The AI hype in the media obscures the fact that we're clearly in another goddamn venture capital bubble right now. As the Wall Street Journal said earlier this month (article is paywalled), "... In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue." On top of that, the industry is running at a loss on power consumption alone, never mind labour costs (which are quite high: those generative LLMs require extensive human curati ..read more

I am very pleased to be able to admit that the Laundry Files are shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Series! (Astute readers will recall that the Laundry Files were shortlisted—but did not win—in 2019. Per the rules, "A qualifying installment must be published in the qualifying year ... If a Series is a finalist and does not win, it is no longer eligible until at least two more installments consisting of at lest 240,000 words total appear in subsequent years." Since 2019, the Laundry Files have grown by three full novels (the New Management books) and a novella ("Escape from Yokai Land ..read more

A Wonka Story This is no longer in the current news cycle, but definitely needs to be filed under "stuff too insane for Charlie to make up", or maybe "promising screwball comedy plot line to explore", or even "perils of outsourcing creative media work to generative AI". So. Last weekend saw insane news-generating scenes in Glasgow around a public event aimed at children: Willy's Chocolate Experience, a blatant attempt to cash in on Roald Dahl's cautionary children's tale, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". Which is currently most prominently associated in the zeitgeist with a 2004 movie ..read more

(You probably expected this announcement a while ago ...) I've just signed a new two book deal with my publishers, Tor.com publishing in the USA/Canada and Orbit in the UK/rest of world, and the book I'm talking about here and now—the one that's already written and delivered to the Production people who turn it into a thing you'll be able to buy later this year—is a Laundry stand-alone titled "A Conventional Boy". ("Delivered to production" means it is now ready to be copy-edited, typeset, printed/bound/distributed and simultaneously turned into an ebook and pushed through the interwebbytubes ..read more

You've probably seen news reports that the Hugo awards handed out last year at the world science fiction convention in Chengdu were rigged. For example: Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors. The Guardian got bits of the background wrong, but what's undeniably true is that it's a huge mess. And the key point the press and most of the public miss is that they seem to think there's some sort of worldcon organization that can fix this. Spoiler: there isn't. (Caveat: what follows below the cut line is my brain dump, from 20km up, in lay terms, of what went wrong. I ..read more

I am seeing newspaper headlines today along the lines of British public will be called up to fight if UK goes to war because 'military is too small', Army chief warns, and I am rolling my eyes. The Tories run this flag up the mast regularly whenever they want to boost their popularity with the geriatric demographic who remember national service (abolished 60 years ago, in 1963). Thatcher did it in the early 80s; the Army general staff told her to piss off. And the pols have gotten the same reaction ever since. This time the call is coming from inside the house—it's a general, not a politician ..read more

(I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago ...) 2024 looks set to be a somewhat disruptive year. Never mind the Summer Olympics in Paris; the big news is politics, where close to half the world's population get to vote in elections with a strong prospect of electing outright fascists. Taiwan was first on 13th January, and elected Democratic People's Party incumbent Vice-President Vice President Lai Ching-te as President. I don't have enough understanding of Taiwanese politics to comment further other than to note that this outcome evinced displeased noises from Beijing (and my interpreta ..read more

Season of Skulls came out six months ago, so here be spoilers. If you want a recap of the two previous novels in this not-exactly-a-trilogy, you can find my notes on them here: Dead Lies Dreaming, Quantum of Nightmares. What do I mean by not-exactly-a-trilogy? Well: the idea of the New Management was to reboot the Laundry Files, which I've been writing since 1999, with a new cast of protagonists largely drawn from a younger generation, and dealing with more modern social and political issues. My little one-shot Lovecraftian-spy mashup has evolved over two decades into a sprawling setting with ..read more

Why you shouldn't trust AI (large language models): a cautionary example. So, Google Bard is the big G's "AI" assisted internet search tool. I'd heard ungood things about Bard's tendency to Make Shit Up, so I decided to test it for myself, on a topic I'm an authority on: me. I logged in with a throwaway account, and gave it a prompt: "Tell me five fun facts about Charles Stross". Bard is stateful, so I followed up with: "Tell me five more fun facts about Charles Stross". And because I'm a glutton for punishment, I did it again: "Tell me another five fun facts about Charles Stross". Here's what ..read more

(This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home.) In 2021, writer and game designer Alex Blechman inadvertently created a meme: Sci-Fi Author: "In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale." Tech Company: "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus!" Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer: I have about thirty nov ..read more