By The Way...

Wednesday, December 6, 2006
10:38:00 AM EST
Hearing Field Below -- Regina Spektor
The third day of Author Interview Week is here, and I'm really very happy to present to you Charles Stross. Charlie is a friend of mine, but more than that, he's one of the hottest writers in science fiction: He nabbed a Hugo Award (that's science fiction's highest award) for his novella "The Concrete Jungle" last year, and in the last three years, he's had a novel nominated for the Hugo Award each year. That's a nice trick if you can manage it.

Charlie writes science fiction and fantasy but also worked at various times as a pharmacist, a computer programmer and as a magazine columnist. Much of this gets discussed in today's interview, along with Charlie's latest novel The Jennifer Morgue, a book that mashes up the classic British spy thriller with horrible squishy demons from an alternate dimension. Yes, it's every bit as fun as it sounds; Publishers Weekly called Jennifer Morgue "alternately chilling and hilarious" -- not a bad combination.

And now: Charles Stross.

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and The Jennifer Morgue.

Must I? Oh very well. The Jennifer Morgue is my latest novel, and it's the second in a series that follow the misadventures of a slashdot-reading sandal-wearing hacker-geek who's fallen into the wrong universe and can't get out. We first met "Bob Howard" (as he calls himself in these stories) in The Atrocity Archives. It turns out that magic exists; but it's a branch of applied mathematics. Computers being gadgets that can be used for theorem solving at high speed, Bob stumbled across this the hard way at university -- and only just survived long enough to be drafted by the Laundry, a shadowy British government agency for defending us from the scum of the multiverse.

And by "scum", I mean "scum". Or ichor. Or bubbling vile tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime. We are in H. P. Lovecraft territory here, and the horrid truth is that the stars are due to come right in just another twelve yearsor so, at which point we'll have Cthulhu to deal with. And Bob is expected to deal with this on a civil service salary, with matrix management and paperclip audits on top.

In The Jennifer Morgue, Bob is pitched into a role that he simply isn't suited for. He's a crap driver (and knows it), doesn't know how to tie a bow tie (he's more at home in a Linux t-shirt), and is just barely competent enough with a handgun to avoid shooting himself in the foot by accident. Unfortunately for him, he is a competent computational demonologist, which is why he's sent to the Caribbean to deal with enigmatic billionaire Ellis Billington, who is running the sort of caper that Her Majesty's Government would usually send James Bond to deal with (if being James Bond wasn't an automatic "do not hire" flag these days). But there's a catch (in fact there are several): Billington's occult defenses include a geas that can only be penetrated by a certain famous spy. So what's a hacker to do?

If this all sounds a bit familiar, it should. I'm a great fan of the classic British spy thriller; The Atrocity Archives was something of a homage to Len Deighton, and The Jennifer Morgue does it for the Bond canon (both motion picture and written branches).

2. One of the things that is impressive about your work is how you manage to play with your influences (in the case of The Jennifer Morgue, HP Lovecraft and Ian Fleming), cross-pollinate them and yet still manage to inject your own voice into the proceedings. You make this balancing act look easy, but is it really as easy as it looks? How do you do homage without pratfalling into parody?

I think the first thing you have to do is to really like the material you're working with. It's okay to be exasperated or sometimes annoyed by it, but you can't do this kind of pastiche with source material that you are contemptuous of -- you've got to put yourself into the mind-set of "if I was Ian Fleming, how would I write about  Lovecraftian horrors?"

The second thing you need is to be familiar with the material. In the case of both Fleming and Deighton I've read most, if not all, of their books more than once over the years. I'd read biographies of Fleming and critical analyses of Deighton's work (he's a much more private figure), and I'd read large chunks of Lovecraft and the halo of other mythos writers who worked the same soil, not to mention works about Lovecraft -- most recently, the Michel Houellebecq book, which I'd recommend as a quick starter (quick review link). I've also seen most of the movies. (Part of the preparation for writing The Jennifer Morgue entailed re-watching almost all of the Bond canon. Which sounds like a whole lot more fun than it actually is, because some of those films suck mightily.)

Backing off a bit, I also had to take the decision to do this thing in the first place -- to take the works of two well-loved writers, add Magic Ingredient X (a cynical twenty-something hacker who is utterly unlike any character who might have featured in said writers' work, or even in their world-view), and then remix the hell out of them. It turns out that this is a pretty good recipe for getting something original out of the far end of the process -- the lack of slashdot-reading geeks in Lovecraft, for example, enables you to probe the mythos and come up with something new -- but working through the consequences is pretty demanding.

It's not a unique technique, by the way: I'm pretty sure it's exactly what Terry Pratchett did with the first two Discworld books (take a bunch of stock fantasy tropes to populate your pin-ball machine of a world -- all bright, shiny flashing things -- add a cynical, terrified magician who Runs Away A Lot to play the part of the ball, and pull back the piston) before they took on a life of their own. But the interesting thing is how quickly it turned out to generate an entirely new fictional universe that, while clearly nodding at past examples of the art, has something new to say.

In the case of the Laundry books (the Laundry is the nickname of the agency Bob works for), there is an overall story arc, and hopefully there'll be a bunch more books in due course (although not before 2008, due to existing pressure of work). But although I know which famous author of spy thrillers I'm going to pastiche for the third novel, sooner or later they're going to have to stand on their own merits.

3. Your first science fiction story was published in the early 80s, but it's only recently that you've become a full-time writer. What were you doing in the meantime, and what lessons can aspiring writers draw from your experience?

Lessons from experience? Hah! Here's what I'd pass on to aspiring writers ...

1) Don't become a pharmacist if you can't cope with the idea that you might occasionally poison or kill someone entirely by accident.

2) Especially don't become a pharmacist if you can't cope with the police staking you out for an armed robbery. Repeatedly. (If this happens to you, it is time to Get Another Job.)

3) When the software dev group is dragged to an off-site junket, and the board of directors rush on-stage punching the air, to announce that the CEO is retiring and they have appointed the CFO as his successor, this is what we in the software industry call A Bad Sign.

4) It is an Even Worse Sign when your manager is reading the 1980-edition IBM Staff Handbook and the year is any time after 1994.

5) Unless they offer you a seat on the board, leave start-ups to the under-35s. Young, energetic, optimistic, and easily gulled.

6) And if a bubble economy you're working in has just burst, now is a bad time to change jobs.

(I can truthfully say "been there, done that", for all of those experiences. I would not say I am a better person for them all, but they're usually good for at least one beer, so I suppose every cloud has a brown, fermentable lining.)

All of those clues are kind of specialized, so here are some more general observations:

"The future is plastics." No, it's personal computers. No, it's real estate. No, the future is writing. If you want to be a writer, you need to write. The other stuff is there to hold body and soul together. If the other stuff is too lucrative or too time-consuming or too interesting you'll be tempted to stop writing.

At the same time, try to bear in mind that starving in a garret is a side-effect of your chosen profession, not a route to it. I don't believe that suffering makes for a good environment in which to create great art.

4. Share a piece of advice you've been given about writing.

I'm really bad at taking advice!

But, one that needs passing on is: if you plan to write for commercial publication rather than self-gratification or academia, remember the first rule of publishing economics: money flows towards the author. Be very suspicious of any agent, publisher, or company involved in publishing that asks you to pay for something (other thanreturn postage on your unwanted submissions).

Reputable agents make their money by taking a percentage cut of your profits. Reputable publishers make their money by selling your work to the public. Folks who reverse the model and dip into your pocket aren't expecting to sell your work for a profit, or to the public. Folks who neither dip your pocket nor pay you are, well, they're small press: they may be well-intentioned but they're not going to make you famous or rich. (Small press is a useful place to practice your art when you're getting started, or to experiment in public with stuff you simply can't sell, but  if you want to be a full time self-employed writer, it's ultimately a distraction.)

5. Last year, you released your novel Accelerando in a free electronic version at the same time the hardcover version of the novel debuted. What did this do for the sales of the book or when it came time for awards consideration? Would you do it again if you could?

The free electronic version of Accelerando is an interesting question. It had about 60,000 downloads in its first two months; in the same period, the hardcover edition pretty much sold out and had to be reprinted (and it had a larger print run than my previous SF novel).

It's very hard to prove that a free ebook edition of a novel either helped or hindered the sales of a paper edition published at the same time, but the email feedback I've had from readers has typically been along the lines of "thanks for making the ebook available, I have now bought a couple of your other books", or "I read the ebook then bought the hardcover just so I could have it on dead tree as well". Which is encouraging.

I also believe that the free ebook route is going to become increasingly important in the reader award ballots over the next few years (especially the Hugo awards, which are voted on by the public in the shape of members of the World Science Fiction Society). Over the past few years, it's become almost impossible to win a Hugo without releasing a short story or novella on-line for the voters to read, as magazine circulations have declined so far that the voters are unfamiliar with the entire range of published stories for a given year. I think the same is, to a lesser extent, happening withnovels, as witness the 2006 shortlist (in which all the novels were available as downloads for the Hugo voters).

As for whether I'd do it again if I could ... yes, I would. Contractual arrangements prevented me from doing so with my last SF novel, Glasshouse (essentially, it was published at different times in different countries, and my publishers quite reasonably objected to a free download appearing months before the readers could buy their paper editions), but I hope to be able to repeat the promotion again with a forthcoming book.

6. You've recently been the Guest of Honor at a number of science fiction conventions. For those unfamiliar with conventions, explain what that is and what expected of you. Is it fun? Is it exhausting? Where will you be next?

Whether science fiction conventions are fun depends on where you stand on the idea of checking into a hotel for a long weekend where a bunch of folks get together to attend panel discussions and talks, play games, watch movies, get drunk in the bar with their friends, and otherwise spend time together. I find it fun, but I've been doing it for about twenty years (I was a fan before I sold a single short story), and it's not necessarily to everybody's taste.

The Guest of Honour's job is ... well, it's usually an author, or an artist, or (sometimes) a well-known fan. Media conventions often invite actors (or directors) from film or TV series. You get to give a talk, or talks, or an interview, and sit in on and contribute to numerous panel discussions, and if you're a writer, people will thrust books at you to sign. (Be nice to them, they're your future.) The main perk of the job is that all but the smallest convention will pay to fly you in and put you up in a nice hotel room for the duration, rather than making you pay up like everyone else. The flipside of doing it this way is, it's a job (and if you do it right, it should be exhausting, or at least as tiring as doing a good day's work requires).

The next convention I'm guest of honour at is Picocon, in London -- a small one-day event run by Imperial College (part of the University of London). Then I guess I'll be at P-Con 4 in Dublin. P-Con, being run in Ireland, is very small by con standards and can't afford to fly guests in (On the other hand, P-Cons are relaxed, good fun, and it's an excuse for a spring break in Dublin. What's not to like?)

My next con in the United States is Penguicon, and it should be a gas -- Penguicon is a hybrid SF and Free Software convention in Detroit, over April 20th-22nd.

----

Want to read more Charles Stross? He keeps a blog here, and don't forget to check out the online version of his Hugo Award-nominated novel Accelerando, which you'll find here.


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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)

• #2 Comment from arulraj1985 
  2/11/08 11:08 AM | Permalink

  
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• #1 Comment from lurkynat 
  12/7/06 12:36 PM | Permalink

  feacinating John!
  thank you so much for these great interviews! you are wonderful to post them!
  hugs,natalie