Excellent. Hopefully I can make Iorich and the next Dresden Files (Don't judge me!) novel last until at least june.

The Dresden Files are one of my guilty pleasures, Ben. (Although I detect a whiff of phoning 'em in, lately -- and Inadequate Research Syndrome in the most recent one.)

Well, enjoy Dresden: I knew I did the last time I was there. And thanks for the news about the Fuller Memorandum. After laughing out loud thorugh the first two Laundry books I am really looking forward to it.

Woot! More Laundry! Thank you inspiration fairy for screwing with Charlie's production schedule!

The Fuller Memorandum: hooray!

Dresden: apart of course from the amazing museums and buildings, you can get killer kebabs there. Try one with added halloumi cheese. Yes, they've actually found a way to make a kebab even more fatty. And gorgeous.

Let us know as soon as The Fuller Memorandum is available for pre-order, because I've been salivating over it since you mentioned the starting premise. (That Fuller??? Oh yeah.)

A nice hardback edition to match my Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue would be really really nice, but I know you have no control over that.

Clifton: Golden Gryphon won't be publishing FULLER MEMORANDUM. Instead, it'sd going to Ace, and while they'll be publishing a hardcover, it'll be the same size as my other Ace hardbacks (i.e. taller and somewhat different in design from the GG ones.)

By the way? I'm in a hotel room with wifi, but a jumped-up PDA and a folding keyboard rather than a laptop. So I'm not up to blogging or responding at length to comments while I'm here; I'll play catch-up on Tuesday when I'm home again.

Been hearing some fascinating tales about the parallel evolution of SF fandom in the GDR -- as opposed to West Germany -- prior to 1989. (Science fiction: deeply subversive degenerate counter-revolutionary literature, and wildly popular among the students at the technical institutes ... hence not popular with certain Party officials. With the result that East German SF fandom is atomized and local, while West German fandom is centralized and organized ... hopefully I'll have something interesting to blog about when I get back to a real keyboard!)

Charlie@8, Please do and I am not surprised that SF would be seen as subversive in the GDR. If a writer can't publicly criticize the regime, it still may be possible to criticize a regime on some planet which just happens to have some properties in common. The powers in charge of course recognize this so a writer would still have to be careful as shown by the example of Zamyatin in the 1920's.

Re: "The Fuller Memorandum".

Huzzah!

David @8: In the 90s we had an influx of Eastern European fans turning up at British conventions. Some of them had been in the publishing business in the old East, writing and editing under state control. One of them (I think he was Czech) was on a program panel explaining how the censorship system actually worked.

He had started out when he was young, writing speculative fiction he knew he couldn't get published through the regular markets. He circulated typed manuscripts around circles of friends, like writer's crit circles in the West; this wasn't as dangerous as it might appear as the censorship only really cut in when people tried to get stuff published for wide distribution and the state controlled the publishing houses. He was mentored by existing writers and editors and after rewriting his work appropriately he started to get recommended to publishers and finally got stuff published. As an established writer he got more and more work editing and eventually he ended up mentoring new writers himself. It was only much later he realised that he had taught the newer writers how to avoid the censorship in the same way he had been taught, writing in such a way that the authorities didn't actually have to censor their work at all since they effectively censored it themselves.

David @8: what Robert says at 11 is part of the story.

Another part: the problem with SF in the GDR wasn't the writers trying to subvert the political system (because mostly they weren't) -- it was Fandom. There were relatively few SF titles with mainstream publication, and lots of demand, so readers got together to swap books and chat, as they do everywhere. The problem was that in the GDR, any social group that wasn't directly established by the Party was seen as a potential rival by the Party. The Party wasn't just about politics as we understand it in the west -- the Party was there to organize every aspect of public life, from pre-school play groups to funerals. (About the only thing they kept their hands off -- mostly -- in the GDR was the Church ... and if you were involved in the Church, you were effectively a follower of a rival religion, and likely to be frozen out of decent jobs and higher education.) Party bureaucrats didn't read or understand SF (any more than they understood rock'n'roll), so they viewed it with suspicion (because anything they didn't understand might be a threat).

There's an exact behavioural parallel you may be more familiar with: western politicians in the 1990s panicking over this Internet thing. They didn't understand or want it, so they assumed it must be some kind of threat. The difference was that in the GDR, the Party had no natural competitors -- so no selection process for rising politicians who understood this funky new stuff (be it modern music or SF or the internet). Politics, pickled in aspic ...

The famous German Heinrich Heine once (before the specter of a united Germany haunted the established European Empires) put it that way:

The German censors ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] --- idiots --- [censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored] ---[censored]

Let's put it that way, there was a lot to be read between the lines. And one of the things that the censors kept worrying about, was that sometimes people would laugh in the cinema at the wrong places. This was then obviously a mistake by the director. Of course he should have overlaid the scene with an obvious joke, such that the viewers would be able to laugh about the wrong thing at the right place.

Next July? Why does it take so long? They short of carbon paper or something?

Dirk: because my publishers run on a production schedule that spit out roughly 200 books a year, and everything moves in lockstep at the pace of the slowest item in the queue (dictated by little things like, oh, allowing contingency time for the guys who still write with hand-whittled quill pens and home-made ink). Put it another way: they could rush a book into print in about eight weeks (and there's a lot of work involved) but only if they were willing to shunt everything else out into a siding to make way for the express train. I was scheduled years in advance to hand in a novel at a certain time for publication in July 2010, and that's the slot FULLER MEMORANDUM is plugged into. (I'm now working on the 2011 novel ... a sequel, of sorts, to HALTING STATE.)

Since the thread has veered off into a discussion of your upcoming releases, when is the next installment of the Merchant Princes set to be released?

Congraulations on winning in the Best Foreign Novel category.

@15: You'd think there was a better way to do it. Something with more flexible publication schedules, at least. I suppose as long as writers are writers and we're not all part of the Internet anyways it's not really possible, though.

Robert @11: This, of course, is the way most sophisticated censorship occurs. Including ours. Chomsky famously had a run-in with Andrew Marr where he pointed out to Marr the self-censorship innate in being a trainee journalist in, lets say, the BBC, where one learns to tone down any 'maverick' political or social opinions in favour of the status quo, as otherwise your editor will consider you 'flaky' or unreliable. He (or she) of course had his writing style shaped by a similar mentor when he was junior staff. Everyone higher is climbing the greasy pole, with a knighthood or some other bauble potentially at offer for the most 'reliable' at the end of it all.

Try searching Youtube for a more lucid exposition such as will not fit in this comment...

Awesome, always ready to jump in to more non-euclidean twists and turns with the Laundry :)

Sort of semi-related; playing through [Prototype] on the Xbox, it had a definite wheels-within-wheels black ops vs man-not-meant-to-ken feel about it, and with a bit of Googling, I find Dennis Detwiller of Delta Green fame was a senior designer on the game... A shoggoth with a hoodie is a pretty much must-buy on my list ;)

beowulf888: "The Trade of Queens" is due out from Tor in March/April next year. It's in the production pipeline, currently waiting for UPS to get it between stations (they helpfully tried to deliver the copy-edited manuscript for my eyeball check around the time I was checking in for the flight home from Dresden).

truth is life @18: in general, small presses are much more flexible. The quid pro quo is they aren't juggling zillions of authors at the same time, and they can't devote the same resources to marketing the books.

PS: Yes, I'm baaaaaaack. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Sonja Rae Fritzsche http://titan.iwu.edu/~sfritzsc/cv.html has done first-rate research into the bizarro world of Science Fiction publishing in Cold War East Germany.

For instance:

(Book) Science Fiction Literature in East Germany. DDR Studien/East German Studies Series. Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang, September 2006.

(Articles) "Utopia, Dystopia, and Ostalgia: The Pre- and Post Unification Visions of East German Science Fiction Writer Alexander Kröger." Journal of Utopian Studies 17.3 (Winter 2006): 441-464.

"Reading Ursula Le Guin in East Germany." Extrapolation 47.3 (2006): 471-487.

Asimov and Le Guin were 2 of the 3 first American authors whose science fiction was translated into German, with special foreword and afterword, for East German publication. The two were politically vetted.

Asimov was allowed as he was determined to be "a bourgois secular humanist."

Le Guin was a trickier case. They liked her attack on Capitalism in "The Dispossessed" but denigrated her for failing to point out that Communism was objectively superior to the false dichotomy between Capitalism and Anarchism.

When Sonja Rae Fritzsche gave a talk at the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association) annual meeting about 4? years ago in Las Vegas, Ursula Le Guin was in the audience. I questioned Dr. Fritzsche, by explaining the Asimov/Vonnegut role in the American Humanist Association.

Le Guin now entered the discourse, although usually she listened without comment to papers on her writings. She said approximately:

"Are you now or have you ever been a Secular Humanist? Well, I am not in the American Humanist Association, and didn't know that Asimov was President."

I like to slightly fictionalize this by paraphrasing her comment as: "I am not now, nor have ever been..."

Charlie @2: I love the Dresden files too. I also found the most recent book a bit strange on the first read. However I reread all the books from the beginning (yay for unemployment...) and thought that the recent one is one of the weakest. I also noticed that there's an awful lot of foreshadowing in the earlier parts of the series but apparently much less later on.

I think the latest book is 'filler' between plot cycles, not that it's bad but it has some weaknesses that could be explained by it being an in between or lead up story.

I'd like to see the laundry novels turn into as long a series... hint!

Robin @23: I'm hoping to pitch the fourth Laundry novel at my publishers in about six months' time. It all depends how #3 pans out -- if it does well, #4 and #5 will get the green light in due course.