COVID-19 Kills a Charles Stross Novel

It's hard to be a science fiction writer these days, especially if you want to write a near-future novel. SF author, Charles Stross, had a really good idea for the third book in his near-future Scottish police procedural series (the first two were Haltin State and Rule 34). It would have started with a viral zombie plague that could be cured by a deep brain implant, but the Mafia hack the implants ...

It's never going to get written, as Stross explains in this somewhat anguished blog post.

I was planning a pandemic zombie disaster novel in which people behaved like human beings, rather than psychotic, heavily armed doomsday preppers. My zombie plague differs from most: it's a viral encephalitis, possibly an odd strain of influenza, which leaves a percentage of its victims with Cotard's Delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome. The affected person holds a delusional belief that they're dead, or putrefying, or don't exist, or they're in hell. (It's associated with parietal lobe lesions and can also be induced by some drug metabolites: as a consequence of viral encephalitis it would be weird, but possibly no weirder than Encephalitis lethargica.) How does a society deal with a pandemic that leaves 1% of the population permanently convinced that they're dead? Well ...

I had a plot all worked out. TLDR: deep brain stimulation via implant. Rapidly leading to rental plans—because in our grim meathook privatised-medicine future the medical devices company who are first-to-market realize that charging people a monthly plan to feel like they're alive is a good revenue stream—but this is followed by hackers cracking the DRM on the cryptocoin-funded brain implants. The device manufacturer goes bankrupt, and their intellectual property rights are bought out by a Mafia-like operation who employ stringers to go around uploading malware to the implants of zombies who've stopped paying the rent, permanently bricking them. Our protagonist is a zombie detective: the actual story opens when a murder victim walks into a police station to complain that they've been killed.

And then, as he says, COVID-19 came along.

He's included what would have been the first thousand words or so of the novel at the end of the blog post, if you want to see what might have been.