Unexpected Questions with Charlie Stross

Charles Stross, 58, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of seven Hugo-nominated novels and winner of three Hugo awards for best novella, Stross’s works have been translated into over twelve languages. His most recent novel, “Season of Skulls”, is published by Tor.com <https://tor.com/> in the USA and Orbit in the UK and EU.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk died). He’s been a full-time writer since 2000.

If you were to write a book about a group of superheroes with completely useless powers, what would their powers be?

I kinda-sorta already did this! My long-running Laundry Files series encompasses everything from Lovecraftian nightmares to geekish computational demonologists by way of people gifted—or more accurately afflicted—with superpowers. And the current New Management trilogy within that setting features a team of B-tier supers (who, admittedly, are more on the lawbreaking side of the balance sheet: but in the context of their nightmarish dystopian world, that’s probably a good thing):

Imp: the Impresario. Imp is a film school drop-out, obsessed with making the ultimate (pirate) feature-length movie of Peter Pan. Imp’s superpower is very simple: he can convince anyone of anything at all, if he can talk to them face-to-face. (It only lasts about fifteen minutes, though, so forget about convincing a movie production company’s accounts department to fund him. On the other hand, for bloodlessly robbing banks? It’s perfect.)

Doc Depression: Imp’s sidekick. An empathic projector, as long as the emotions he’s projecting are downbeat. Apathy, despair, passivity—these are Doc’s stock in trade. (Those bank robberies? Go so much more smoothly when the security guards are too depressed to notice.)

Game Boy: he aces games. Every game—including perfect saving throws every time. Including real life situations if he can pretend it’s a LARP. Comes in handy when he’s dodging the odd insufficiently-depressed security guard while carrying the loot.

Del, the Deliverator. Works as a cycle courier but gets talked into being the getaway driver for Imp’s team. Her particular talent is speed: not just mad cycling skills and driving fast, but finding optimal routes between points. (It turns out she can intuit a deterministic O(N) solution to the Travelling Salesman Problem at will, making her better than any route-finding software.)

Taken individually, these folks’ powers are pretty feeble. But collectively, they’re a heist waiting to happen.

(Shame for them that the heist they get hired for in “Dead Lies Dreaming” is to recover a hand-written concordance to the one true Necronomicon from a cursed library …)

If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?

Most of the recorded past is a terrible place to live! It’s not even very picturesque to visit. Toilet paper was first sold commercially in the US in the 1860s, but as late as the 1830s “splinter-free” was an additional luxury the manufacturers boasted about on the wrapper. 20% of children died of virulent diseases before the age of 5 in 1900—diseases we have been so successful at eliminating through vaccination campaigns that conspiracy theorists believe they’re no longer a threat. Sexism and racism went unremarked on a scale we’ve almost forgotten; in the USA prior to 1970 women couldn’t open bank accounts or apply for a credit card without their husband or father’s permission, mass murder of non-whites (on the scale of entire towns being wiped off the map) went uninvestigated in the 1920s, abortion, contraception, pornography (including racy novels, not just video), and any sex at all (except between a married heterosexual couple) were illegal. And most other countries? We’re just as bad, or worse.

Seriously, if someone offers you a time machine ticket to 1823, you should punch them and run away. Even 1923 isn’t much better. 1943: there was a world war going on. 1963: assassination season and race riots. 1983: I was there, oh god (and by god I mean Cthulhu) we all knew we were going to die in a nuclear fireball any day now. The PTSD lives on!

For a brief window of time, from around 1991 to 2001, things looked to be getting better. I mean, the threat of having your face melted due to a momentary lapse of attention by a senile Hollywood actor or an emphysemic KGB officer had subsided, chickenpox and mumps no longer killed windrows of babies, there were even meds for AIDS victims, and we had cellphones and raves and the early internet (which was unbelievably cool and not personally owned by about five mad trillionaires).

Then things got worse again and we’re back to dying in a fireball (climate change is the new hotness), a mad guy in the Kremlin is waving nukes around again, the anti-vaxxers are trying to kill us, all the stuff that used to be illegal is going to be illegal again, billionaires own everything including your left kidney if you miss your next credit card repayment, and—

Just stick to the present day: at least we’ve still got splinter-free toilet paper.

If you had to choose between being a mermaid or a dragon, which would you pick and why?

Dragon—no question.

Dragons are airborne apex predators: there aren’t many of them and nothing preys on them. Just stay away from human princesses and tin men armed with murder cutlery and you’ll be fine!

Mermaids, in contrast, are about the size of seals and live in the sea. You know what else lives in the sea and considers seal-sized pelagian mammals a tasty snack? Killer whales!

I do not want to become whale poop. So: dragon it is!

If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?

The first problem with human/alien interactions would obviously be determining whether the alien was in fact alive at all, or just an oddly-shaped rock: then determining if it’s a heterotroph or an autotroph, whether it has separate cells with nuclei or is a syncitium or rhizome network, does it have rigid walls or flexible membranes … and then we go down the variant-biochemistry rabbit hole!

For example, oxygen. We breathe oxygen! Can’t live without it, in fact. But did you know that for about the first two billion years of life on Earth oxygen was a deadly poison to pretty much everything? And there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere because the Earth’s crust still contained huge quantities of unreduced iron compounds. It was only about a billion years ago when the crust finally became fully oxidized that free oxygen began building up in the biosphere … and poisoned 99.9% of all the life on Earth, because it was an excretory end product of early plant life.

(As you probably guessed, I’m not a fan of the “humans with extra latex make-up on their head” school of alien biology.)

But wait, there’s more!

Let’s assume we find aliens who are recognizable animals with flexible lipid membranes around their cells and an aerobic respiratory metabolism similar to our own, and DNA/RNA transcription, and ribosomes, and the whole recognizable panoply of terrestrial-compatible life.

What about sex?

There is quite some controversy over when, how, and why sexual assortative gene mingling evolved, but one common theory in evolutionary biology is that sex is a tool for cock-blocking parasites. Roughly three-quarters of known species are parasitic on some other species—that is, they eat them alive. While it’s metabolically cheaper to reproduce by parthenogenesis (cloning), any vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a parasite are shared between mother and daughters. Mixing up gene lineages, however, provides some scope for sharing traits that block parasite entrypoints at a cellular level. (Classic example: sickle-cell anaemia is a side-effect of having two copies of a gene that, when present in a single copy, makes red blood cells resistant to invasion by malarial parasites. Sickle-cell persists because it’s less likely to kill its carriers—only 25% of people with the gene inherit copies of it from both parents, and without two copies you aren’t at risk of sickle-cell—than succumbing to malaria.)

By the way, there’s more than one way to do sex (whatever the transphobes may say). Some folks insist that a female has two X chromosomes and a uterus and produces eggs, while a male has an XY karyotype and produces sperm and has a penis. These people have obviously never met any birds: 98% of bird species’ males lack penises, and where females have a ZW karyotype and males are a ZZ. Nor have they ever met a clownfish—all the members of a school of clownfish are female except the dominant one, and if the dominant male dies, the top surviving female becomes male. And don’t get me started on Platypuses (ten sex chromosomes! TEN! But only two sexes) or fungi (hundreds of genetic mating types which can cross match for, well, hundreds of sexes).

Sexual assortation appears to be a prerequisite for sexual attraction (at least, you don’t need sexual attraction if you never evolved sex in the first place), but then we get into some really murky waters because in addition to talking about genetics we’re now talking about *behavioural* genetics, that is, how genes influence physiology and, through physiology, animal behaviour. Which is kind of like eating soup noodles with chopsticks, if you’re holding your chopsticks with another pair of chopsticks (and wearing a blindfold). Sexual attraction seems to be a behavioural trait that is conserved in evolution—that is, if you don’t exhibit it, you don’t reproduce, and if you don’t reproduce, the next generation doesn’t reflect your traits. But it’s almost certainly a side-effect of other characteristics. How do we identify potential mates? How do we interact with them? How specific are our tastes? As Robert Heinlein noted at one point, warthogs are obviously sexy as hell—to other warhogs, not humans. Obviously humans and warthogs are all mammals, but each species possesses and lacks some traits relevant to the other. Sexual attraction to non-humans is not conserved by evolution unless the non-human is so close to human that they’re a compatible branch of our family tree: say, Denisovans or Neanderthals (who interbred with our ancestors).

Finally …

Taking evolution as a given, there are a few constants which we can guess will apply to aliens from Earth-like biospheres.

Firstly, there’s no such thing as trees. That is: while trees undoubtedly exist (they contain about 75% of Earth’s biomass by weight), there’s no one true way to tree—trees appear to have evolved repeatedly from different photoautotrophs over the past billion years, and the form they take is the result of convergent evolutionary pressures: grow tall (to capture all the sunlight above your rivals), develop rigid tubular capillary systems to raise water and keep those leaves up, develop mechanisms for dispersing seeds widely.

The convergent evolution thing goes for many other features of biology, by the way: eyes, for example, have evolved independently multiple times (as Stephen Jay Gould documented). And so did carcinization: just as there’s no right way to tree, there’s no one way to crab—but all sorts of sea-dwelling arthropods develop convergent crab-like traits. (Crustacea are aquatic arthropods, occupying the niche that insects monopolize on land: it turns out that a key enzyme required for hardening chitin—insect carapaces—doesn’t operate efficiently in seawater, so crustaceans use heavier, denser, calcium carbonate crystals to stiffen their shells. Which is why crabs don’t fly.)

We see other long-term evolutionary trends, notably predator/prey arms races. One such is theory of mind (TOM), which enables a predated species to anticipate its predators’ activities (do those paw prints around the water hole mean the lions are going to wait nearby?) and allow predators to out-think their prey. Another arms race is the development of venom: snakes appear to have developed venom multiple times, semi-independently, over the past 200 million years—there’s very limited or no evidence of venom going back to much earlier eras, however.

The Fermi paradox suggests that we are among the first spacefaring intelligent species to evolve (at least, in this galaxy). So it, therefore, seems likely that any sexy alien I meet will be an extremely intelligent, venomous, tree-dwelling crab. Or maybe a hypercastrating alien mind-control endoparasite (like the real-world Sacculina carcini) that has eaten the spacecrab’s gonads and would like to sample my wedding tackle.

And people say I write horror stories! I have no idea what gives them that idea.

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