I recently cornered scifi writer Charles Stross because I had a lot of burning questions after reading his most recent novel Saturn's Children, about a sexbot who becomes a smuggler. But after a bit of cursory bonding over our love of internet porn, and a few excellent tales about his previous life working at a Scottish ISP where one of his jobs was preventing a cat from peeing on the modems that delivered the internet to all of Scotland, we wound up having a very interesting conversation that I was not expecting. It was about why science fiction created in the U.S. is so dystopian right now, while UK scifi is practically giddy about the future.

I had asked Stross, somewhat off the cuff, why so many Scottish SF writers are kicking ass these days (I was thinking in particular of Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, Grant Morrison, and Stross himself). And that's how we got onto the topic. He had a very precise answer, which involved both politics and the famous experimental scifi magazine Interzone.   Read More...