Charlie at the Grauniad

Today’s Guardian includes an interview with Charlie Stross (conducted by Damien G Walter). It covers a variety of subjects including the Singularity and the nature of fiction:

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction – the study of the human condition – needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

That will put a few establishment noses out of joint, I suspect.

Update: link corrected – thanks to Juha Autero whose comment ought to be below but it got eaten by the spam trap.