December 2016 Archives

This seems to be shaping up to be a future counterfactual in the grand tradition of soc.history.what-if (which only chewed over historical counter-factuals), but what the hell.

The story of 2017 ("Things can only get better!") continues below.

Right, so 2016 has been a total shitebag of a year all round. Looking ahead, what can 2017 possibly do to top 2016 for sheer awfulness? Let me check my crystal ball ...

There appears to be a dedicated Laundry Files fanfic community on Archive Of Our Own. No surprise there. But the most recent poster may be of interest to some. Just saying ...

Empire Games

So, in case you were wondering what the thing I've been working on since late 2012 looks like, there's now a chunk of the first chapter of "Empire Games" up on Tor's website. And the book goes on sale just over a month from now in the US! Alas, we Brits have to wait an extra week—Tor USA and Tor UK may share a name but they're actually different publishers with different shipping schedules.

Preorder (via Amazon.com): US hardcover, US Kindle edition, UK Kindle edition.

(Amazon UK only list the Kindle edition right now because Tor UK decided to switch the paper edition from hardcover to trade paperback, and the change is still propagating through Amazon's database. I'll update with a link to the trade paperback as soon as I get it.)

Empire Games peek!

Normally, I use my blog as a soap-box for spouting complex opinions. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, is very constrained: it's almost impossible to express long, nuanced opinions. But sometimes it's necessary to eat your own dog food. Here's a series of eleven tweets I posted last week, expressing a hypothesis about what's wrong with twitter today.

A short commercial interlude

Just so you know why I've been quiet lately, it's because this book-shaped object is now on its way to the copy editor for publication in late June/early July next year (assuming we survive that long.)

The Delirium Brief (UK) The Delirium Brief (US)

The UK edition is going to be published by Orbit, as usual, and that's their cover on the left (or above, depending on your browser). But in the United States, the series is now moving to Tor.com Publishing; so there's a whole new cover design coming. (To be clear: earlier books will remain with Ace, but "The Delirium Brief" and subsequent novels will come from Tor.)

You can preorder the books via Amazon here: US Hardcover Edition and here: UK Hardcover Edition; ebook editions are also available (US Kindle, UK Kindle not yet listed but available soon).

However, that's not my next book! This is:

Empire Games (UK)

It's coming out in late Jannuary ... and I'm going to have a lot more to say about Empire Games very soon! (In the meantime here are the UK Kindle edition and the US Kindle edition. NB: if you pre-ordered the UK hardcover, you probably want to cancel that order and try again. Tor UK made a late decision to switch the book to trade paperback, so existing pre-orders for the now non-existent UK hardback have probably vanished into limbo: on the bright side, their trade paperback edition should match the Merchant Princes omnibuses in size. The US hardcover is still A Thing.)

And now you know why I've been kind of quiet for the past few months. It's not just the insanely depressing news environment for 2016 (about which I'll have something else to say, when I've finally digested the indigestible implications); I've been gearing up to produce two books a year for the next few years, I've had to rewrite half a Laundry novel (because Brexit ruined the original plot of The Delirium Brief), and as I move to new publishing arrangements I'm busy working on my Next Big Thing, a space opera titled Ghost Engine which is only tenuously related to anything I've written before (hint: Palimpsest, only for intergalactic expansion over the next million years).

Specials

Merchandise

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This page is an archive of entries from December 2016 listed from newest to oldest.

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