Back to: Lovebible.pl | Forward to: Trust Me (I'm a kettle) PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy By Charlie Stross I really wanted to make it a trilogy, you know? I mean, what could be cooler than a trilogy of near-future Scottish police procedurals about crimes that don't exist yet, written in multi-viewpoint second person? (Elizabeth Bear has a term for that kind of thing: she calls it "stunt writing".) Unfortunately the NSA have done it again:To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.At this point, I'm clutching my head. "Halting State" wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006. Trouble is, about the only parts that haven't happened yet are Scottish Independence and the use of actual quantum computers for cracking public key encryption (and there's a big fat question mark over the latter—what else are the NSA up to?). I'm throwing in the towel. I probably will write another near-future Scottish police procedural by and by, but it won't be a sequel to the first two except in the loosest sense. The science fictional universe of "Halting State" and "Rule 34" is teetering on the edge of turning into reality. Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2007 forced me back to the drawing board for "Rule 34"; the Snowden revelations have systematically trashed all my ideas for the third book. To make matters worse, Scotland is teetering on the edge of a political singularity. There is a Referendum on Scottish Independence coming up in September 2014. Then the UK (with or without Scotland) is expected to hold a referendum on whether or not to stay in the EU—a vote with consequences which are probably even more disruptive than the question of whether Scotland should separate from the Union. In just two years the map of the Scottish near future will have changed, unpredictably and drastically, from where it is now. I therefore conclude that there is simply no point in my starting to write a near-future politically astute crime thriller set in Scotland before I know the outcome of those votes (especially as it couldn't be published before mid-2016). Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with the spaceships and bug-eyed monsters. Realism in fiction is over-rated. PS: If you're wondering what sort of near-future dystopian panopticon surveillance state/spy thriller I would be writing if I wasn't setting it in Scotland and writing in the second person, you'll get to see when I finish it. Ahem. Because that's the direction the trilogy provisionally titled "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" is going in. There will eventually be another near-future Scottish thriller, but I'm not going to start writing until after the votes are in. And it won't be in-series with the first two. Posted by Charlie Stross at 13:18 on December 9, 2013 | Comments (181) 181 Comments anonemouse | December 9, 2013 13:49 1: Take Arthur C. Clarke's solution for the 2001 series' inconsistencies, and claim each is set in a very similar but discontinuous universe? (The Discovery went to Saturn in 2001 and was orbiting Jupiter in 2010, so we're not talking little changes, here.) Whenever it's written, I'll be waiting to buy it, at least. library.mole | December 9, 2013 13:53 2: Charlie, do you feel,as I do, that the information being trawled in bulk by the NSA will inevitably end up being shared with other law-enforcement agencies, all the way down to the "ordinary" police? Perhaps all intelligence and police agencies will eventually blend into a kind of panopticon overseer organization...Welcome to the reality of the movie 'Brazil.' t3knomanser | December 9, 2013 13:54 3: "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" Ah, I'm just in the process of re-reading that. I do look forward to follow-ons. And the inevitable TV series- seriously, it's "Game of Thrones" plus "Homeland" with hints of "The Wire". Just piling those names together is like crack to a TV executive. jackwilliambell | December 9, 2013 13:54 4: You could always follow Gibson's strategy of writing in an alternate universe that is a lot like here today. But different wherever it impacts actual news and politics. _ieronim | December 9, 2013 14:05 5: The actual backdoor in elliptic curves math looks a lot funnier to me than breaking the keys using quantum computers. Anyway, QC isn't a magic wand, and there are many problems where it provides only sqrt(N) advantage. I have even read the announcement of a conference on QC-resistant cryptography. And, well, we have yet to s...