let's be clear

[rone]

The Singularity is the nerd version of the Rapture, and it's just as likely to happen, and it's just as embarrassing to write about.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought Charlie Stross's Accelerando did a pretty good job of subverting the subgenre: sort of "if the Singularity did happen it might kind of suck".

[waider.livejournal.com]

Meh, my take on that was "if Charlie Stross wrote about the Singularity in a book called Accelerando it might kind of suck". Charlie Stross, fine, Singularity, whatever, combination, ew no.

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a former cow orker of his, Charlie Stross is a really smart guy with a twisted sense of humour. The trouble is that he isn't quite as smart or knowledgable as he thinks he is, and he's lazy about his research. This tends to show up in his fiction, IMO. Of course, I may be biased, seeing the person behind the story...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He does tend to write rubbery science, and I'm not sure whether it's intentional or not. E.g. he seems to be one of the legions of writers who believe you can communicate faster than light using particles in a nonlocally correlated quantum state, or maybe it's just deliberate handwaving for a plot device.

Um, to go with the rubbery characters?

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Charlie writes too fast for the books' good, I think.

BEWARE: MINOR SPOILER

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

To qualify the following, I am an annoying pedant (but you knew that already), so things that bug me about books and stories won't annoy other people. I'm willing to let FTL tricks go on the "obvious plot device, and maybe we just don't know enough to do this yet" basis, but I get annoyed when people bugger up on "basic facts", even in F&SF. For example, there was a screwup of that kind in Donaldson's 2nd Thmoas Covenent trilogy (forgotten the title of the individual book, even though I remember the screwup: it may well have been corrected in later printings), which had me hurling the book across the room.

Given the above context, here's an example from Charlie's work. He wrote an "alternate world" short story, set in the era when Ollie North and Fawn Hall were big news, which had some cool ideas (IIRC, it was called A Colder war, or something similar). In that story, he has Americans studying a spysat image in which they are looking at bodies strewn around some Afghan hillside and speculating as to the cause of death. All very cool and dramatic, except that even the current spysats don't produce images with the kind of resolution needed to show severed arms and strange mutilations, and '80s satellites were such that they struggled to distinguish between similarly-sized warships of different types. I know he can cite the "It's an alternative world, technology is better there!", but it bugged the crap out of me.

Of course, I'm probably biased, because I worked with the guy, and saw him make factual errors about events in the UK on a particular newsgroup (the latter wouldn't have bothered me, except that he was an oldbie and his US readership would take his assertions as the Voice of God, on a newsgroup which normally exhibited severe pedantic tendencies) . . . This probably sounds like I dislike Charlie. Actually, I don't, but I've learned that he's a normal human, complete with an assortment of virtues and flaws, as opposed to some God of Writing. My reaction probably means that I should never spend any real time around my favourite authors. ;)

Re: BEWARE: MINOR SPOILER

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Writers are human. It's the 19h Century that got small.

Honestly, there are no Gods of Writing.

Re: BEWARE: MINOR SPOILER

[venividi.livejournal.com]

A cautionary tale.

Once upon a time, I had an office mate who knew very much about pi and the calculation thereof. He read Contact. He was unhappy with the glaring mistake of generating pi one digit at a time. He wrote a testy message to Carl Sagan, explaining that a man of Carl's stature in the community should know better and do better. (For the non-mathematical, the well known algorithms for generating pi do so by doubling the number of calculated digits each itteration.)

Carl, bless his soul, returned to star stuff.

My office mate thereafter figured out an algorithm that, you guessed it, generates pi one digit at a time...

Re: BEWARE: MINOR SPOILER

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I do remember that in the 1980s, there was a popular rumor that existing super-sekrit spy satellites had attained resolution so high that license plates (or in some versions, newspapers) could be read from orbit. Later I read many explanations of various reasons that this could not be so, but it was the sort of "there's a lot goes on they're not telling us" kind of rumor (as Terry Pratchett would put it) that is almost impossible to dispel.

[venividi.livejournal.com]

What!?! You can't?!? when they'd pass that law, and what's the penalty if I don't stop?