Charlie Stross

I've read Singularity Sky, and Iron Sunrise. Also read http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-will-not-write-4-escha.html

> My first two published SF novels, "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", have a long and tangled history. And I figure it's probably worth (a) explaining why there won't be a third one in that particular series, and (b) spoilering the plot thread I had kicking around that would have been in the third Eschaton novel if I was going to write it.

Freeze Frame Revolution I've enjoyed - I need to read the rest of that universe. https://www.goodreads.com/series/168556-sunflower-cycle

I've read Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky - The Children of the Sky is also on my reading list.

In high school I read Consider Phlebas and I need to do a read of the entirety of the series in one go.

I'll put the others on my to read list.

I think science fiction author Charles Stores put it best in this 2016 blog post[1]:

> 2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices). Telepathy, unfortunately, turns out to not be all about elevated Apollonian abstract intellectualism: it's an emotion amplifier and taps into the most toxic wellsprings of the subconscious. As implemented, it brings out the worst in us. Twitter and Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers and public execution spectators. It can be used for good, but more often it drags us down into the dim-witted, outraged weltanschauung of the mob.

[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-american-political-marker.html

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/not-a-manifesto.html

This blog has a brilliant insight that I still remember more than a decade later: we live in a fantasy setting, not a Sci-fi one. Our modern computers are so unfathomable complex that they are demons, ancient magic that can be tamed and barely manipulated, but not engineered. Modern computing isn't Star Trek TNG, where Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge each have every layer of their starship in their heads with full understanding, and they can manipulate each layer independently. We live in a world where the simple cell phone in our pocket contains so much complexity that it is beyond any 10 human minds combined to fully understand how the hardware, the device drivers, the OS, the app layer, and the internet all interact between each other.

Sci-fi author Charlie Stross had a wonderful take-down of He3[1] a decade ago. It's alas not very technical. The short of it is that there are no reactors, if we do make them they are going to be insanely fantastically hot (a billion degrees), there's only ~10 parts per billion (according to your wikipedia link) on the moon & mining that will be hard, and then we'd have to transport the stuff too.

I'd read something else about the challenges of reactor design, but not sure what it was. I haven't been enthused about He3 since. I feel like the one interesting use would be a Project Orion / Nuclear Pulse Propulsion system, but wow, boy does that seem like an expensive way to do propulsion: what's the use case?

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/moonshine.html

I would argue it has been (and still is) a credible award because it is generally quite open about its policies. The choice to host the awards in Chengdu was not the act of some shadowy cabal, but a simple result of easily exploited policy. Charles Stross writes about it at length[0], but the simple gist is that it only costs $50 to vote on where the next year's awards are hosted, and there was a successful campaign to get SF fans in Chengdu to vote for their city.

Hopefully, as it has done in the past, the Hugos will update policy in a way that mitigates this sort of thing in the future. I don't see an easy solution, but I wish them the best.

[0]: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html

Yes and no: good science fiction takes a trend and extrapolates. Extrapolation should be based on logic (to be good - but you can also just aim for entertaining and go wild).

The details might differ, but it's worth thinking about whether the implications make sense. Watt's certainly asks a lot of good questions which other orders have also asked - i.e. Accelerando[1] is very interested in the idea of "what happens to mankind when economic systems can no longer be participated in by recognizably human minds?" - taken out to the limits of known physics.

[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html

^^^ You read the full-text here, I highly recommend it.