Being the blog of Charles Stross, author, and occasional guests ...
This isn't a blog entry I wanted to write, but it's a necessary one: a statement about the use of generative large language models (colloquially "AI") in my work. I do not use LLMs in my work. I don't use...
So, the second novel in the Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue, was first published on November 1st, 2006. And while it was superficially a pastiche of the Bond movie canon (as it existed at that time--I was writing before the...
I must remember that now I'm over 60, doing more than one SF convention in a month is probably more than my stamina can cope with. (Which is going to make this November really interesting as I'm about to say...
(This blog essay is overdue because I'm still waiting for new prescription glasses and writing while cross-eyed with text zoomed to 250% is tedious. They should be here later this week. Meanwhile ...) Back in January 2022 I wrote an...
So, I had my second round of eye surgery, and it worked fine. I got a short distance lens, leaving me myopic, which was expected, and I've booked an opthalmology appointment for the earliest possible date post-surgery (in mid-May, the...
It's the end of March. Since the last blog update I've had my second cataract surgery (it went much better this time), written a portion-and-outline of a new novel (for my agent, who will hopefully have feedback or maybe just...
... The TLDR is: the cataract in my one mostly working eye (the other has about 50% retinal occlusion) is steadily getting worse, and I'm scheduled for surgery on March 27th. NB: no need to lecture me about cataract surgery,...
Sorry I haven't updated the blog for a while: I've been busy. (Writing the final draft of a new novel entirely unconnected to anything else you've read—space opera, new setting, longest thing I've written aside from the big Merchant Princes...
The Regicide Report, the last novel in the main Laundry Files series, is coming out on January 27th in the US (from Tor.com Publishing) and the UK (from Orbit). If you want to order signed hardcovers, contact Transreal Fiction in...
It's been years and years since I last went trawling for webcomics worth reading, so it's time for an update: obviously online search is pretty much useless, but we ought to be able to crowdsource something here. I keep a...
It should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the tech news that many companies are pushing the adoption of "AI" (large language models) among their own employees--from software developers to management--and the push is coming from...
So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about...
So, I'm cross-eyed and typing with one eye screwed shut, which sucks. Seeing an ophthalmologist tomorrow, expecting a priority referral to get the other eyeball stabbed. (It was not made clear to me at the time of the last stabbing...
It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in...
So, in the past month I've been stabbed in the right eye, successfully, at the local ophthalmology hospital. Cataract surgery is interesting: bright lights, mask over the rest of your face, powerful local anaesthesia, constant flow of irrigation— they practically...