Escape Plans, by Charles Stross

(View entire post here)

This week, I'm running away from Edinburgh -- to Berlin.

Edinburgh (where I live) is a very odd city. Like Rome, it's built on seven hills; the basalt remains of an extinct volcano, and one that was scoured by an ice sheet just 12,000 years ago, so that the city is dominated by a collection of crags and cliffs. It's been inhabited since the early iron age, but the modern city dates to the middle ages, and has been shaped by war and geography. You can find the first ten and twelve story high apartment blocks in the world here, built in the middle ages to cram bodies inside the city walls. (Imagine living in a tenth story apartment with no elevators and no plumbing or water supplies!) There are roads that pass over and under each other, streets on bridges with buildings to either side, streets in tunnels, secret histories and royal societies. There's nothing quite like Edinburgh, and it's a wonderful place to live and write ... until the summer, when the Mimes arrive.

The Mimes -- in white-face, pretending to be statues, or delivering very dodgy weather forecasts via sign language -- are one of the first harbingers of the Festival. During the Edinburgh International Festival (one of the largest performing arts binges in the world) the entire city goes a little bit mad. Everywhere stays open a couple of hours longer, and the pubs and clubs (which normally open until after midnight) frequently fail to eject their clientelle until dawn. There's a performance in every basement, stand up comedy on every street corner, the population triples, and you can't go out of your front door to buy a newspaper without tripping over a street theatre troupe from Prague or a gaggle of lost tourists from New York.

And just as you think it can get no worse, behind the plague of mimes (themselves as welcome as a swarm of wasps) comes a marching droning phalanx of bagpipers. Bagpipers are a particularly Scottish disease, and at this point I'm going to betray my non-native roots be denouncing them as an unmitigated nuisance. A set of pipes at ten metres is loud enough to drown out a jet engine; you can hear them half a kilometre away. To make matters worse, in the hands of an amateur they're approximately as euphonious as a car crash. And the amateurs swarm in high summer, squeaking and farting and roaring around the city like yellowjackets the size of airliners; they've gotten so bad of late that the city council has taken out a legal injunction banning them from the Royal Mile (the picturesque high street at the heart of the city, that links the royal Holyrood Palace to the still active army garrison ensconced in Edinburgh Castle); but that's achieved is to displace the buzzing bag-buggerers to the edges of the city centre.

Charles Stross, Saturn's Children, android, future, femmebot, science fiction, Penguin Books, books