Charlie's Diary

(This is for discussion of BRITISH politics. Deviations onto American politics will be deleted without warning.)

There is a general election coming tomorrow (Thursday July 4th). It looks likely to be a Conservative wipe-out—the worst defeat for the Tories since 1945. Pre-election polling shows large defections from the Conservative right to Reform UK, the latest reincarnation of Nigel Farage's fascist-adjacent UKIP. Reform UK won't get many (if any) seats in parliament but they are likely to cost the Conservatives a lot of votes, while Labour has persistently shown a lead of 20-25% in polling for the past year.

There's a well-known issue in British politics of "bashful Conservative" voters, who say they'll vote for someone else but who then revert to tribal loyalty on the day of the election. But even assuming everyone who says they're defecting to Reform but they turn out for the Conservatives on the day, there's likely to be a Labour government by next Monday.

What happens next?

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

(I am still elbow-deep in the guts of The Regicide Report, hence paucity of recent blog entries.)

I must admit that I used to be a big fan of conspiracy theories—or applied psychoceramics, as we called it back in the nineties—but the rise of social media has lifted the carpet to reveal a mass of wriggly creepy-crawlies under the rug, some of which are very not nice at all: as witness the rise of QAnon (which is basically the old anti-semitic Blood Libel in a new coat of paint), the enthusiastic adoption of a bunch of really nasty racist conspiracy theories by the far right (who use them to market Nazism via the internet), and so on.

It's quite apparent that right now we're seeing the build-out of a whole new communications technology that hasn't quite hit the public eye yet—ubiquitous satellite broadband and telephony. This is still in the very early stages. Right now my iPhone can in principle send a very limited SOS message to emergency services via satellite if I'm outside of cell service. The next generation of phones will do better, and the days of needing a dedicated satellite phone the size of a brick are numbered.

But this technology is dependent on infrastructure, and the infrastructure in question requires vast numbers of what are essentially cellphone towers in orbit. According to some announced plans, SpaceX's Starlink constellation will ultimately require as many as 45,000 satellites in orbit to provide global service. As we've seen from its military uses in the Ukraine war, even with the need for a bulky base station Starlink has strategic implications: ubiquitous orbital cellphone service (even if its limited by contention ratios) is even more significant. China is planning its own low-orbit comsat constellation, and doubtless there will be others: as with GPS, we now have multiple nations or supranational blocs like the EU running satellite fleets to provide a secure service.

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 curation of the input data they require for training).

So, we've been here before. Most recently with cryptocurrency/blockchain (which is still going on, albeit much less prominently as governments and police go after the most obvious thieves and con men like Sam Bankman Fried).

But there've been other internet-related bubbles before.

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"), totaling about 370,000 words. "Season of Skulls" was published in 2023, hence the series is eligible in 2024.)

The Hugo award winners will be announced at the world science fiction convention in Glasgow this August, on the evening of Sunday August 11th. Full announcement of the entire shortlist here.

In addition to the Hugo nomination, the Kickstarter for the second edition of the Laundry tabletop role playing game, from Cubicle 7 games, goes live for pre-orders in the next month. If you want to be notified when that happens, there's a sign-up page here.

Finally, there's some big news coming soon about film/TV rights, and separately, graphic novel rights, to the Laundry Files. I can't say any more at this point, but expect another announcement (or two!) over the coming months.

I'm sure you have questions. Ask away!

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 directed by Tim Burton, who probably needs no introduction, even to a cinematic illiterate like me. Although I gather a prequel movie (called, predictably, Wonka), came out in 2023.

(Because sooner or later the folks behind "House of Illuminati Ltd" will wise up and delete the website, here's a handy link to how it looked on February 24th via archive.org.)

INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE - CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT ™!

Tickets to Willys Chocolate Experience™ are on sale now!

The event was advertised with amazing, almost hallucinogenic, graphics that were clearly AI generated, and equally clearly not proofread because Stable Diffusion utterly sucks at writing English captions, as opposed to word salad offering enticements such as Catgacating • live performances • Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats.* And tickets were on sale for a mere £35 per child!

(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".

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 am not a convention runner and I haven't been following the Chengdu mess obsessively. If you want the inside baseball deets, read the File770 blog. If you want to see the rulebook, you can find it here (along with a bunch more stuff). I am on the outside of the fannish discourse and flame wars on this topic, and I may have misunderstood some of the details. I'm open to authoritative corrections and will update if necessary.)

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—but it still won't work because changes to the structure of the British society and economy since 1979 (hint: Thatcher's revolution) make it impossible.

Reasons it won't work: there are two aspects, infrastructure and labour.

(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.

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 multiple viewpoint characters, but they were all essentially civil servants working in the secret side of the government, which is a bit restricting. I blew the doors off the universe in The Nightmare Stacks, allowing me to explore the overarching theme of how to live in a world gone mad—the world of the New Management—and this trilogy marked the start of that. Also, the Laundry Files main story line comes to an end in late May of 2015, in an event that can reasonably be called the Lovecraftian Singularity: the climactic events, from The Nightmare Stacks onwards, are all crammed into a period of about 18-24 months. 2015 is receding in the rear view mirror and I wanted to jump the the setting forward a bit, so Dead Lies Dreaming starts in winter of 2015 and Season of Skulls takes place in spring of 2017 ... and, of course, the summer of 1816.

(I have plans for more New Management novels, starting with one in 2019, but my editors are holding my feet to the fire and insisting I finish the earlier series before I go there. And they're right. So I'm working on the final installment in Bob and Mo's story arc at the moment ...)

Why you shouldn't trust AI (large language models): a cautionary example.

(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 novels in print, translated into a dozen languages, I've won a few awards, and I've been around long enough that my wikipedia page is a mess of mangled edits.

And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

All I can think of right now is that the New Management, which started as a ghastly satire on the UK's government of 2016, now looks impossibly utopian.

In particular the headlines are dominated by the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, which is a shit-show beyond parody. Suella Braverman went full xenophobe (millions and millions of migrants are about to descend on the UK, apparently) then went full Cruella de Ville (stomping on a guide dog's tail at a press conference) because cruelty is her only policy. Rishi Sunak announced transphobia as his only visible policy (before being told that it's probably illegal by Liberty). Then he announced the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, and patted himself on the back by conceding that the government intended to fund an extension of the Metrolink tram line to Manchester Airport—spoiler: an extension that entered service in 2014.

The only news that makes sense is that Brexiteer Nigel Farage said he would not rejoin the Conservative Party (after Sunak suggested he might be allowed in if he applied)—after all, rats are famous for abandoning sinking ships, not climbing aboard.

Please won't somebody think of the children? No, wait, Rishi Sunak is doing that: he's raising the smoking age so that anyone born after 2008 will never be old enough to legally buy cigarettes, the same day Lord Frost proposed raising the pension age to 75 to cut guvernment spending because heaven forbid that people should be allowed to escape this vale of toil and tears through the blessed mercy of self-inflicted lung cancer.

How the hell am I supposed to parody this?