Interview with Charles Stross

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Charles Stross (December 2025)

 

Charles Stross has written seven Hugo-nominated novels and is the winner of the 2005, 2010, and 2014 Hugo awards for best novella. He has won numerous other awards and been translated into at least 12 other languages. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: You are regarded as a space opera writer, at least according to Wikipedia. Do you agree? Do you think there is a distinct British tradition of space opera, deriving from Banks, Reynolds and other writers from the 80s? If there is, are you part of it?

 

Space opera, like all SF, reflects the author's view of their lived reality onto the silver screen of a fictional world—in this case, a far future wide-screen epic with spaceships and interstellar travel.

 

The UK ran a world-empire until 1947, and its controlled demolition—in the wake of WW2—left the rubble of the British collective subconscious quaking. (Arguably, it's still doing so.) Before about 1956 and the Suez crisis (which unambiguously hammered the nails into the coffin lid of British imperial aspirations) British SF tended to reflect a self-image of unconscious cultural dominance. Since then … well, the message is still sinking in, and the aftershocks are still ringing. (Brexit was one of them, a last delusion of imperial autonomy that gripped enough of the right wing to convince them that going it alone was a viable economic strategy. Spoiler: it isn't.)

 

The USA *acquired* a world-empire in 1945, or at least the sort of global hegemony the British Empire had circa 1850. And now it's visibly sliding: in both cases, they came in with the shift to a new energy economy (the British Empire ran on coal, the US Empire ran on oil), and in both cases, an energy transition destabilized them (spot the current one!).

 

Anyway … British space opera historically reflected the British attitude to empire, even if the authors were self-consciously anti-imperialist. And there was generally *less* of it than in the US—it takes a very particular kind of brash self-confidence to do the genre unironically, as witness all the hard work George Lucas has put in since 1985 or so into making the Star Wars universe from the first movie seem, well, unironic. (I don't think it's any kind of accident that the late-imperial spasm of Trumpism coincides with Mel Brooks authorizing a sequel to "Spaceballs"!)

 

Then Iain Banks came along in the mid-80s and kicked the whole rotting apple cart over in his own inimitable way. He's one of two authors who completely revolutionized space opera in that decade—the other was Bruce Sterling, whose "Schismatrix" is very much the Velvet Underground of the New Space Opera (not many people went to their gigs, but everyone who did seemed to form a new wave band). While Schismatrix had a claustrophobic cold-war sensibility to it, lacking any hint of an authoritarian hegemony, Iain went in a very different direction: what if there's a galactic hegemony, *and they're left-anarchist idealists*?

 

Anyway, those two visions detonated the whole field of space opera, and the rest of us are just playing in the wreckage.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: Your bio says that, like several science fiction writers, you have spent time working as a technical writer. Does this type of work influence your writing style for fiction or are they entirely different?

 

Entirely different. We call it "writing", but really, it's a different process.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: I have heard that you tweeted that you believe yourself to be autistic - do you think this influences the way you write? Do your stories reflect this in plot, characters or any other way? Does it influence the type of stories you read?

 

Yes, very much so. It probably explains why literary fiction didn't really speak to me before I hit middle age—we tend to take a lot longer to become socially astute enough to make sense of the neurotypical world. And it influences my whole approach to writing, which is ideas-driven (although I try to illustrate them by having human protagonists directly experiencing their consequences—otherwise I'd be as dry as Olaf Stapledon).

 

SFBC Member: Have any of the science fiction ideas you've written about in the past ended up becoming present day reality? Do any examples stand out in your mind?

 

A bunch. But having said that—we who write SF are not in the business of predicting the future! Rather, we're popular entertainers spinning yarns that people want to read, and sometimes we hit the target by accident.

 

I'd like to note my two near-future Scottish police procedurals, "Halting State" and "Rule 34", that came alarmingly close to reality (written 2005/6 and 2008, published 2007 and 2009, set in 2017 and 2022). The first dealt with economics in MMORPGs in a world where AR goggles had caught on, as seemed plausible a decade or two ago … and the use of networked games for coordinating espionage rings, which is something that IIRC has actually happened. Meanwhile "Rule 34" dealt with a variety of forseeable stuff ranging from ransomware targeting 3D printers—I don't *think* it's happened yet, but the 3D printing boom seemed to stall in the 2010s—to non-sentient AI taking an alarming role in human relationships: it was a very near-miss at predicting our LLM-riddled present.

 

Damo Mac Choiligh: What was it like writing 'Rapture of the Nerds' with Cory Doctorow; did you enjoy the collaborative process? Do you both share the same sense of humour?

 

Yes, but it was also irritating as hell! We later agreed that we'd both written 80% of the same book, because we ended up playing table tennis with short chapters then rewriting each others work, and we were pulling in slightly different directions.

 

Dave Hook: Although I deeply understand the appeal of writing series works, is there any chance you will write any more standalone novels?

 

That's a business question! And currently publishers seem to be pushing for standalones.

 

Having finished two gigantic series, I'm currently trying to spin up something new. And what I'm working on is two books in a vast space opera setting—so different they concern different species in different eras, and can plausibly be read entirely as standalones, much as Iain's Culture novels were all standalones.

 

I just turned 61; the Laundry Files took 25 years to write, the Merchant Princes took from 2003 to 2021, and I don't think I've got another 20 years left in me. So if only to avoid leaving an incomplete series and thereafter being cursed forever by my readers, I'm going to stick to standalones or shared settings rather than tackling anything larger than a trilogy.

 

Dave Hook: One of my favorite works by Mr. Stross is the 2000 novelette "A Colder War". I have always felt this story is independent of the Laundry Universe works beginning with the 2001 "The Atrocity Archive". At the same time, it felt to me there was some overlapping themes. Maybe this has been discussed elsewhere, but I would be interested in his thoughts.

 

I wrote "A Colder War" between 1992 and 1998—it spent about six years at the back of a drawer—to process my trauma from growing up during the cold war in a small country with about 2000 H-bombs pointed at it: if WW3 ever broke out, nobody in the UK had any expectation of surviving more than six hours, and it could all happen by accident because some idiot politician in another country cracked a joke in front of a hot mike (I'm still sore about Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" crack in 1984).

 

Anyway, ACW stands by itself: it brooks no sequels. (I mean, the end of the story literally takes place after the end of the world.) And I couldn't write more in that reality anyway: it's too corrosively bleak. But if something is bleak, you can make it funny and get a very dark humour out of it. So in 1999 I began writing a *funny* Lovecraftian story about IT tech support in a secret government agency dealing with world-ending horrors and also who has the key to the office supplies cupboard—and it kind of hung together.

 

Dave Hook: Finally, and I have not read it in a while, I have felt for some time that the 2006 Stross novel "Glasshouse" is one of the most terrifying novels I have read, in the context of reality and what is not reality. This may be a little more common today with the multiplication of works about simulated universes and virtual realities, but at the time it had quite an impact on me. Can I assume the intent was to depict a terrifying scenario?

 

The intent was to run a thought experiment: take the Zimbardo prison study and apply that same protocol to gender roles among people enculturated in a posthuman, post-gender society. Then it snowballed. Side-effects of mind uploading as posited in the book involve practical immortality and also mind *editing* by malevolent parties, and raise secondary questions: if there's a war, what do you do with the defeated combatants? ("Glasshouse" is British Army slang for a military prison. My big regret about the novel is that I didn't make that glaringly clear in the front matter.)

 

I'm playing with some of the same concepts again in a new work in progress (part of the new space opera setting I mentioned earlier) but it's unsold at present so I'm not going to discuss it further. (Can't be published before 2027, because business.)

 

John Grayshaw: Since your novels mix science fiction, fantasy, and horror, what is it you like about each of them?

 

I don't divide up my likes and dislikes along genre lines. Someone else invented those genres: not me. (What I write is usually described as cross-genre, anyway.)

 

John Grayshaw: What is it about the Merchant Princes series that makes you want to keep writing novels set in it?

 

I don't, any more. It's finished. The original 2003 plan was for a tetralogy of big fat books: the last of the original plan got crammed into the last hundred pages of "Invisible Sun" and it has run its course.

 

John Grayshaw: What is it about the Laundry Files series that makes you want to keep writing novels set in it?

 

It's a huge setting with a gigantic ensemble cast of characters … but it, too, is finished: it ran into a spiral of diminishing sales, so "The Regecide Report" wraps the original series up with a bow. The New Management books were originally intended to be Laundry Files: The Next Generation, but I handed in the first of them, "Dead Lies Dreaming", just as both my US and UK publishers went into lockdown in 2020 and the message got dropped, meaning they got sold as more OG Laundry Files, which annoyed readers who were looking for more OG stuff, not something for the next generation.

 

(There might be a final New Management novella or short novel in due course—it's half-written—but that project is on hold while I get the space opera spun up.)

 

John Grayshaw: What kind of research do you do for your novels?

 

I don't. Or rather, I constantly do *general* background reading about lots of things, and eventually they show up in a work of fiction when I've got enough material.

 

(Non-fiction authors typically work on a research-then-write cycle; fiction writers don't usually have the luxury of interrupting the writing process to do something else with an uncertain pay-off down the line.)

 

I will confess to writing with several browser tabs open on wikipedia at any given time, a scrapbook of papers saved off arXiv, and a bunch of incomprehensible notes I keep using SimpleNote.

 

John Grayshaw: When did you start to feel like you’d made it as a writer?

 

The imposter syndrome finally went away (and never came back) after the third Hugo award. That was about 20 books and 15 years into a full-time writing career, so go figure.

 

John Grayshaw: Which one of your works is your personal favorite and why?

 

I don't really have favourites—they're ALL my favourite thing while I'm writing them! (Right now my favourite thing is something called "Starter Pack" which you won't be able to read for a couple of years. And next year it'll be something new.)

 

John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction writers that you enjoyed during your childhood?

 

With respect, that's a silly question. I'm 61 so you're asking about my favoures probably 40-50 years ago. The SF/F field was so wildly different back then that there's very little carry-through—a lot of SF that was popular in the mid-1970s has aged very badly indeed, especially SF that would have appealed to a teenager!

 

John Grayshaw: Who are some of your favorite current science fiction writers? And why?

 

I burned out on reading SF/F about a decade ago, after reading not much else for my first 50 years. So I'm absolutely out of touch with current developments. Critic James Nicoll is blogging a series of posts about the Arthur C. Clarke award shortlists including a poll on which novels you've read, and I realized I'd been at >60% until about 2005, then gradually began dropping, until after 2015 I was down to zero because I'm simply not reading within the field any more. (I really hope I un-burn-out sooner or later so I can play catch-up: I hear there've been a lot of good things.)

 

John Grayshaw: Do you enjoy going to science fiction conventions? Have any fun stories from going to them? Or have you gotten any interesting reader feedback from your works in general?

 

Yes, but my convention-going took a nose dive in 2016 and never recovered. (Entering the USA during any Republican presidency since 2000 has become distinctly unpleasant—I'm a foreigner, as far as ICE and CBP are concerned I have *zero* human rights—and I completely stopped during the first Trump administration. Then, just as I was getting ready to get back in the pool, along comes COVID19! And then another Trump administration, just like the last one only bigglier worse.)

 

I'm going to some British and European conventions these days, but mostly just as a fan, hanging out there (and being on a few panel discussions).

 

I will add that my first SF convention was in 1983 or thereabouts ...

 

John Grayshaw: Any of your works under option for movies or TV?

 

Yes. There's a TV option on the Laundry Files right now. It's the third time someone's bought an option on the books since 2008, and if it gets as far as a pilot episode it'll be a first.

 

Note that I don't watch films or TV. I have "exciting" eyeballs, as one ophthalmology professor put it, and I probably also have a mild degree of ADHD; I get really annoyed by movies (the ones I can physically see, because they're not just a muddy motion blur on the screen) because the plots telegraph themselves minutes ahead and the emotional beats are transparently manipulative (I spend too much time anatomizing the narrative structure of fiction), and TV season pacing bores me to tears: I can't sit still for more than 15 minutes.

 

John Grayshaw: What are some of your hobbies other than writing?

 

I have no life outside writing.

 

John Grayshaw: Do you have a writing routine that you stick to?

 

Nope: every book is different. I've tried all sorts of working routines over the decades, the only thing that sticks is what doesn't work—I don't write while I'm on vacation/travelling (which is important to keep me from going completely stale) and I can't concentrate in public. So I work in my home office.

 

John Grayshaw: What are you working on currently and what are your plans for the future?

 

I'm currently working on my big next space opera setting, which currently has three works in it: the novella "Palimpsest" (published in 2009, won the Hugo for best novella in 2010, collected in "Wireless"), a novel titled "Ghost Engine" that I've been trying to wrestle into submission since 2015 (it's an Iain M. Banks homage, and Iain was a literary writer first and foremost—there's a lot more to the Culture than sarcastic starships with odd names), and another novel titled "Starter Pack", a Harry Harrison homage (elevator pitch: "The Stainless Steel Rat gets Isekai'd").

 

This is all I can see for the future right now, although I have just had a mad idea for a sequel to "Starter Pack", which I can't even begin writing until early 2027.