Bloggasm

Simon Owens: When the Hugo awards were hosted in the UK, many people noticed that a lot more UK authors were on the ballot. Does this frustrate you at all when the ceremony is being held in the US that there is a certain kind of “home field” advantage to it?

Charlie Stross: No, I’m not worried. The preponderance of UK authors on the ballot was only a feature of the novel shortlist, and two-thirds of the voters were American worldcon members; what appears to have happened is that a vintage year for British SF coincided with a year in which the normal US suspects were all between novels for some reason. In general, Hugo voters aren’t that parochial; as long as the story is good they don’t care about the nationality of the author.

SO: As someone who has had success in both short fiction and novels, which do you prefer? Do you find yourself wishing you could spend more time on short fiction?

CS: To tell the truth, I find novels more satisfying. A short story (or indeed anything shorter than a novella) is a vehicle that only gives you limited space: there’s room to get one neat idea or scene or emotional punch in, two at the most. This limits your ability to engage with the reader. Some ideas are just too big to get across in their full depth in anything less than a book — indeed, many ideas take more than one book to develop. (I’m thinking of Stephenson’s huge Baroque Cycle here; while there are numerous shorter books inside it struggling to escape, I don’t see how he could have delivered its cumulative message with anything much shorter.)

SO: How do you think the UK book market differs from the US market?

CS: The market, or the readers?

The market itself is similar, albeit smaller and probably more cut- throat as a result. The readers, however, are a different matter. If SF reflects the authors preoccupations with the present on the wide screen of the future, then SF that sells is SF that speaks to the reader’s preoccupations — be it a desire for escapism from the present (reassuring tales of derring-do in a future where the present has a happy ending), or a playground for fears or hopes. Right now there seems to me to be in the American zeitgeist a desperate worry about Empire, while the British zeitgeist has finally laid the ghost of empire to rest, a half-century after the empire itself died. And this is probably subtly skewing our output. In the current decade, is an American Ken MacLeod or Richard Morgan even possible? Or a British John Ringo or David Weber?

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

CS: 1. Making Light By Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, plus others. Two very smart, very talented SF editors hold a unique literary salon. It’s the comment threads that make it work …

2. Terra Nova is a group blog about the sociology, economics, and politics of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs to their friends). Pay attention at the back: MMORPGs are the first widespread, networked, consumer-oriented virtual reality environments, and the first that are popular enough that people will pay money to use them. Today they are about where the web was in 1995. In 2015 they will affect your life the way the web affects it in 2005. This is your guidebook to the future you’re going to live in.

3. Juan Cole’s weblog. Don’t understand what’s going on in Iraq, or middle eastern politics in general? Confused by CNN or the BBC? Professor Cole is that rare thing, an expert on middle eastern and Iraqi politics who reads Arabic, transcribes news reports, and provides the background that non- specialist news sources simply can’t cover.

4. Crooked Timber. Get a bunch of philosophers, economists, statisticians and argumentative non-right- wingers and give them a group blog: hilarity and multi-way discourse ensues on topics as diverse as the limits of statistical measures, multi-blogger seminars on SF and fantasy novels, and (groan) more on
Iraq.

5. Bruce Sterling’s weblog. Chairman Bruce has always lived at least fifteen minutes in everyone else’s future. Currently he’s obsessed with eastern Europe, design, universal fabrication, security, and Bollywood. But that could change any minute now.

You can find Charlie’s blog over here.