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.