Jim Baen's Universe

Authors | Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross knew he wanted to be a writer from the age of six, or thereabouts, but didn't really get started until his early teens (when his sister loaned him a manual typewriter around the time he was getting heavily into Dungeons and Dragons); the results were unexpected, and he's been trying to bury them ever since. He made his first commercial for-money sale to Interzone in 1986, and sold about a dozen stories elsewhere throughout the late 1980's and early 1990's before a dip in his writing career. He began writing fiction in earnest again in 1998, and that's probably why you're reading this FAQ.

Along the way to his current occupation, he qualified as a Pharmacist. (This is what you get for listening to people who tell you "but you can't earn a living as a writer -- get a career first!") He figured out it was a bad idea the second time the local police staked his shop out for an armed robbery -- he's a slow learner. Sick at heart from drugging people and dodging SWAT teams and gangsters -- it's hard to do that when you're wearing a lab coat -- he returned to university and did a postgraduate degree in computer science, the one technical field he was able to get obsessive about. He got sucked into the web and dot-com industry, by way of the software business, ending up as a contractor and then lead programmer at a successful Scottish dot-com start-up. But all good things come to an end, and the bottom dropped out of the market just as he was in the process of moving jobs.

Luckily he was already writing the Linux column for Computer Shopper, so by a hop, a skip and a jump he managed to turn this into an exciting full time career as a freelance journalist specialising in Linux and free software, with a helping of internet civil liberties on the side. This, it turns out, was a perfect environment for spending more time writing fiction -- and fiction is now what he spends the majority of his time writing.

Visit Web Page at: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/ or http://www.accelerando.org/