#charles-stross — Public Fediverse posts

William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, or Charles (Charlie) Stross never predicted this!

#PizzaSignal #SciFiPizza #PizzaPunk
#Neuromancer #SnowCrash #HaltingState #Rule34
#WilliamGibson #Gibson #NealStephenson #CharlesStross
#SciFi #Distopia #Distopian #Cyberpunk

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5750716-pentagon-pizza-report-hegseth/

@welshpixie

This is very cool, and though making or drawing them is not for me, I'm glad these booklets exist!

The curious part of me wants to know if you have the patterns for any of the ones that transport you between alternate timelines 😉

#MerchantPrinces #CharlesStross #CharlieStross #Celtic #CelticKnot #AlternateTimeline

My holiday reading was two novels by Charles Stross: one Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum, which I read out of sequence, and The Halting State.
They are both fun reads with lots of ideas. The Fuller Memorandum is set in 2008 and was published in 2010; The Halting State was published in 2008 and is set in 2017. The are both quite geeky but The Halting State much more so, it must be the most unashamedly geeky novel I have ever read. I can recommend them both but beware that the Laundry series is about Lovecraftian horrors and magic is just advanced computing; and Halting State is about online gaming. Which I don't do at all, and yet I enjoyed it.
#AmReading #HaveRead #CharlesStross

Connected to the EuroCon at the MetropolCon 2026 in Berlin Charles Stross is coming to the OtherlandWe will have a relaxed Tabeltalk with Charlie about the Euro- and MetropolCon, Fantasy, Science Fiction, the end of the world and technology.Wann: 11. 12. 2025 um 19:30 // Wo: Otherland Please register: …

Charles Stross, the author ( @cstross ), posted a new blog entry on why high-level executives at companies are pushing "AI" use so strongly onto their workers, even though empirical studies show negative productivity gains:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html

This may be more or less implied by what he wrote, but I would add that high-level executives aren't as likely to see the "this thing generated an incorrect answer / solution" aspect of "AI" use because being empirically correct is not as important to the things a high-level executive does. It's more important that they make decisions quickly and get things moving rather than making the correct decisions. [1]

Less charitably, top executives can't tell the "AI" is giving wrong answers, because they don't know the right answers.

[1] Of course it would be best for all if they could make the correct decision quickly, but you can't have everything. Where would you keep it?

#AI #LLM #CharlesStross #CharlieStross #executive #CEO #decision #answer #WrongAnswer #wat #GeorgeCarlin

Watching United States of Bedlam turning #Trumpland, while reading #charlesstross #thelaundry #labyrinthindex...

What a century, huh?

#SciFi
#DystopiaNow
#CharlesStross
#Quotes
#zer0billionaires

#SciFi
#DystopiaNow
#CharlesStross
#Quotes
#zer0billionaires

#SciFi
#DystopiaNow
#CharlesStross
#Quotes
#zer0billionaires

#SciFi
#DystopiaNow
#CharlesStross
#Quotes
#zer0billionaires

#SciFi
#DystopiaNow
#CharlesStross
#Quotes
#zer0billionaires

Now, "Neptune's Brood", it looks at what happens thousands of years later:

Generations of robots making descendants so advanced that they're truly post-human, super-human, the financial and technological structures of interstellar colonization, the societal structures of entities that can clone their minds at will, sects of human-worshipping post-humans that consider de-extincting humans and colonizing star systems with them a holy calling, and a conspiracy, murder and fraud mystery on a galactic scale.

If you're nerdy enough to appreciate heists based on counter-party risk mitigation protocols, this book is for you. In fact, if you're like that, I'd recommend that you read NB first, like I did, and then enjoy SC as a prequel that fleshes out the backstory to some of the societal and technical elements.

#NeptunesBrood #CharlesStross

The book is a conspiracy mystery and a cloak-and-dagger romp across the solar system with hard-sci-fi space travel so grueling and time-consuming that only robots can handle it. It's also an interesting examination of where capitalism goes at its most inhuman -- when there aren't even any humans. And finally it's an examination of the human condition by entities both trying to be human and trying to stop being so human.

It has loads of cool ideas -- how did we go about making slave androids, what happens to identity when you're an AI and can be copied, how do you create meaning when the people who defined your meaning went extinct? The world-building is creative and plausible. And the mystery has several unexpected twists of identity, allegiances and epic historical shifts.

If you find this intriguing and you're not very sensitive to mental and physical abuse when it's important to plot and motivations, or weird forms and uses of sex that post-human entities will develop in the absence of humans and human morality, I can recommend this book.

#SaturnsChildren #CharlesStross

Civil servants versus cosmic horrors in The Laundry RPG. Think Brazil meets Cthulhu, but with more paperwork and fewer ducts. Not quite as dystopian as our current government, mind you - at least these lot admit they're watching. Pre-orders open for this bureaucratic nightmare from Cubicle 7 https://l.d20.ninja/2p9cpsxb #RPG #cthulhu #cubicle #theLaundry #hpLovecraft #callOfCthulhu #charlesStross

I've finished: A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy seeks to answer the question: How would D&D and RPGs fit into the Laundry universe.

It's a side story starring a new main character and a few side characters from other novel.

Set before the arrival of the new management, it doesn't require familiarity with the latest books. I think it is set somewhere after Book# 6 The Annihilation Score, as Mo and her violin are very briefly mentioned.

It is short and to the point and features a couple of bonus short stories starring Bob.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/95cfda69-8c1d-47fa-aefa-51f6f6a33ca2

@bookstodon #bookstodon #SFF #AudioBooks #CharlesStross #LaundyFiles

[ Home ] [ FAQ ] [ Contact me ] [ Older stuff ] Back to: Storm cloud approaching rapidly I have a new book coming out on Tuesday 7th of January: it's A Conventional Boy, a short standalone novel in the Laundry Files. (It takes place at roughly the same time as The Rhesus Chart.) It's published in the USA (and Canada) by Tor.com and in the UK (and...

> American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through.. WIRED). It's.. uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's.. more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
#CharlesStross #AmericanSF

Somebody's toot got me to an SF writer's blog post about M$'s Recall mess.^1 It was good so I read the post about his visit to Japan (er, Tokyo and Kyoto).^2

> They've got our future, damn it.

And wondered if anyone has visited Havana of Sikkim and said the same? Think Peak Oil, Tokyo's ecological footprint, Japan's reliance on food and fertilizer imports, quick conversion to Agroecology might be the future: malls->worms.

^1 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html
^2 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/traveling-to-japan.html
#CharlesStross

Cubicle 7 have rekindled its work on its tabletop RPG based on Charles Stross' novels about bureaucracy, tech-magic and cosmic horror.
.
..
#ttrpg #charlesstross

https://www.geeknative.com/165891/the-laundry-files-ttrpg-surges-through-100000-on-its-return/

The Mended Drum is a Discworld-themed Mastodon server for anyone who remembers Sir Terry Pratchett and his works. Also welcomes fans of @neilhimself, Douglas Adams, @cstross, @dianeduane and more.

:Fediverse: https://mendeddrum.org

For more info see https://mendeddrum.org/about or contact their admin @patrick

#FeaturedServer #Discworld #TerryPratchett #SirTerryPratchett #NeilGaiman #DouglasAdams #CharlesStross #DianeDuane #Books #Fantasy #SciFi #SFF #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse

"Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them librarians." — Charles Stross — — — #CharlesStross #quote #quotes #Internet #books #libraries #librarian #quip #snarky #humor