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Invisible Sun: signed copies and author events

Invisible Sun comes out next week!

If you want to order signed copies, they're available from Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh: I'll be dropping in some time next week to sign them, and Mike will ship them on or after the official release date. (He's currently only quoting UK postage, but can ship overseas: the combination of Brexit and COVID19 has done a whammy on the post office, however things do appear to be moving—for now.)

I'm also doing a couple of virtual events.

First up, on Tuesday the 28th, is a book launch/talk for Tubby And Coos Book Shop in New Orleans; the event starts at 8pm UK time (2pm local) with streaming via Facebook, YouTube, and Crowdcast.

Next, on Wednesday September the 29th, is the regular Tom Doherty Associates (that's Tor, by any other name) Read The Room webcast, with a panel on fall fantasy/SF launches from Tor authors—of whom I am one! Register at the link above if you want to see us; the event starts at 11pm (UK time) or 6pm (US eastern time).

There isn't going to be an in-person reading/book launch in Edinburgh this time round: it's beginning to turn a wee bit chilly, and I'm not ready to do indoors/in your face events yet. (Maybe next year ...)

69 Comments

1:

Postage overseas (even the little one) has gotten rather stiff, indeed. Plus VAT/handling/stuff on arrival makes a UK paperback pretty much exactly twice the price it goes for at the canonical Dutch online bookshifter.

Still.

Said bookshifter hasn't exactly been reliable with pre-orders, it's nice to have it signed (Sunlit Uplands Edition?), it'll make a nice experiment in how ordering from the post-colossal-act-of-self-harm UK works, and all else aside I'd rather keep Transreal in business than some local Amazon-wannabe.

2:

Transreal is basically one guy named Mike in a shop the size of my living room. Per a publisher's marketign person of my acquaintance 2-3 years ago, he was moving almost as many SF/F books as Waterstones in Edinburgh. (One tiny specialist bookshop can make a hell of a difference.) However I turn 57 next month, Mike is some years older than I am, and I'm not sure how much longer he'll be around -- or whether anyone else will want to take on the business.

3:

Less than a week to go! Woo-hoo!

Tom Gauld has another cartoon that is appropriate.

4:

I’m so looking forward to this one: the whole series has been my favourite of yours. Thank you!

5:

The (?) predecessor (?) of Transreal Walking from the Gassmarket along the West Port is how I found Charlie's books in the first place in Edinburgh in 2003 .....

6:

Same shop, I think: he had to move a few years ago (ended up just up the road). Back in the 90s Mike ran the SF/F bookstore in the basement of Edinburgh's Forbidden Planet, before they decided to stop selling books and focus on toys and comics.

7:

Charlie I bought a paperback copy of Singularity Sky ... & haven't looked back since .....

8:

Charlie Stross @ 6: Same shop, I think: he had to move a few years ago (ended up just up the road). Back in the 90s Mike ran the SF/F bookstore in the basement of Edinburgh's Forbidden Planet, before they decided to stop selling books and focus on toys and comics.

I bought a book from Transreal Fiction in November 2004. I don't know if I had discovered you as an author then or not, but as I walked past I saw a new David Weber Honor Harrington in the window & stopped in to buy that.

I took some photos along Grassmarket; standing on the corner of Grassmarket & Warden's Cl and then at the other end of Cowgatehead looking down Cowgate towards the bridge before I walked up to Greyfriars.

According to Google Maps Streetview there's a Transreal Fiction at 46 Candlemaker Row, and that looks like the store front I remember. Had they moved to that location by November 2004?

I did not take anywhere near as many photos as I should have taken, but I was still new to digital photography and my thinking was still being shaped by film's limits of 24 & 36 exposure rolls.

9:

Transreal was on the Grassmarket (near the Cowgate end) until about a decade(?) ago. Then moved to its current location on Candlemaker Row, just round the corner and a hundred metres up the hill from where it used to be.

10:

Speaking of author related events, I hear that Winchell Chung of Atomic Rockets is currently in the hospital, lucid but not feeling well. Best wishes, etc.

11:

Isn’t New Orleans CET so the event starts at 8pm UK time not 7pm?

12:

I've just ordered my copy!

13:

Tor (based in NYC) told me 7pm, store finally got in touch and said "nope, 8pm your time", so I've updated the OP.

14:

[Chanting]

ONE! MORE! DAY! ONE! MORE! DAY! ONE! MORE! DAY!

15:

Yeah, this is dreadful. I'm having to work on my writing, instead of reading Invisible Sun.

16:

Off topic again, way too early, the Laundry Files just got recommended and Big River linked in the commentary for today's Grrl Power web comic.

I can only see it as a real compliment when another author writes, "This series reminded me what, and I hate to put it this way, but, what good writing is."

17:

Just got my copy, hot off the Innertubes. Will dive in ASAP.

18:

How about the 10th Anniversary version of 'One Day More!' which has a few lines that sorta fit the event like: 'tomorrow we'll discover what our god has in store...'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IddP8AAIGTQ

I just checked the status of my order. They've moved delivery up so it should be here eod today.

19:

Well, I got an email, and went to eBooks.com. And there was Invisible Sun.

As an epub (thank you, Tor). The web site's confused, it seemed to think I needed Adobe Digital Editions, but after I moused around, I got to "download", and it's on my Nook.

Looking forward to it.

20:

Administrative note:

I will start a new blog entry for Q&A (including spoilers) about the entire Empire Games trilogy, but not before the book drops in the UK (i.e. Thursday).

Spoilers in comments on this thread will be deleted.

21:

I started reading... and it's not a spoiler to say that whack helping Elizabeth in the most obvious way in the world, and I hadn't seen that coming.

23:

Nah. It was only a buck :-)

24:

As long as there's no ponds with arms coming out holding a sword....

Oh, seriously, I see Brexit is starting to get real, with fuel shortages.

25:

Just retrieved my hardcover copy of Invisible Sun from the Amazon Hub Locker (UTexas). Excitement!

26:

I enjoyed that reading and Q&A. Looking forward to the book. Soon.

27:

Note: there's only one f in the word "Bahnhof"...

28:

That seems silly. England has thousands and thousands of surplus people, but a very limited supply of mythical beasts. Why, I remember back in the good old days they used to have no problem finding willing* virgins* to feed to the more carnivorous** mythical beasts.

  • technically * even more technically ** I couldn't find mention of what they actually ate, but that was what they were given
29:

Got my electronic copy today. I can't think of a book I've anticipated more. If I had died of COVID before reading it I would have haunted you, Charlie.

30:

Compulsively hitting "Sync" on my Kindle every 10 minutes.

31:

...Aaaaand finished :)

No spoilers here, but I liked it a lot.

32:

It's been a long wait, but most definitely worth it.

33:

Charlie, I got Invisible Sun yesterday morning. It's all your fault that I was up until 02:40 finishing it....

Btw, one thing that seems reasonable to me, that you missed: why always have someone hang onto your back? Wouldn't it be easier, in some cases, to squat, and have someone sit on your lap?

34:

why always have someone hang onto your back? Wouldn't it be easier, in some cases, to squat, and have someone sit on your lap?

I suspect authorial self-insertion: my knees are giving me a lot of grief this decade!

35:

Only people with good strength, very good knees AND very good balance can squat with someone on their lap. Almost always, the next easiest after hanging on to your back is hanging on to your front!

36:

A possible explanation:

The first world walker to carry a passenger took them piggy-back and it worked, so that's how they kept doing it and taught new clan members to do it. They were't big on innovating, just good at copying stuff that they'd seen work.

Also, it's probably more stable than squatting.

Given the electrical isolation explanation they could in theory just wear rubber soled shoes and hold hands, but I'll stop now before I dismantle Charlie's worldbuilding too much!

37:

why always have someone hang onto your back? Wouldn't it be easier, in some cases, to squat, and have someone sit on your lap?

Have you tried it?

My experience, dealing with children, is that that's a great way to fall over…

Seriously, it's a much more unbalanced position than having someone on your back.

38:

Speed of return when exploring that carried over into general transport? Much quicker with a piggyback passenger for them to let go and drop into a standing position, both spin round and the original world walker hop up on the passengers back for a fast return than it is to disentangle, stand up, change position and remount.

39:

Ok, so why not a chair with rubber or plastic wheels (like the one Miriam was seated in in book 1)? Or rubber feet?

40:

Elderly Cynic @ 35: Only people with good strength, very good knees AND very good balance can squat with someone on their lap. Almost always, the next easiest after hanging on to your back is hanging on to your front!

I still have to read the book to get the context, but why not the "fireman's carry"?

41:

Miriam's chair has always bothered me a lot. According to everything the clans knew that chair could not be where it was. And Miriam was apparently quite smart, and quite observant. But somehow she never wondered how her chair ended up in another world.

42:

Make it third, after back and front. You need a strong back to carry someone like that without hurting yourself. But it beats a squat into a cocked hat!

43:

why not the "fireman's carry"?

Which one? Neither of the ones I've been taught match what I see people in the US doing. Mind you, I've seen the bride carry called a fireman's carry so I suspect a lot of the time it's more like "carry I saw a fireman use".

Admittedly much of what I've been taught is in the context of lighter-than-average people, so the idea that a 70kg person is going to lift a 140kg person onto their shoulders then run up a flight of stairs and through a doorway was never going to fly.

The hip carry at least makes it more plausible that you can carry someone heavier than you are, although twice your weight is still pushing it. Shoulder drags are no fun, but make it possible for two or more people to work together (which doesn't work for the clan, obviously).

For stationary lifts the bent-leg hug and straighten is far more effective. I can actually lift twice my own weight, more for a short time, that way. Amusingly I can lift both my girlfriend and her 12 year old child at the same time this way. She can't quite lift us two, but that's partly because her arms aren't long enough to get a good grip.

44:

Some of this stuff I suspect comes down to OGH wanting the plot to be follow-able, and partly to him being fat and old. He's not going about his day picking up strange men and distributing them into ponds, so he doesn't readily imagine other people doing that.

If he did visit a local dojo and spend a bit of time with fit young folk asking them how many people they can lift off the ground for two seconds I suspect he'd get quite different results to those depicted in the book. Not least if the people being lifted with helping, at which point two adults and three decent size backpacks seems like a much more reasonable upper limit (viz, a 70kg adult holding ~200kg off the ground for 2-5 seconds).

If you were doing that twice a day indefinitely I suspect you'd end up deciding that half an hour in the gym doing weights was worth while, and at that point you might want to think about exercises designed to build bone mass and joint resilience rather than purely muscle mass (they are related but not identical). I'm guessing that with regular training 300kg for the average fit young woman and 350kg for the average fit young man would be do-able.

The problem with that from a courier perspective is that it every definitely locks you in to world-walking between flat, equipotential surfaces in controlled locations, because even a 10cm drop is going to result in a tangled pile of bits and possibly injury. But since the clan were doing exactly that 99% of the time it would work.

45:

Remembering OGH from a few years ago at Balticon, I don't think of him as "fat", or old, but given my perspective, most o' you are young whippersnappers.

Clan people did speak occasionally, doing the Postal Service, as having "frames".

46:

Well that was a day happily wasted invested in reading. Thanks!

Two burning questions:

  • Did Angie's hair change color every scene she was in?
  • B. Is there a surreptitious Star Trek: The Next Generation reference to a famous episode in there? While I was reading I kept thinking "We are Locusts of Borg. Resistance is Futile. Prepare to be assimilated!"

    47:

    Enjoyed it a lot. Looking forward to the spoiler thread. (I wonder if Greg T will spot an almost direct quote (perhaps coincidental) near the end of the novel, related to an alleged Richard Courant quote about lack of sanity.)

    48:

    Bill A I'm more likely to echo Grouch Marx: "It's well-known there ain't no Sanity Claus!"

    49:

    Looking forward to reading this, it’s going to jump to the top of the TBR as soon as I get a copy. I have escaped the wilds of rural Aberdeenshire for the day and am en route to Edinburgh, I hope Transreal have copies in stock. Tge weather is proper dreich, looks like ideal conditions to sit in a cosy pub with a good book.

    50:

    Mine is "en route" from Large River as of 01:30 BST today.

    51:

    Transreal have copies in stock, but they're not signed yet. (Not until tomorrow, anyway, because: logstics.)

    52:

    Thanks for the response, I am staying overnight in Edinburgh, my train leaves at 14:28. I hope I can catch a signed copy tomorrow :-)

    53:

    Mine has been "The driver is 3 stops away" for the past hour. He should also be bringing the latest Harry Dresden which was handy as I'd mixed up the UK and US release dates so when I finished rereading Empire Games and Dark State on Tuesday I was able to fit Peace Talks in the gap.

    54:

    I just started it last night (Kindle version). I was worried that, several years having passed since I last read any Merchant Princes novel, that I would be lost on diving into a new one. (I find, to my surprise, that I have the clearest memories of The Family Trade and the other early books in the series. I still carry the image of an modern office chair in a forest as my icon of the story.) Thus I was pleased that it began with character sketches and time line summaries.

    And then, when I began the novel proper, I found I was almost lost, anyway. I had forgotten the cliffhanger that left Elizabeth bopping around a completely unfamiliar Berlin, and the other cliffhanger that resulting from Adam having died. I had forgotten how Rita and Miriam were related (i.e., not that they are mother and daughter, but that Miriam gave Rita up for adoption, so they didn't know each other). So, I'm gradually working my way into it.

    55:

    Charlie @ 51 So those of us getting signed copies won't see them until some time Mon-Wed next week, then? Or something like that...

    56:

    I'm dropping in at Transreal to sign them tomorrow lunchtime, so they should go in the post Friday evening.

    Delays due to Ingrams (wholesaler) taking their own sweet time to send Mike his pre-orders -- blame the trucker shortage/Brexit.

    Also due to me having to schlep about 10kg of additional books a mile and a half uphill in Edinburgh (and I am very unfit after a year and a half of self-isolation and no swimming).

    57:

    My copy arrived whilst I was out at dialysis! :-)

    58:

    Elderly Cynic @ 42: Make it third, after back and front. You need a strong back to carry someone like that without hurting yourself.
    But it beats a squat into a cocked hat!

    Moz @ 43:

    why not the "fireman's carry"?

    Which one? Neither of the ones I've been taught match what I see people in the US doing. Mind you, I've seen the bride carry called a fireman's carry so I suspect a lot of the time it's more like "carry I saw a fireman use".

    This is the one I learned in the Army:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireman's_carry

    Admittedly much of what I've been taught is in the context of lighter-than-average people, so the idea that a 70kg person is going to lift a 140kg person onto their shoulders then run up a flight of stairs and through a doorway was never going to fly.

    In training it was more often an 80kg person carrying a 90kg person & vice versa. The instructors did try to pair up people of similar physique. But even the 50kg person could manage the lift & stagger a step or two. We went through the training as a platoon and I had a platoon that was half female. Every one of them managed it, even when required to lift & carry one of the male soldiers (who were all larger).

    It didn't require running "up a flight of stairs and through a doorway"; you only had to stagger far enough to get them (and yourself) out of the line of fire.

    In the context of world walking (as I remember it from Empire Games and Dark State) the carrier only has to be able to carry them a single step, when the trio of young world walkers who had aligned with Miriam were exploring new worlds - when they found the world with the dome and the door ...

    But they were prepared for that with carrying harnesses & a plan how to jump over and back on the INITIAL entry. In an emergency - where a couple of world walkers might need to walk from 1 to 2 to 3 without advance prep - I think the "fireman's carry" would serve the purpose the same as it serves in combat.

    59:

    Greg Tingey @ 48: Bill A
    I'm more likely to echo Grouch Marx:
    "It's well-known there ain't no Sanity Claus!"

    That was Chico's line.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Sy6oiJbEk

    60:

    Re-read Empire Games, and just restarting Dark State, in preparation for Invisible Sun.

    I do adore Kurt and his tradecraft.

    I am hoping against hope that there’ll be a happy conclusion to the series.

    61:

    The point is that it is much easier to carry a person on your back - BUT it requires the person to be able to hold their legs together and help a little with their arms. The Fireman's Carry is intended to carry people who are unconscious or otherwise incapacitated.

    62:

    I've always thought that the (maybe-fireman's) "carry" is ... You bend down, get the victim supported, grab their forearms over your own shoulders - & stand up, slightly stooped. You now have an overweight, but well-distributed "backpack" consisting of another person. Once, when teaching, I used this method to carry a 15-yrd old pupil, who appeared to have badly injured their ankle .. up & through several sets of doors to the School's office, where they could be sat-down, with leg supported / no weight on that leg, until proper medical help arrived.

    63:

    Elderly Cynic @ 61: The point is that it is much easier to carry a person on your back - BUT it requires the person to be able to hold their legs together and help a little with their arms. The Fireman's Carry is intended to carry people who are unconscious or otherwise incapacitated.

    That was my point. The book is about people who are fighting a war. What do they do if they need to evacuate a wounded comrade? How are they going to piggy-back someone who is NOT able to "hold their legs together and help a little with their arms"?

    "In an emergency - where a couple of world walkers might need to walk from 1 to 2 to 3 without advance prep - I think the "fireman's carry" would serve the purpose the same as it serves in combat."
    64:

    Greg Tingey @ 62: I've always thought that the (maybe-fireman's) "carry" is ...
    You bend down, get the victim supported, grab their forearms over your own shoulders - & stand up, slightly stooped. You now have an overweight, but well-distributed "backpack" consisting of another person.
    Once, when teaching, I used this method to carry a 15-yrd old pupil, who appeared to have badly injured their ankle .. up & through several sets of doors to the School's office, where they could be sat-down, with leg supported / no weight on that leg, until proper medical help arrived.

    The two Wikipedia illustrations show the way I was trained:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Army_FM_3-21.75_3-40A-E.jpg
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Army_FM_3-21.75_3-40F-J.jpg

    I don't think firemen generally use the fireman's carry to carry people up the stairs ... unless they're evacuating someone from a fire in the sub-basement.

    Again I'm thinking of how would world walkers evacuate an incapacitated comrade or respond to an emergency where they needed to rapidly cross multiple time lines without access to the harness system they designed for exploring ... and without the electro-optical world walking systems ~USA developed back in the first series.

    65:

    Gaaah.... at last my copy is FINALLY supposed to be on its way, but fuck me what a saga it was just to get to that point.

    Go to Waterstones... they don't have it. Useless buggers. They had one copy of Dark State and one copy of Atrocity Archive, and that was it for anything by Charlie.

    Go to WH Smiths... they don't have it. Useless buggers. They don't have any of Charlie's books at all.

    But they do have a big rack of Amazon gift cards, to encourage people who can't find what they want to order it from Amazon instead of from the shop they're actually in. And it seemed at the time that that would be an easier option than spending ten minutes saying things like "no, Stross, C.H.A.R.L.E.S. S.T.R.O.S.S." several times while sharing viruses with someone.

    My Amazon account doesn't work. I haven't used it for ages, and now it keeps telling me it wants me to visit a link in an email it's sent me before it'll let me sign in. Only I forgot I was still using the domain of that email address for something I might care about, and let it drop. So the email cannot arrive.

    I go to send an email to Amazon customer support. Only there is no fucking email for Amazon customer support. The only methods provided to contact them require you to log in first, which is no bloody use when it's not being able to log in you need to contact them about. So I end up searching the web and past emails for any vaguely useful looking possibilities and trying those until I find one that doesn't bounce. Still don't know if it actually works of course. Never got a reply.

    Try the Amazon account again at random after a few days not expecting it to work, but am surprised to find it does now. Maybe my email did get through, or maybe someone at Amazon noticed the bounces from the nonexistent domain and had the nous to tell it to stop moaning, but I suspect it was just their computer system getting bored and acting the arse for no reason and then a few days later deciding to stop again.

    I discover that if you can guess someone's Amazon password that's all you need to pinch their account. Having signed in, I can update my registered email address just by typing in the new one and visiting links out of a couple of emails it sends to the new one. It doesn't try to send anything to the old one to make sure someone's not trying to pinch the account, so I don't have to explain to customer service about the domain no longer existing. It doesn't even ask me what the old one was - it tells me what it was, instead.

    At bloody last... so it appears. Put "Invisible Sun" into the search box, go to the listing, select "paperback", try to buy it.

    Only somewhere in the sequence of clicks that follows on the way to the checkout, the bloody weasel bastard remote system signs me up to fucking Amazon Prime. I never told it I wanted that, and it never gave me any opportunity to tell it I didn't. It just happened automatically without my consent, and suddenly I found it was trying to have me check out using Prime and not letting me tell it to fuck off.

    So I abort the checkout and try to cancel the Prime. Can't bloody do it. I discover several possible URLs hunting around the Amazon site, but they all redirect to one or other of two pages neither of which have any "cancel Prime" options even though it claims they do. Every possible path eventually leads to the same place, which is the "Update, Cancel and more..." link in the "Manage" menu. That link is mentioned several times, and even illustrated in screenshots, in Amazon's own help pages, but it doesn't exist any more. It's now changed to "Update your settings" and doesn't lead to anything except "manage your household", and there's nothing there either.

    So to get rid of this thing Amazon forced on me without my consent and don't provide any way to cancel, I have to contact customer service and get them to scrub the mustelline odour off themselves.

    Then at last FINALLY the account is back to normal and I can finish putting the order in. I now have an email sent to the new email address informing me that I have successfully ordered Invisible Sun, without Prime, and it is to be delivered on Monday 11th October. When I could have read it by now if Waterstones and Smiths weren't so useless.

    Although it may be a useful delay, since like LAvery @ 54 I find I can remember the earlier sub-series better than the two books so far in the later one, so it would probably do me some good to read them again in the meantime. Probably because I inhaled the two later books too fast as soon as they arrived...

    Moz @ 41: Miriam's chair was well within the range of sizes of objects that they knew perfectly well one person could carry through and did it themselves all the time, so there's no immediate reason for them to wonder how she got it through. Then they were vastly more interested in its occupant for other reasons and had far too much else to think about to worry about trivia like "why did she carry a chair with her?", and Miriam herself similarly had far too much else to think about on her own account. So I reckon it just rapidly evaporated from everyone's attention and most of them would probably go "what chair?" if you asked them about it now.

    @ 44 "If you were doing that twice a day indefinitely I suspect you'd end up deciding that half an hour in the gym doing weights was worth while"

    If you were doing it twice a day indefinitely you'd end up not really thinking about it before not really as long as you might expect. BTDT. Doing it all the time you adapt naturally, and not pulling yourself apart in the process comes as part of the package. So you can spend your free time in the pub instead (and your money on beer, instead of on renting a few square metres of someone else's floor to do stuff you could do at home for nothing with a knapsack full of bricks in any case.)

    66:

    I discover that if you can guess someone's Amazon password that's all you need to pinch their account.

    Only if they don't use 2FA rather than (weak) username/password security. Their default 2FA mechanism is a text message to an already-confirmed-to-be-yours mobile phone number but they also support authenticator apps.

    Only somewhere in the sequence of clicks that follows on the way to the checkout, the bloody weasel bastard remote system signs me up to fucking Amazon Prime.

    The first three months are free, IIRC, which means free next-day home delivery. I'd wait for the book to arrive before you cancel it. Details are buried in the "Terms & Conditions" web page small print:

    3.3. Cancellation by you and refunds If you signed up for your Prime membership directly through us, you may cancel it any time by visiting Your Account and adjusting your membership settings. You may also contact customer service. If neither you nor anyone authorised by you to use your account has taken advantage of any Prime benefits in the current membership period, we will refund this membership fee in full.

    As for the chair ... consider the Clan has just come through a brutal civil war which killed somewhere in the range 10-50% of actual living world-walkers. It takes a generation to bounce back from that, and there's a loss of institutional knowledge. There's also a strong incentive for the Clan Security people to suppress knowledge of how to world-walk with extra cargo, because they want to keep the family talent a scarce (and lucrative) resource. Remember: they're not trying to maximize payload (like the Commonwealth) because they're stuck so deep in the development trap that they don't realize there's a problem.

    67:

    The chair thing: at some point Miriam had it explained to her that she would be physically carrying stuff through as a courier. And she was told why, and there was some emphasis on the carrying part. Later she was greatly inconvenienced by the need to lift/carry people etc.

    It just seemed weird that at no point did she ever think "you know, somehow the chair I was sitting on came through with me. What's up with that?"

    68:

    For me it just breaks the "Miriam is really smart and comes up with good ideas" thing. I enjoy thinking about this stuff, she apparently does too. She's all logic and problem solving and collect the facts. Like Sherlock Holmes not noticing that the chair isn't in the room any more... if the author mentions that you'd better believe it's important later.

    I mean, it sort of is, but in a minor side note that doesn't affect the storyline.

    69:

    Finally ordered my copy from Waterstones. Paperback only. Pshah. Collect from the bijoux local shop in Didcot.

    For some reason Amazon wouldn't deliver the hardback to the local autoshelf system at the rail station, only the softback, so screw them. How big is the hardback? Is it leaking toxic fumes? Weird.

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    About this Entry

    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on September 24, 2021 4:51 PM.

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