Literary references

[daibhidc]

It's always nice to realise the people whose books you read also read the other people whose books you read.

Halting State by Charles Stross is a technothriller set in 2020s Edinburgh, and various virtual locations, in a word where everyone wears VR glasses that overlay Google Maps and various other computer inputs over their field of vision.

This includes MMORPGs, with passers-by becoming NPCs, and other players being flagged as such. And at one point...

You hop the bus to Drum Bae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past omniously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves and humans from various periods of HistoryLand™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players' heads, though - Discworld™ isn't too popular amongst the nine-til-five set.

(Double bonus points to Mr Stross for remembering the Disc has "dwarfs", not "dwarves".)

Comments

[gmh.livejournal.com]

*g* - I would point you to the datum that Charlie was the first person on AFP to use footnotes (on 11/08/92).

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

Aha. It's been a long time since I read the Timeline, and back then the name passed me by. (Although I *do* recall him writing a peice in Ansible in the late nineties that I enjoyed. "Monty Egen's Dead Singularity Sketch", if memory serves.)