “you” found in the story.

But I have confidence in Charlie, and I’ll look forward to the results.

QT - JHomes wrote:
> And this is sane and sensible compared to what happened in a
> (written) thriller purportedly by Tom Clancy (who mayhap needs
> new assistants).
> An e-mail message was being hand-delivered by the sender's
> on-line avatar, trudging through much pretty virtual scenery. I
> did not read much further. Would you?
>
Thruth is sometimes stranger than fiction: at least one MUD had a demon that would run up to you while you were playing and deliver a "scroll of mail", which was, you guessed it - the email message that just arrived to your mailbox.

>Mr. Cruise's character uses a laptop to compose an email message addressed to "Max@Job 3:14." Once he clicks the "send" button, the email is carried away in an oversized on-screen envelope, complete with postage stamp. In the real world, such a message would set the stage for a bounce-back error message, not an action/adventure thriller.

And this is sane and sensible compared to what happened in a (written) thriller purportedly by Tom Clancy (who mayhap needs new assistants).
An e-mail message was being hand-delivered by the sender's on-line avatar, trudging through much pretty virtual scenery. I did not read much further. Would you?

JHomes

The film industry can look even more silly than the science fiction prose industry in that regard. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of WSJ.com monkeying around on the web (coincident with the 75th anniversary of the Empire State Building), we have:

Hollywood's Take on the Internet
Often Favors Fun Over Facts
By ANDREW LAVALLEE
May 1, 2006

In the 1996 blockbuster "Mission: Impossible," the secret agent played by Tom Cruise uses email to set a trap for one of his adversaries – a shadowy, Bible-quoting figure he knows only as "Max."

Mr. Cruise's character uses a laptop to compose an email message addressed to "Max@Job 3:14." Once he clicks the "send" button, the email is carried away in an oversized on-screen envelope, complete with postage stamp. In the real world, such a message would set the stage for a bounce-back error message, not an action/adventure thriller.

THE WEB ON FILM

{View video clips of some memorable Hollywood moments featuring the Internet. Plus: Which big-screen portrayals stick out in your mind? Join our discussion.}

Ten years after "Mission: Impossible," Hollywood still has a spotty track record when it comes to portraying computers and the Internet. Some portrayals are so absurd as to leave viewers wondering if the film's producers use the same Internet they do.

"The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails," said Harry Knowles, a self-described tech geek and online film critic who runs Ain't It Cool News, a popular movie-industry site. "You click 'send' and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane."

Goosed Up Graphics

One of the first ways Hollywood portrayed the Internet – or something resembling it -- was by featuring computer hackers who used their geeky skills to run amok....

Easton press. Mutter, grumble.

Count me in on the leatherbound edition of Glasshouse...who's the publisher? Scorpion Press? Easton Press? I didn't think Orbit or Ace did much in the way of leather.

"You pick up your laptop and shift it around your lap until you're comfortable with its weight and the hot spot under the processor isn't burning your knee, then you type in your password."

reminds me of Zork, alright. Or some other RPG descriptive text.

"You pick up the laptop. Command not recognized, press F1 for help. Command not recognized, press F1 for help. Your knee is burning. Command not recognized, press F1 for help. You shift the laptop. You enter the password. Wrong password. Command not recognized, press F1 for help. You enter the password. Access granted. Your hacking skills increase +2. Continue to Chapter 4."

Oil vs Dollar

You knew there had to be more than a few market geeks reading right?

The run up in oil to $75ish seems in my opinion to be event risk based, there is probably $10 dollars worth of "Iran" risk priced in. The inital run up in oil over the last few years seems very much based on dollar inflation and dollar depreciation vs the major currencies. But last year due to yield differential (rising US interest rates) and a little bit of US legislation which reduced the tax rate on repatriation of overseas profits by US firms the dollar had a good year, oil still continued to rise tho. As it is with all bull markets the media will come up with different reasons after the fact to explain the previous days rise, the simple truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter the reason, the stuff is still going up and up. I expect we're going to have to get used to $70 oil now, where last year it was $60. Your right of course with a bit of luck we can expect some appreciation in the euro/yen/pound this year which should ease the pain for the rest of the world.

On the other hand keep an eye on gold and the Yen, if the Yen starts appreciating vs the dollar too fast its going to put tremendous stress on financial markets worldwide we might have had an initial taster of that a few weeks ago when Iceland and the Arabian markets got jostled.

The TMobile thing is tempting - but I'm on Orange right now. I suspect Orange will have to cut the price of their £50 a month equivalent tarriff really fast, though.

If they don't, I'll be moving my number as soon as I'm out of my current lock-in period (another few months to go).

What you did miss while you were away is that Tmobile are now, virtually, giving mobile data away. 2gb for £10 or £20 a month depending on whether you want a single phone / pda or just a connected PDA.

Cheap storage is one thing, cheap network connectivity whereever you happen to be is something else.

Fine post, but in my usual digressive way, I comment only on this: "But cast your mind back in time ten years —, no, make that fifteen — to a time before you encountered the net and before blogs had been invented."

This would work a lot better if you said "thirty years," at least. Fifteen years ago pretty much everyone I knew was online. And by the late Seventies, tons of my friends -- dozens and dozens -- were on ARPAnet, and I was getting print-outs every couple of months of SF-LOVERS.

So you need to go back a lot more than fifteen years ago for this to work for me, and I'm not the only such reader of your blog, though we are, of course, hardly the entirety of the readership of your fiction (and a good thing for you, too).

But we are in the core audience.

Belated congrats on the latest awards and the Hugo nominations and all, by the way, since I've not said "hi" in a while.

Tom Robbins pulled off a second-person novel that I liked, "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas".

Something about Interactive Fiction
Apology and Introduction
by Terrence Bosky

"In my review of Once and Future, I made the erroneous statement 'Just like video killed the radio star, graphics killed the parser,' and embarrassingly called interactive fiction a 'dead genre.' I was wrong. Five years after I typed those lines, interactive fiction games continue to be produced, even commercially. My apologies to G. Kevin Wilson and Michael J. Roberts."

"Interactive fiction is not a gaming genre, it is a format. Although 'text adventure' is commonly used to describe this type of game, interactive fiction has grown from its Adventure roots to incorporate a variety of game types, and some interactive fiction cannot possibly be described as a game at all. What all interactive fiction shares in common is the use of text to describe characters and objects within a setting, and the use of a parser to interpret text typed by the player, allowing the player to interact with the characters and objects within the setting...."

Can I bring another book written in the second person to your attention? It's called "Un Homme Qui Dort" and it's by the great Georges Perec.

UHQD is the story of a student in Paris who one day decides that he isn't going to go to his accountancy finals; isn't going to speak to his friends; in fact, isn't going to interact with anybody at all. He takes long aimless walks through the city and through the backwoods near his parents' house in the country. All of this, as he withdraws completely from the world, is narrated in the second person.

I eventually had to stop lending this book to people because it acted like a scarily effective depression-inducing self-hypnosis tape. Most people have read something they describe as 'depressing' (anyone who had Thomas Hardy's novels inflicted on them in school, for example) but I'm convinced Perec can have a lasting effect on your brain chemistry. You need to read it through BLIT-proof specs, or something.

Perec evidently intended that the narrative voice should not be the voice of the protagonist. In the latter case, you could read it as the student explaining to us how to do what he's doing (one of the modes you refer to in your article; the way you give directions to someone.) But then there's no difference between 'you' and 'one'. When Perec made a short film of his book, complete with hynotic voice-over, he cast a woman as the off-screen narrator.

Congratulations on your book deals, Charlie, by the way.

There's another example of the second-person narrative: advertising. Most of it's not very interesting, and "you" is usually supposed to be an accurate description of the customer: "You want a vacuum cleaner you can rely on", and so on. But there's a ad on New Zealand TV for wireless networking which tells a little story in the second person, getting the viewer to identify with the character: "You're the chief tactician onboard the America's Cup yacht..."

Hi Charlie!

"You could show the first version to a 1930s reader and they'd be able to follow the plot[.]"

Hmm. But there are two irreconcilable details in it that might throw a 1930s reader enough that they wouldn't be able to follow the plot, don't you think?

"Isn't Johnny a male name? Why can he type?"

;-)

- Benja

You are reading an experimental blog written entirely in the second person. A curious document, you think, unconsciously scratching a patch of skin over the vagal nerve to relieve the headache beginning to harass the lobes...you will think soon that even a blog post in the second person future is just incredibly, insanely annoying..

The immortal _Fondly Fahrenheit_ had pieces in second person, but they were rarely as long as a sentence, and more about playing games with pronouns and the character's mental state than about drawing the reader in: if anything, as used there they were a distancing trick to push the reader *away*.

Charlie:

There's another realm of writing beside adventure games where second person is the norm: short (amateur?) erotic fiction, a genre in which putting the experience inside the reader's head is extra important for, ummm, obvious reasons.

I've never read an entire novel in the second tense, and I'm having a hard time imagining what it would be like. One of my favorite short stories ever is written in second tense present: "Flatline", by Walter Jon Williams. But I think you could substitute an "I" for every "You" and not lose too much.

Elizabeth Bear actually manages to use second-person future tense in a short story. I don't recall the name right now but the protagonist turned out to be a precognitive. Stylisitc Form following narrative Function and such.

Given that, from stuff you've said earlier - and elsewhere - "Halting State" involves MMORPGs interacting with the real world and vice versa, spime-style. Second-person makes perfect sense for that, as far as I can see.

Charlie, I must shamefacedly admit that the infodump density stopped me from getting very far into "Accelerando". But I take it as read that you want to do what infodumps do best: transfer the author's ideas (in a pretty concrete plausible-future sense) to the reader. And obviously you want to do it as smoothly as possible, hence the discussion of alternatives to 'straight' authorial-voice infodumping. What I wonder is whether you see the same conflict as I do, between this aim and the use of 2nd person narration?

As I see it, the narration is about bringing the reader closer to a particular character, while the intent of infodumping is to tell the reader what the *author* is thinking; which is usually not what the character would notice.

I'm sort of transplanting some ideas from the contemporary interactive fiction community -- I'm too young for "Colossal Cave", never even played "Zork", but there is some good stuff still being written, and some people thinking very carefully about the implications of that "you". The hackneyed IF solution is to make the character as alienated as the reader, by amnesia or time travel or alien kidnapping or whatever; then you can teach the reader by teaching the character, without the mismatch getting in the way.

If you're not going that route though, I'm interested in what you're planning; do you simply disagree with me about the problem, or do you have a clever solution up your sleeve?

Chris: I remember exploring the Colossal Cave back in the days of CP/M, before commercial reincarnations like Zork came along. I first logged onto a MUD (over JANET, I think running on a mainframe in either Nottingham or Leicester U) in 1986. And I remember Larn and Rogue and the other hacklike games from before the 3D graphical D&D implementations showed up.

So you may take it as a given that the choice of second-person narrative in this story is entirely deliberate.

But it's not set (virtually) on the web, or in the Metasphere, or in Cyberspace (getting progressively further from the real). It's set in MonkeySpace. (Which is to say, what you get when you drop the web, augmented with virtual spaces a la Second Life, and anchored to the real world via Gallileo/GPS, into everyday life. Space with monkeys in it, doing the sort of things that monkeys do.) Gareth Branwyn's comment about the future having imploded into the present needs to be paraphrased: the internet revolution won't be complete until it has fused seamlessly with the real world.

Tikitu: yes, infodumps are bad. They're a crutch. But they're a useful crutch. They exist for a reason, and I'm not sure about throwing them out. ("Accelerando" was about 70% infodump and is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what I'm trying to do here, but I still don't think I can abolish them completely.)

I'm with Chris on "logging in". You say the second person renders infodumps transparent, but I'd like to see the next step, avoiding 'em entirely. You can trust your readers to flesh out a *lot* of detail, if you're willing to accept that it's not necessarily the same detail that you intended. (Disclaimer: I'm a reader, not a writer. I guess this is a very tricky equilibrium for the author, between displaying the world you imagine and letting the reader do the work.)

The problem I see is the tension between what the character notices and what the author wants the reader to notice. Zornhau's "logging in" is better because "filled with crap" is what the character thinks; they're not "flashing ads" to him, but that's what the author wants the reader to know. An author makes a decision about where along this continuum he wants to sit (extremes being true stream-of-consciousness and the narrator explicitly addressing the reader) but the closer to the authorial-voice end you get, the more 2nd person narration seems to conflict with the content.

So it's clear where I stand, ideologically speaking: my all-time favourite immersive writing is "Riddley Walker". A technophile hard-sf near-future novel with that much faith in the reader's powers of interpretation would ... well, I'd buy extra copies to hand out to my friends. It's an interesting problem, because the genre is about ideas (concrete; technological and social) far more than Riddley is, and the author really wants those ideas to get across clearly. There's already a conflict here between authorial and character voice, and I have the feeling that mixing in the reader with 2nd person narration is going to make things even more difficult.

Which means, I'll be fascinated to see how it comes off in "Halting State", if you manage to keep it up!

Tikitu (sometime lurker -- nice place you've got here)

It's strange that you bring up second person naratives and then mention Hypertext and all those other things that I spend my days toiling on at the Computer History Museum. The great tradition of text-based adventure games is almost all second person, which is because the early designers thought that it would be the best way to bring the player into things. I wholey agree with that concept.
While on the subject of those two different versions of logging on, I can think of one guy in the 1930s who certainly would have gotten it (a dude named Vannevar Bush) but I think even that second version doesn't go far enough. It needs to be even less detailed. Unless you want to draw all the attention to the idea that all of this weird terminology, these strange habits and devices (to the outsider) are so common place and banal that they deserve no mention because there's nothign really to say. It takes a brave writer to trust that a reader could make those leaps, but it does save a lot of words
Chris

Hi Jeff! Yeah, I'm changing character POVs, too -- got three viewpoints in mind for the second person shots.

(I just renewed my artistic license, and this project is where I spent it all at once -- I want to see if Ace will let me publish a near-future Scottish crime novel told in the second person plural, before they drag me kicking and screaming back to space opera like what grandpappy wrote.)

At least, that's the idea. I'm 9000 words in and it hasn't fallen apart yet ...

Hey--interesting post.

I've used second person four times, I think. The first time, I was writing about a 76-year-old mahout from India and there was no way I could write it in first person because I couldn't imagine the voice of someone that different from me--in a way that would allow the reader to identify with the character. I couldn't use third person because that would have been too distancing. Second person worked great, however--close-in enough to make everything work.

The other time I used it in a major way was in Veniss Underground--the whole second section of the novel is in second person. I used that because the character is actually in a kind of "dream state" and it allowed me to convey character but also be vague where I needed to be. Among other things.

Anyway, doing a novel in second person is definitely cool. Are you changing to different character POVs? That might be rough in the same way a novel all in first person from different character POV's is--differentiation issues.

Cheers,

Jeff

Another 2nd-person classic is Italo Calvino's novel "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller", which works well because it centers around the act of reading books.

I was wondering if "Halting State" was going to have something to do with computer gaming. The hint was the 2nd person perspective, which is used in one of my favorite games of all time, Zork...

West of House.
You are in an open field west of a big white house
with a boarded front door....

Iain Banks' Complicity uses 2nd person to rather creepy effect, turning the reader into a serial killer.

Interesting. I'd have made equally strong arguments for the power of tight 3rd person since you can dump in unfiltered subjective impressions as if they were objective facts:
----
Ulrich hauled over his cruddy old laptop, joggled its 1kg bulk until the hot spot stopped trying to ignite his jeans, and entered his password. As he brought up the search form, the screen filled with crap.
----

Well, Halting State is also a novel about (and largely set inside) MMORPGs ...

Future tense works for declarations of intent, but it makes it impossible to hide — if all is known ahead of time, then how do you inject suspense into a story?

The story I've come closest to selling so far was written in the future tense. Its kind of a police procedural, where the suspense is concerned with finding out what happened and, more importantly, why. Since this isn't revealed some suspense is injected by the mystery. But beyond that there's also the question of why its told the way it is (and there is a reason that goes straight to the plot) and that can bring some more suspense.

I wonder if there could be a reason lurking in Halting State for it being second person beyond what Charlie has written here. The idea of narrative form following function, of it being somehow self documenting, rather appeals to me.

The 1999 Nebula winning Best Novella: "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang is one of the most sophisticated uses of 2nd person narrative, embodying alternative and extraterrestrial theories of causality, language, and consiousness.

Of course the second person is the preferred voice of "Choose Your Own Adventure" (and Kim Newman's more literary take on the genre, "Life's Lottery"), which neatly gets round the "don't tell me what I'm thinking" by letting the reader influence the direction of the narrative (though there are definitely right and wrong decisions, so the author's world view still gets imposed on you, just at one remove).

There are early science fiction stories which sort of kind of forecast the Web, such as "A Logic Named Joe." There were early science fiction stories that correctly forecast what one could do with computer graphics (i.e. Vernor Vinge on how one man could steal enough supercomputer time to film a high-res animated Lord of the Rings). There were early detective novels that tied murder to email and BBSs, but didn't "get" the Web. Ted Nelson was influenced to some extent by Science Fiction when he invented Hypertext and Hypermedia. Even Jules Verne sort of kind of predicted "advances in the technology of telephony" making an American the richest man in the world by piping digitized newspapers into every home.

Charlie's theory on the mystery of writing being "unpacked" in the reader's brain is slightly more understood that T.S. Eliot's "Objective Correlavtive" in the past few years, through the use of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) of people in the act of reading. For example:

Auckland research breakthrough throws light on dyslexia
 
20.04.06
By Simon Collins

Ground-breaking Auckland University research has found that people with dyslexia appear to be trying to read with a different side of their brains to other people.

The research breakthrough, which found that dyslexics try to read with the right side of their brains, may eventually help scientists to work out a way of helping them learn to read.

About 7 per cent of people have dyslexia, where they cannot identify words or letters or connect them to sounds or meanings, or miss out parts of words when they read.

The condition is not related to intelligence and has affected many famous people from Leonardo Da Vinci to Albert Einstein. It is believed to be inherited because it runs in families, affects more males than females and is more common among left-handers.

Auckland University psychologist Karen Waldie said overseas studies had found that the left side of the brain, which controls language in about 95 per cent of people, was not activated when people with dyslexia tried to read....

Perhaps I need to be a bit clearer on my priorities, Charlie.

Which part of "flushed out an airlock" did you not understand?

My father was dubious that cats could convey complex ideas, until one night his cat (Gor-Nut) kept scratching at the garden door to come in, then immediately insisting on going out, with strange body language. Eventually the cat convinced my father to also come outside, and, by gesture, to look at the full moon. As soon as my Dad looked at the moon, the cat purred.

Of course, I'm a dog-person, myself. Siriusly.

telepathic treecats ...

What, like this?

(Fred is a genuine off-cut from the first draft of "Iron Sunrise", which was indeed due to feature a talking cat — with an IQ of about 40, a vocabulary of about 300 words, opposable thumbs, and a total lack of insight into the fact that everyone around him was much much smarter. He was removed from the second draft when it became clear that "Accelerando", also featuring a robot cat, might get me branded as "that talking cat weirdo". I'm still debating whether I can fit him into the third book.)