Charlie's Diary

My US publisher, Tor.com, is discounting the most recent Laundry Files/New Management novel, Season of Skulls, to $2.99 in all North American ebook stores this month (December 2024). The price of the ebook will go back up in January.

(It's a promotion to support the release of A Conventional Boy on January 7th 2025.)

This offer does not apply to ebook stores outside the USA and Canada (where the ebook is published by Orbit, not Tor.com), nor does it apply to audiobook or paper editions.

I'm not going to deep-link into Amazon and life's too short to link to every ebook store that sells it (Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes and Noble, etc) but if you go to your regular supplier and search for "Stross Season of Skulls" you should find it.

The subject here needs some unpacking ...

Over the past 20+ years I've published a bunch of novels (over 30 at last count) and a couple of short story collections. In that time I've covered a bunch of tropes, that is, genre-specific shibboleths that authors feel the need to play with. (Vampires? Check. Time police? Check. Interstellar war? Check. Elves? Check. The Singularity? Check. Waking up in the wrong body? Check. And so on.)

Let's briefly split the question in half: science fiction, or fantasy? It's a hair-splitting distinction (and one mostly dictated by reader preferences and marketing requirements) but let's just call science fiction fiction that needs to stay within bullshitting distance of reality, while fantasy can wave a magic wand and thereby shred the rule book of the physical sciences.

There are a bunch of science-fictional ideas I haven't tacked because they don't make sense to me. I haven't done a full on zombie rising, although I've considered it (detailed explanation here): the Residual Human Resources in the Laundry Files are the closest I've gone. Psionics and telepathy and psychic powers in general were pretty thoroughly debunked by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit's research, so I don't go there outside of fantasy. Alien life is another matter and one that falls on the science fictional side of the genre fence, but the idea of tool-using, communicative aliens that can survive in a human-compatible biosphere is one I find difficult to swallow (hint: microbiology and immunology militate against it--even H. G. Wells in 1895 got that right).

Anyway.

I'm nearing the end of the Laundry Files, and have finished with the Merchant Princes. So I'm trying to figure out if there's anything I haven't done in terms of genre tropes that I should add to my to-do list for the next decade.

Discuss?

Greetings from the New Management! I'm currently up to my elbows in The Regicide Report (coming to you in 2026). In the meantime, I wrote a bundle of world building notes that won't ever make it into a novel because they're far too policy-oriented (translation: deathly boring to normal readers). After all, it's a civil service/politics satire series, and to give it some substance I had to work out what the politics would be.

In particular, I sat down a while ago (before the Labour election victory in May) to work out what the New Management's version of "Project 2025" might look like, except the in-universe dateline is 2015. Here are my notes: make of them what you will, and feel free to contribute your own suggestions.

So, my next novel, A Conventional Boy, is coming out in two months time. (The publication date is January 7th; in the USA it's going to be published by Tor.com, and in the UK, EU, Australia, and NZ it'll be coming from Orbit.)

In the 1980s evangelicals fomented a moral panic around Dungeons and Dragons, claiming it was corrupting children and leading them onto a slippery slope to Satanism. But this is the world of the Laundry, and Lovecraftian Elder Gods are very real. When the Laundry collided with Dungeons and Dragons, Mistakes were Made (and swept under the rug, in true bureaucratic fashion). Thirty five years later one of those mistakes, named Derek Reilly, has been thoroughly institutionalized in Camp Sunshine, a centre for deprogramming cultists. Everyone takes him for granted: everyone's forgotten him. But Derek hasn't forgotten the outside world. And when he hears about a gaming convention that's coming to the nearest town, he finally has a reason to activate his foolproof escape plan—he's going to go to his first ever con.

Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy ...

This is Derek the DM's long-overdue origin story (in the works since 2009). Originally it was going to be a novelette (an overgrown short story) but it just kept growing and growing and growing until it turned into a novel in its own right. If you've ever wondered what would happen if I wrote a Laundry Files LitRPG/progression fantasy? This is for you: it's published here for the first time, along with two other Laundry Files novelettes (the Hugo-shortlisted Overtime, and Dowm on the Farm), and an afterword about the history of the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic.

Purely by coincidence this very week the Satanic D&D Panic is back in the news in the UK: the D&D stuff is about five paragraphs down in this news item. I wish real life would stop stealing the most dystopian pieces of my work! But in the meantime, please buy my book? I mean, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review: "This is urban fantasy with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and it reads a bit like Terry Pratchett trying his hand at Lovecraftian horror," so it can't be that bad!

Here's a universal ebook link (to all US ebook stores that list it for sale).

(Small print: The universal link, via Books2Read.com, is experimental and sometimes breaks. It's particularly iffy if the book is published with different ISBNs in different markets, like A Conventional Boy. If it doesn't work for you, you can search your preferred online bookstore for "Stross Conventional Boy" to find it: I'll try and update later. (Obviously I'm trying to stop prioritizing Amazon over other bookshops.)

So, there was an election yesterday in the United States. (This is not that blog entry or discussion thread: that'll come later, when I've got my thoughts in order and gotten tired of swearing.)

Much smaller things also happened yesterday. In particular, I had a first appointment with my new ophthalmologist, who has taken over the practice from my previous ophthalmologists (who retired). I had about a six week wait for this session, because they're moving to an entirely new IT system and in addition to getting up to speed with her patients needs she used the session to move all the old notes into the new set-up (and confirm that they were correct).

I thought there'd been a change in my vision, and that I'd need new lenses, and I was half-right: there has indeed been a change, but I don't need new glasses as much as I need surgery, because I'm developing cataracts in both eyes.

I am going away for the next 10 days, so updates will be infrequent ...

I'm thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit, "the Earth's too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket", and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed in his Mars trilogy in the 1980s.

And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?

This is a brain dump about a gadget I acquired recently—a Japanese grey-market import Pomera DM250—and it's of limited interest so I wouldn't normally write about it here, except the manufacturer has pre-announced a kickstarter campaign, coming in the next couple of months, to sell a US/English version of the machine. I still have the occasional vestigial tech journalist itch, even though it's been nearly 20 years since I stopped doing that for a living, so you can take this as me scratching that itch.

(This essay is late because I came home from worldcon with a wonderful prize--COVID19. It was a very mild dose and I'm better now but it put everything on hold for about a week.)

In the past I've blogged about how difficult it is to write the near future, ten years out (I used to have a working recipe); and then more recently about how the error bars on such predictions are getting longer: and most recently about how bad fifties SF is in a feedback loop with the real world, delivering dystopian outcomes through the medium of deeply superficial billionaires and their pet projects. But is that all that's making the near future hard to write about? What if it isn't just the postulated near future, but the readers themselves who I'm writing for, that are changing?

This year's World Science Fiction convention is taking place at the Scottish Events Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, from August 8th to August 12th (next month).

You will be unsurprised to know that, unless I come down with COVID19 in the next week, I'm going to be there. I'm also going to be appearing on a few panels and other events during the convention, which I'm listing below the cut.

(The names after the time identify the function space in the SEC where the events are held. An (M) in brackets after a particpant's name indicates the person moderating the discussion.)

Almost exactly six months ago I blogged in The Coming Storm about how 2024 looked like a "somewhat disruptive" year. Hoo, boy!

Let's recap point by point from that piece.

(This is for discussion of BRITISH politics. Deviations onto American politics will be deleted without warning.)

There is a general election coming tomorrow (Thursday July 4th). It looks likely to be a Conservative wipe-out—the worst defeat for the Tories since 1945. Pre-election polling shows large defections from the Conservative right to Reform UK, the latest reincarnation of Nigel Farage's fascist-adjacent UKIP. Reform UK won't get many (if any) seats in parliament but they are likely to cost the Conservatives a lot of votes, while Labour has persistently shown a lead of 20-25% in polling for the past year.

There's a well-known issue in British politics of "bashful Conservative" voters, who say they'll vote for someone else but who then revert to tribal loyalty on the day of the election. But even assuming everyone who says they're defecting to Reform but they turn out for the Conservatives on the day, there's likely to be a Labour government by next Monday.

What happens next?

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

(I am still elbow-deep in the guts of The Regicide Report, hence paucity of recent blog entries.)

I must admit that I used to be a big fan of conspiracy theories—or applied psychoceramics, as we called it back in the nineties—but the rise of social media has lifted the carpet to reveal a mass of wriggly creepy-crawlies under the rug, some of which are very not nice at all: as witness the rise of QAnon (which is basically the old anti-semitic Blood Libel in a new coat of paint), the enthusiastic adoption of a bunch of really nasty racist conspiracy theories by the far right (who use them to market Nazism via the internet), and so on.

It's quite apparent that right now we're seeing the build-out of a whole new communications technology that hasn't quite hit the public eye yet—ubiquitous satellite broadband and telephony. This is still in the very early stages. Right now my iPhone can in principle send a very limited SOS message to emergency services via satellite if I'm outside of cell service. The next generation of phones will do better, and the days of needing a dedicated satellite phone the size of a brick are numbered.

But this technology is dependent on infrastructure, and the infrastructure in question requires vast numbers of what are essentially cellphone towers in orbit. According to some announced plans, SpaceX's Starlink constellation will ultimately require as many as 45,000 satellites in orbit to provide global service. As we've seen from its military uses in the Ukraine war, even with the need for a bulky base station Starlink has strategic implications: ubiquitous orbital cellphone service (even if its limited by contention ratios) is even more significant. China is planning its own low-orbit comsat constellation, and doubtless there will be others: as with GPS, we now have multiple nations or supranational blocs like the EU running satellite fleets to provide a secure service.