[Xfire] matteox: Hello! We are very pleased to welcome everyone to the 2007 Hugo Nominees Chat! Please welcome our special guests Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and Peter Watts.

[Xfire] matteox: If you have a question for a specific author, please indicate who you are directing your question to.

[Xfire] matteox: Please stay on at the end of the chat for the prizes.

[Xfire] matteox: Our guests will now say a few words about themselves and start taking your questions.

cstross: Hi. I'm Charlie Stross. I'm the author of GLASSHOUSE, currently on the shortlist for the Hugo award (along with everyone else's novels tonight :) -- I'm a former dotcom startup monkey and computer journalist (with a variety of murky career preceeding those activities), who's now turned to writing SF full time. My next (forthcoming) SF novel, HALTING STATE, is about MMOs and John Carmack seemed to like it ...

Peter Watts: My name's Peter Watts. I like domestic shorthair cats, long walks on the beach, and baiting Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm looking for a masochist partner with an interest in neuroeconomics.

Peter Watts: Oh, right, and I also write skiffy. Blindsight was the latest.

vvinge: I'm Vernor Vinge. I also write techno oriented (hard) science fiction.

 

vvinge: Question: This ones more for vernor vinge: your wiki says you are now working on a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. How do you handle returning to a universe where the tech you originally presented seems dated now, especially the galaxy wide version of the internet that seemed to communicate little more than text

Answer: this is a general problem with writing science fiction. It can be much worse when you are writing near future science fiction. I think that over the last 50 years in science fiction people that figured out various cute ways to future proof their writing. I am desperately trying to follow a those tricks in this sequel, as I'm writing to the fire upon the deep.

 

Peter Watts: Question: ShoTDeaD Peter Watts - What inspired you to write Blindsight?

Answer: Man, that's a question and a half. A question Dawkins asked offhanded back in the nineties, I guess: what *use* was consciousness, in a Darwinian sense? How are conscious organisms better off than nonconscious ones? I didn't know, so I thought about it for ten years.

 

I still don't know.

 

cstross: Question: ShoTDeaD What are the authors favorite or most inpiring Sci-Fi movies?

Answer: I hate 95% of SF movies. The problem is, they usually mangle the underlying concepts so badly that nothing remains of the original idea. (See also The Matrix, and the explanation of what the Matrix is using humans for -- batteries! If I ran across something that stupid in a book -- without a real smart explanation -- I'd throw it at the nearest wall, )

 

vvinge: Question: CaLiLaTiN: Vernor Vinge, do you miss teaching at San Diego State University?

Answer: I miss many aspects of the teaching. Teaching in an area that can be one of the nicest jobs imaginable. On the other hand, writing is very entertaining also, and it's nice to have the time. Focus on it.

 

Peter Watts: Question: TheShadow: Why did you became a writer? Was it your dream or something?

Answer: It's not a dream. It's a sickness.

 

vvinge: Question: Beetle Bailey: i'm in the midst of signing a contract with a literary agency for my first of hopefully many novels, what should I look out for

Answer: one thing that could be helpful, is to look at various model contracts. I believe the science fiction writers of America have material about things to watch out for in contracts

 

cstross: Question: Beetle Bailey: i'm in the midst of signing a contract with a literary agency for my first of hopefully many novels, what should I look out for?

Answer: The agent's job is basically to shake down the publisher on behalf of the author, who then picks them up, dusts them down, and says "there there, let's go make some money together". Look at who else they represent. Look at the terms of their agency contract and look for anything inequitable. Ask other authors. (And I ought to add that this question deserves a fifty-page answer, so I'm going to stop right here).

 

Peter Watts: Question: [Xfire] Artaxs: Peter Watts: Your aliens in Blindsight are really, well, "alien". I had to re-read some portions of the story to get a better understanding of the science that went into the characters' insights on them. Do you wish you had more space to expound on the backstory and theories that the scramblers were modeled on?

Answer: Just as well I didn't. The more detail you go into, the more likely you are to run into a wall -- some reason why everything you've invented just wouldn't work. I'd just as soon not have my nose rubbed in my own faulty worldbuilding.

 

That said, I rather suspect I *will* be going into more detail scrambler-wise, in the future.

 

vvinge: Question: why do like writing scifi books rather than anything else

Answer: I write what I know! :-)

 

cstross: Question: Vanderdecken: When you write your novels, do you find yourself constantly going back into the earlier chapters to add detail or references or injokes, or does it all just lay out as you write it?

Answer: The former. Word processors are an amazing boon. Usually novels -- even written from outline -- don't come out linearly, and you end up with loose ends that need tying up. You also end up with stuff showing up at the climax that needs explicating earlier -- what Anton Chekhov meant when he said, "if you place a gun on the mantlepiece in Act One [of a play] it needs to be fired in the final act".

 

cstross: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: why do like writing scifi books rather than anything else?

Answer: Because I have complete creative autonomy. Go work on a computer game or a movie or TV show and you're one of the inputs to a process with tens or hundreds of creators. Write a book, and it's *all yours* to mess up on your lonesome!

 

Peter Watts: Question: : ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: why do like writing scifi books rather than anything else?

Answer: I don't, necessarily. It's just that there are some subjects that just don't fit into the boundaries of other literary forms. Try doing a rumination on the nature of sentience in a historical romance, for example.

 

Actually, now that I think of it, maybe someone *could* pull that off. But I don't have those moves yet.

 

cstross: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: why do like writing scifi books rather than anything else?

Answer: Also, everything Peter said.

 

vvinge: Question: ShoTDeaD To all - When you have written your books has there been times where you hit writers block and went on a months hiatus or to work on one of you other successful novels

Answer: I suffer from more or less permanent writer's block. I also have the problem that what ever I right the first time around just shows me what it is that I should do stead

 

cstross: Question: TheShadow: Do you play video games? What is or favourite video game? (both authors)

Answer: I try not to. I can lose days if I fall off the wagon. Luckily it's not hard to restrict myself -- I'm a Mac/Linux user with a violent Microsoft allergy, which helps enormously, and the only console in the house is a Wii.

 

cstross: Question: [SOS] sjk: Writing - a job, a hobby, or an addiction?

Answer: It's heroin for the literati.

 

vvinge: Question: Would you consider branching out your work into other genres

Answer: alas, I suspect that it would take me a long time to master the subtleties of other genres. Also, writing straight prose has all sorts of possibilities that I still haven't figured out.

 

Peter Watts: Question: Artaxs: Peter Watts: What inspired you to put Blindsight online (for free!) in its entirety? Have you published anything else under the Creative Commons license?

Answer: I put Blindsight online for free because nobody was getting it opn the ground: it was getting all these killer reviews,m but distribution sucked the one-eyed purple trouser ell. One of the two major chains in the US didn't preorder any copies; all the smaller stores were selling out in days and then being backordered for weeks. The only way I could give people a chance to read the damn thing was to give it away.

 

And yes, *all* my stuff is available online under the CC. Just hunt up the Backlist page on my website, and it's all there.

 

cstross: Question: TheShadow: Why do you prefer Linux/mac over windows?

Answer: This veers dangerously close to platform advocacy -- and a flame war starter -- so I'll be brief: I was using computers before Microsoft existed, and I happen to think there are other, better, ways to use computers than the cruft that comes out of Redmond. I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a going-on-20-years UNIX-gearhead.

 

vvinge: Question: galendor63: To Vinge - Followup on the writer's block. Do you start a writhing a different book or series when you hit that block or just wait till the block is gone and continue

Answer: I thought about doing that. The trouble is, it takes me so much effort to change gears. In the end, I usually stick with something till it's done. One exception is a huge part of anovel, that I totally bailed out on. It was supposed to be a sequel to the blabber. Someday I hope to get to it.

 

cstross: Question: have you ever considered making a movie about one of your novels????

Answer: That's the wrong question. The right question is, "has a Hollywood producer ever considered making a movie about one of your novels???" (And the answer is: "in my dreams".) Making movies is an expensive business, and while I've been involved in various small-scale activities and had a few sniffs from production folks, the next time someone makes a *real* movie of one of my books will be the first. Ditto Vernor and Pete.

 

Peter Watts: Question: TheShadow: Do you play video games? What is or favourite video game? (both authors)

Answer: Half-Life, all of 'em. The first Homeworld, the first Deux Ex. Star Control 2 and Starflight (although you guys probably weren't even alive back then, so never mind). Got Halo sitting here on my desk, but haven't had a chance to check it out yet.

 

I ration myself. If I played more than one or two game a year, I think I'd never come out. In fact, my girlfriend's enough of a WoW addict that I'm getting kinda worried...

cstross: NB: I have a *real* NWN 1 habit. (NWN 2 is DirectX only, so no play on Mac.) I try to keep it locked in a cupboard but it whispers to me in the night. And there's a boxed, unopened copy of WoW sitting on a shelf, taunting me. But I've got deadlines, and I know what'll happen if I open it.

 

vvinge: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: have you ever gotten sort of "attatched" to some of your characters and not wanted to end the story

Answer: I do get attached to characters. On the other hand, I'm always very happy when I've gotten to the end of writing a story!

 

Peter Watts: Question: Quinion: have you ever considered writing in the video game industry?

Answer: I *have* worked in the video game industry. Just for a few months, script for a Homeworld sequel that never materialised. Persojnally, I thought it kicked ass. Maybe I'll novelise it some day.

 

cstross: Question: Charles Stross i heard that in 2008 a novel of yours will appear the name is "Saturns Children" tell me what it is about in shor terms?

Answer: I'd rather not go into too much detail -- it's not finished yet -- but this year (the year I'm writing it) is the 100th anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein's birth. So I'm writing a *late* Heinlein hommage, because everyone else is writing Heinlein juveniles from the 1950s.

 

Peter Watts: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: [to both authors] have you ever considered making a movie about one of your novels????

Answer: Got the occaisonal nibble. One guy who worked on South PArk wanted to movify "Starfish", and while I have enormous respect for SP I don't know if the animation style would suit my writing to a tee.

 

vvinge: Question: GullMoli / Hjalti: Vernor Vinge: What inspired you to write and publish "Bookworm, Run!"

Answer: I had been very interested in intelligence amplification. So for the later years of my high school time. I had been planning to write a story about the first computer augmented human. I describe this story to my little sister and told her about the fact that the invention would of course be tried on a chimpanzee first. She said that the story sounded really dull except for the part about the chimpanzee. I took that as extraordinarily good editorial advice and wrote the story about the chimpanzee.

 

Peter Watts: Question: Artaxs: Peter Watts: You said more scramblers "in the future"?

Answer: I guess I did say that, didn't I?

 

cstross: Question: How much coffee is consumed during the production of a novel?

Answer: I burned out on coffee years ago, at my second dot-com startup. These days I run on tea (strong British-variety tea, drunk for the caffeine, bright orange and strong enough to corrode the spoon). About five litres a day, preferably Irish Breakfast Tea when I can get it. It's sort of coffee-substitute.

 

cstross: Question: Charles Stross: "Late Heinlein" ? As in, an homage to the Number of the Beast / To Sail Beyond the Sunset / The Cat Who Walks Through Walls series?

Answer: Yes. Because that's when he was *trying* to ask complex, sophisticated questions -- he just couldn't quite get his shit together. I'm trying to do a, "what if Heinlein was born 40 years later, lived to see anime and manga and MMOs, and didn't lose his faculties due to medical problems" late period Heinlein.

 

Peter Watts: Question: [Xfire] Artaxs: Peter Watts: You said more scramblers "in the future"? Does that mean we'll get a sequel to Blindsight? And has Homo sapiens vampiris taken their rightful place as the masters of the Earth as the new novel begins?

Answer: Not so much a sequel as a "sidequel". Story happens back on Earth (and in near-solar space) concurrent with the Theseus Mission.

 

vvinge: Question: Daydream: How much coffee is consumed during the production of a novel

Answer: zero. When the soda pop drinker

 

cstross: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: have you ever made a charactrer in one of your novels simialar to a close freind or family member?

Answer: You learn not to do that *real* quick.

cstross: (Luckily the friend in question wasn't offended and I made a note to file off the serial numbers in future!)

 

Peter Watts: Question: Zephyria Mifuyne: Peter Watts: You say you will expand on the concepts of scramblers, will you be doing this via a sequel or branch off, using separate characters, separate goals, etc? Can you shed some light on how you will go about explaining the Scrambler concept, or will we have to wait?

Answer: See my answer above, but for the most part, yeah-- you gotta wait. I'll tell you one thing, though. You know that telematter drive that sends antimatter quantum specs out to Theseus from the Icarus Array?

 

It works both ways.

 

cstross: Question: Colonel Tempest: do you ever get publishers asking you to write sequals and stuff ?

Answer: Publishers *always* want "another novel just like the last one, only different", or "can you turn it into a trilogy?"

Thing is, nobody in publishing knows what's going to work -- any more than they do in Hollywood. (It's just that the stakes are lower.)

 

vvinge: Question: phelann88: Vernor Vinge: in both Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the sky, you come up with original alien cultures that hold up their half of the story. Where did those ideas come from

Answer: the pack minds in a fire upon the deep came from reading lots stapledon's book the Star maker. He has lots of stuff about group minds in the book and I just idly wondered what it would be like to parameterize the group mind idea. By the number of participants. Then I had the great good fortune of a friend of mine suggesting that instead of radio communication to bind the minds. I should use sound, ultrasonic sound. This is just good enough to support coordinator thought and lead to all sorts of cool consequences. On the other hand, I think that the idea behind the spiders in a deepness in the sky came from a dream.

 

Peter Watts: Question: TheShadow: Pter Watts: You writed the sequel to homeworld that never came? Now that is game I would really have loved to play. What do you personally like of the homeworld series? How about Relic studios?

Answer: The first Homeworld was-- touching, somehow, which is a hard trick to pull off in a RTS game. It was basically Moses and the Israelites in the desert, it was Battlestar Galactica. And it was mindboggingly beautiful, from the visuals to the music. Relic-- well, I don't know anyone at Relic any more. Pretty much everyone I knew back then has since moved on; the last one just gave his notice a couple of months back.

 

Of course, they're all multimillionaires. Bastards

 

Peter Watts: Question: TheShadow: Peter Watts: What book would you personally recommend for someone who has never read any of your work?

Answer: Depends. "Starfish" is probably the most accessible to a non-sf audience. "Blindsight" has the chewiest ideas. And if you're into conspicuous consumption, you could always go for "Behemoth": Tor split that book into two volumes, so you'd get to show off your wealth by paying twice for the same damn story.

 

vvinge: Question: [SOS] sjk: Does writing require more creativity or logic

Answer: I think the answer to this question would be very different from individual to individual. In my own case, I try to exploit every bit of power that can come from logic and common tuition and creativity that that comes from subconscious regions.

 

cstross: Question: sjk: Does writing require more creativity or logic?

Answer: I find the process of writing is very similar, subjectively, to working on a large piece of software. You've got lots of interlocking subroutines/classes that need to go together just so to make the thing work, and putting them into place and defining data structures and so on is largely gruntwork, but you can also see that the overall design is something where you've got a wide degree of creative freedom. Books are in some ways worse that software -- the compiler you're trying to bluff your code past is the reader's brain, and not all readers will get the same message out of a book. So you also go for redundancy and hints and try to encode subtle little messages in amidst the blocks of pre-planned prose ... if you try writing without logic, you end up with dream narratives. And if you write without creativity, you might as well be writing software documentation. (Been there, done that.)

 

cstross: Question: GullMoli / Hjalti: do you listen to music while you write?

Answer: Constantly. Currently got something by The Residents on in the background; earlier was on Siouxie and the Banshees. It sets the mood.

 

cstross: Question: Daydream: How has the fame and glory of authorship changed you as persons?

Answer: Fame! Glory! Guffaw.

 

Peter Watts: Question: CaLiLaTiN: Peter Watts, how do you like being a marine-mammal biologist?

Answer: I liked the biology part of it just fine. What I couldn’t stand was the political bullshit. Basicallly, I ended up being a whore for special-interest groups that weren't interested in following the data where it led so much as they were interested in twisting the data to meet their own political bottom line.

 

Which is why I'm not a marine mammal biologist any more,

 

cstross: (Excuse me, I'm having minor mousing problems. Normal service will be resumed shortly ...)

 

Peter Watts: Question: Colonel Tempest: do you ever get publishers asking you to write sequals and stuff ?

Answer: When a book does well, they really want you to do a sequel. When it tanks, they don't answer yourf calls.

 

vvinge: Question: Klaak: GullMoli / Hjalti: do you listen to music while you write

Answer: alas, I am blind to music at some higher integratable level. That is, I'm not tone deaf. Just mentally incapable of responding properly to music. This condition has been exacerbated by my aversion to things like music property enforcement.

 

Peter Watts: Question: GullMoli / Hjalti: What is your least favorite book you have written and why?

Answer: Behemoth, perhaps. It's well-written, it moves nicely, it ties the rifters saga up well enough-- but. Been there done that.

 

cstross: Question: Colonel Tempest: do you ever get partway through a book and then think... this isn't going to work and stop writing it?

Answer: If you're writing full time for a living, that's a disaster -- you're kissing goodbye to a large chunk of a year's income *and* you're going to mess up your publisher's schedule. So if you're a professional, (a) you don't tackle a book that you aren't reasonably certain you can write, and (b) you grit your teeth and go in for heavy-duty refactoring, to try to pull something that's at least readable out of the wreckage. Usually you can make things work if you tell your editor, "hi, I'm in trouble, need another couple of months" (*before* you go overdue), and then get down to tearing it apart. But it's not fun when it happens (and it's happened to me).

On the upside, GLASSHOUSE is the end-product of a "oh s*it, this doesn't work, I need to fix it!" run of that kind.

 

Peter Watts: Question: GullMoli / Hjalti: do you listen to music while you write?

Answer: Sometimes. Jethro Tull. Nine Inch Nails. Porcupine Tree.

 

vvinge: Question: Klaak: MÖטζєя: Vernor Vinge i am currently reading Rainbows End (no spoilers pls still on chapter 9) what inspired you to write such a bueatiful book

Answer: rainbows end was me trying to take almost all the trends and problems that I see with current technology and the things in the world that scare me, and trying to imagine an outcome that was plausibly not nightmarish.

 

cstross: Peter Watts: Nine Inch Nails.

(I should have guessed! :)

 

Peter Watts: Question: Daydream: How has the fame and glory of authorship changed you as persons?

Answer: It's allowed me to lose weight. A diet of rice and barnacles does wonders for your body-mass index.

 

vvinge: Question: [Xfire] Artaxs: Vernor Vinge: You are often quoted as saying that the creation of superhuman intelligences in machines will herald the end of the human era altogether. Do you still believe this, and have you adjusted the timeline? Is the end of the human era something that you would want to live to see

Answer: I think the technological singularity is the most likely non-catastrophic outcome of the coming years.

vvinge: Alas, there are lots of catastrophic outcomes. Just take a look at Martin Rees's book titled our final hour.

 

cstross: Question: How long does it take from finishing writing a book to seeing it in stores?

Answer: It varies. If it's a first novel, it can take you 2-3 years from *selling* it to a publisher before they find you a slot in their schedule and finally it comes out. (And it can take you years to sell that first novel -- SINGULARITY SKY was finished in 1998 but didn't really sell until 2002.) On the other hand, if they're in a hurry, they can blast a topical bestseller through in about 10-12 weeks. Usually, if you're on a treadmill, they want you to send in a novel a year, and they publish it 12 months after the deadline, give or take a month. Production (editing, typesetting, marketing) takes time ...

 

Peter Watts: Question: ^*(ĞØã+)*^Ħ€ΛΛЇ~┌╦╤─: have you ever made a charactrer in one of your novels simialar to a close freind or family member?

Answer: All the time. Hell, for half the cast of Blindsight I even used their real names. I should probably dial that back before I get sued.

 

Peter Watts: Question: : |DonMKB|: What do you do when you have writer's block?

Answer: I stop writing.

 

cstross: Question: GullMoli / Hjalti: Do you think there are more advanced creatures than us somewhere out there in deep space?

Answer: I've got two answers to that. (a) No, we're alone (you might check the entry on Wikipedia for "Fermi Paradox" for more background), or (b) there's advanced life out there, and it's so advanced and so huge we've looked right past it and mistaken it for gross cosmological features. I vacilate between these answers daily ...

 

Peter Watts: Question: 2006ade: Petter Watts wha is your favorite marine - mammal?

Answer: Orca. I know it's a cliché. Also harbour seals; now *there's* a thinking animal. Kind of like big, legless marine cats.

vvinge: Question: Klaak: GullMoli / Hjalti: Do you think there are more advanced creatures than us somewhere out there in deep space

Answer: this is one of the most important philosophical questions that has a completely concrete basis. Even the most grounded speculations about the answer lead us to things that are enormously strange. I think there's a lot more that science fiction can do with these possibilities. Already the various possibilities, have been formed some of the coolest science fiction around such as Charles Stross. Interstellar stories (Iron sunrise, and so on).

 

Peter Watts: Question: tenaciousdank: Peter , do you use oddities of the deep learned as as marine biologist as inspiration for your works? If so can you give a specific example?

Answer: jhsffjfb 8

Peter Watts: Sorry. Cat on keyboard...

Peter Watts: Well, Starfish was pretty full of legit oddities-- crustaceans with eyes on their bellies, that sort of thing-- but that's hardly surprising. Looking back, the gross morphology of the scramblers in Blindsight owes more to brittle stars and schyphozoan jellyfish than I would have liked.

 

cstross: Question: 2006ade: Charles Stross You've been compared to Bruce Sterling. How do you feel about the comparison and how do you contrast your work with his?

Answer: I'm flattered. Bruce is one of the most underrated and important writers in SF in the last two decades. He routinely invents entire new fields, strip-mines them for a single book, then moves on, leaving *ordinary* award-winning writers to pull the gems from his spoil heap. (The classic example being "Schismatrix", which prefigured the entire new space opera movement by about a decade -- and did it ALL in just 300 pages.)

cstross: (In case it wasn't obvious, I'm a big Sterling fan-boy.)

 

vvinge: Question: xdeathknightx: A lot of sci-fi deals with a not so bright future, have you ever thought of a more utopian future to write about or is it more interesting to keep it dark and such

Answer: rainbows end was an attempt at something that was realistically, light and dark. I had a lot of trouble getting dramatic traction out of such realism. I'm headed back to interstellar space for the next one.

 

cstross: Question: CaLiLaTiN: All writers, Does writing a book interfere with family life?

Answer: My wife calls what happens to me "write mode". As in, I'm being myself, or I'm in Write Mode.

I don't know what the cats call it ...

cstross: Write Mode is bad. You focus on the inside of your own head and forget to wash, eat, do basic housekeeping tasks, or write bills. It can be temporarily cured by going to the pub and forcibly resocializing yourself, but that's at some cost to your liver.

cstross: The cure is to finish writing the book and ship it.

 

Peter Watts: Question: Leafwalker: To Peter Watts: Whats your cat's name and color?

Answer: One of 'em's called "Banana" (although these days a better name would be "Potato"). Brown tabby, gloriously mishhapen ears. The other is called "Chipwalla": puffy white thing with asymmetrical grey patches.

 

 

Peter Watts: Question: CaLiLaTiN: All writers, Does writing a book interfere with family life?

Answer: No family. Which is, you know, probably just as well for all concerned.

 

cstross: Question: Beetle Bailey: do you all have college backgrounds, and do you think a creative mind can still find a market without one?

Answer: Sure: SF as a field is full of eccentrics and autodidacts. You may not have a sheepskin, but as long as you're willing to put the work in nobody will call you on it. It's not as if your publisher's going to bar the door if you don't have an MA in creative writing, is it? And I'll confess to being pretty poor in my literary education outside the genre field.

 

Peter Watts: Question: Marshall: To all authors. Some people believe hand writing your novels, rather than typing, will increase your connection with your novel. Do you believe this?

Answer: God no. What it'd increase my connection with would be a whole lot of tensor wrist bandages.

 

cstross: Question: 2006ade: Charles Stross: You skip forward in time considerably with story number four, which picks up with Manfred's daughter Amber. At first I was disappointed to see Macx go, but now I'm falling in love with her. Why the generational jump and will we do this again in part three? Any chance dad (or a part of him) will make a reappearance?

Answer: I structured ACCELERANDO as a trilogy of trilogies of novelettes -- each trilogy tracking one generation of a dysfunctional posthuman society. And yes, your guess is correct (but I'm not spoilering anything).

 

cstross: Question: Marshall: To all authors. Some people believe hand writing your novels, rather than typing, will increase your connection with your novel. Do you believe this?

Answer: *whimper* *cringe*

CAN HAS KBD NAOW? THX!

 

vvinge: Question: Colonel Tempest: do you ever get bored of sci-fi

Answer: actually, I don't get bored with field of science fiction. In principle, it is a very very broad field. Basically, if I do get bored with it I fear I would be much more bored by thinking in an everyday context.(Also, theoretical generality of science fiction often fails in concrete application. When we science fiction people are not sufficiently imaginative, that can be really boring.)

 

Peter Watts: Question: : xdeathknightx: Did you ever include someone in your books based on someone that wronged you or you hate just you can have him perish in a particular nasty way as a way of revenge?

Answer: I did that once, and you know-- I ended up making him more sympathetic than he was in real life, because he came across on the page as such a complete asshole that I didn't figure anyone would buy it.

 

But he really was that big of a dick. Really. Still is, from what I've heard.

 

cstross: Question: Ximikda: To all: Do you have any hobbies like sports - swimming, running or something else? Do you like sports at all or is it just the writing?

Answer: I swim several times a week -- but I'm the fat pasty kid from school who hated organized sports: I'm doing it for medical reasons.

 

cstross: Question: xdeathknightx: Did you ever include someone in your books based on someone that wronged you or you hate just you can have him perish in a particular nasty way as a way of revenge?

Answer: That's dangerous. Firstly, what you commit to writing in public is permanent -- if you change your mind about it after you've published it, you're outa luck in changing it. Secondly, you can get sued for libel (more of a risk here in the UK than in the USA, admittedly). On the other hand, I *have* dedicated my next book to a certain dot com that IPOd in such a way that the entire dev group got shafted but the directors and senior management trousered multi-million in stock options.

 

Peter Watts: Question: Ximikda: To all: Do you have any hobbies like sports - swimming, running or something else?

Answer: Running. Weightlifting. But I don't enjoy that stuff, I hate it. Just do it tgo keep from getting fat. SCUBA diving, although I haven't had the chance to strap on a tank for a couple of years now.

 

Gaming.

 

vvinge: Question: Klaak: Marshall: To all authors. Some people believe hand writing your novels, rather than typing, will increase your connection with your novel. Do you believe this

Answer: I know there are really prolific authors, who still hand write. At the other extreme, I know a really prolific author, who does his drafts using a speech to text program.

 

vvinge: Artaxs: Thank you so much, all of you guys, for chatting with us today

Great! Thanks.

vvinge: me done

vvinge: No new thoughts. It was very ufn.

vvinge: bye

cstross: cstross: Last words: the blog's at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/. Feel free to visit.

Peter Watts: Looks like we're wrapping up, so-- sorry to those whose questions I didn't get around to. My fingers have been flying off my hgands here.

cstross: What He Said.

[Xfire] matteox: That concludes the chat with three of the 2007 Hugo Nominees! Thank you very much to our special guests, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and Peter Watts. Thank you everyone for participating.

 

Now onto the prizes! If you are one of the winners PM me for instructions on how to claim your prize!

vvinge: Yes, I had to tunnel mind to keep up. Missed a lot alas.

Peter Watts: Oh, and what *he* said too, except at www.rifters.com

 

[Xfire] matteox: Three third place winners will received signed copies of Blindsight by Peter Watts.

1. [J4F]Fenris

2. tenaciousdank

3. Daydream

[Xfire] matteox: Two second place winners will receive signed copies of Glasshouse by Charles Stross and Blindsight by Peter Watts

1. Aghen

2. NeonSoldierX

[Xfire] matteox: Ten first place will receive a prize pack with a signed copy of each of the following: Glasshouse by Charles Stross, Rainbows end by Vernor Vinge, and Blindsight by Peter Watts.

1. Cyonsure EPR

2. Shamps

3. MastCrasher

4. questioneer

5. [300]c0p1/\\/\\4$0r

6. romripper

7. Zephyria Mifuyne

8. -)G(- Xen - Cobra

9. 2006ade

10. Ximikda

[Xfire] matteox:

If you are one of the winners PM me for instructions on how to claim your prize!

Thanks again for your participation!

Transcripts will be posted on the Xfire Sci-Fi Week site as soon we’re able to get them out.