I’m part of the committee running HalCon next month in Omiya just North of Tokyo. It’s a (hopefully annual) bi-lingual Japanese/English SF convention. We’ve got two guests this year, Charlie Stross from the UK and Ooishi Masaru from Japan. As part of our con online presence we have a blog on which I posted the following piece about Charlie Stross, which I thought might interest people here as well.

Charlie’s Just This Guy I Know

I can’t remember the first time I met Charlie. I think it was at a party in Leeds at the home of mutual friend Steve Glover. I already knew Charlie by the time he, Steve and I drove down from Leeds to Birmingham for the evening to hear David  Brin speak at the Birmingham SF group. On the way back, as we were on an unlit but major road, Charlie pointed out that he’d had a detached retina re-attached recently and had very limited night vision.
At that point, Charlie was just one of the group of fans I knew. He was a qualified pharmacist with an interest in computers and shortly after that he took a Masters conversion course in computing at Bradford University. Back then he’d sold a story, or maybe two, to Interzone (a British SF magazine) and he had two or three novels in various stages of development. He was an interesting guy with a broad range of interests, quite a few of which overlapped with mine (computers, networking, the intersection of the technical with the social).
Over the years as he and I moved around the UK a bit we kept in touch and met up at conventions, where we’d talk about his latest ideas for novels and short stories. He had a few written-but-not-edited novels around in the late nineties when he’d sold a few more short stories but not yet got a book contract. He did offer me an electronic copy to read, but I always had too much on my “to-read” pile anyway and reading on-screen back then was a lot of hassle even though I had a decent laptop. I still don’t read fiction onscreen much, possibly because I read so much work stuff on-screen.
In the early noughties (is that what we’re calling the decade this hour?) Charlie had moved to Edinburgh from London and I’d moved to Reading from St Andrews. We still met up at conventions around the UK though. I remember Charlie bouncing at me at one of those conventions that he’d finally got a book contract (for what was eventually titled Singularity Sky, though that wasn’t the working title). Not long after, his short story Lobsters (eventually revised to become the first section of the novel Accelerando) was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Charlie seemed to be “making it” as a writer and not long after that gave up the day job to become a full time writer.
I didn’t read his first book when it came out and I rarely read short stories except in collections and very occasionally in anthologies. Further Hugo nominations followed annually in 2003 (Novelette), 2004 (Novel and Novelette), and in 2005 with nominations in the Novella and Novel category he finally won for the Novella. In fact, he’s been on the Hugo ballot every year from 2002-2009 (from 2004-2009 in the novel category – the “big one” according to some folks). In 2006, despite the Hugo nominations, I still hadn’t read any of his books. After all, Charlie was “just this guy I know”. Also, I’d heard the developing ideas of many of his books in long conversations at conventions and on his blog. I was visiting Edinburgh for a computer law conference and got together with Charlie and his wife for dinner and drinking at the pub (well, they were drinking, I was just there for the company). I mentioned that I probably should get around to reading some of his work at some point so between the restaurant and the pub Charlie and I diverted to his house where he gifted me with a copy of everything to date. Thus guilted into reading them I was seriously impressed. Not only were his ideas good (I knew that from the conversations) but his writing was good as well. Now, he’ll admit himself that he’s not a stylist along the lines of Gene Wolfe or Roger Zelazny (to name two of my favourite writers with very different but very distinctive highly stylistic writing) but it gets the job done, which is to entertain, inform and intrigue. I’ve repaid his generosity in giving the first set of books by buying everything since.
At Worldcon last year in Montreal, I met Charlie in the hallway between program items and we walked and talked, as we have done many times before at conventions. This time, though, it had changed. Every 50 yards or so we’d be stopped by someone who wanted to compliment Charlie on his work. Charlie confided that if we’d not been obviously deep in conversation that this would have been every 15 yards instead of every 50. It was clear that he’d reached a particular level of fame, which was somewhat gratifying, although he wasn’t entirely sure he liked some aspects of it, and probably wouldn’t be happy to reach the heights scaled by Neil Gaiman (GoH at that convention, a “superstar” in fandom and a “star” outside it). Charlie also liked the fact that I treated him the same as always: “just this guy I know”. Well, a bit more than that. Charlie’s a friend and I hope will remain so for many years to come. I’m really pleased that we were able to invite him to be one of the guests at the first HalCon. The Japanese influences on Charlie’s work are fairly obvious and he fell in love with the country when visiting during the 2007 Worldcon in Yokohama (see his traveblog) so he’s an appropriate guest for a bi-lingual Japanese/English SF convention. Plus, since I just moved to Tokyo myself, it’ll be nice to see my friend on my new home ground.