Charlie Stross: August 2016 Archives

I'm taking an hour out from polishing and sanding the final draft of "The Delirium Brief", the eighth Laundry Files novel (which is due to hit my editors' inboxes this Wednesday) to just mention something that bugs me which came up in another context this week: interruptions.

Some people thrive on office chatter, conversations, and meetings. In contrast, while I'm working, I can't stand that stuff. My phone ringing is enough to throw me out of my work flow state); never mind a human being poking their head around the door, or incoming email and instant messages. Scheduled conference calls are even worse. Being thrown out of flow is jarring, actually mentally painful: and once the interruption is dealt with it can take me a quarter of an hour to pick up the pieces of whatever I was working on and get back down to it.

What's going on?

Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the Earth. (Note that this could mean anything from Mercury to Neptune in scale: it's very approximate at this stage. Earth-like in exoplanetography does not mean it's a habitable new eden suitable for colonization, it just means "not a gas giant like Jupiter or a tiny dwarf like Pluto".)

So here's a reality check.

As you might have noticed I haven't been updating this blog very often for the past six weeks. This situation is going to continue for at least another three weeks, and I think I owe you an explanation.

I spent the back end of June and the first three weeks of July on the road, which kind of explains the paucity of updates back then. But then I got home and ran straight into two huge jobs: one scheduled, and one completely unplanned. The scheduled job—checking the page proofs (final PDF images of the book, as it will be published) for Empire Games went smoothly and to plan. But the other was an emergency, and it's still ongoing, because ...

... BREXIT broke my next Laundry novel, and I'm having to rewrite it.

(Or: when fiction comes true, part 93.)

I'm used to "Halting State" moments, when something I invented in a work of near-future SF slides disturbingly close to reality a few years later. I'm a lot less used to that happening in my more far-out/speculative fiction, though.

I'd classify the Merchant Princes series (including the forthcoming "Empire Games" trilogy) firmly in that category, even though chunks of it are set in a world so close to ours that even the folks in the headlines are familiar—it invokes parallel universes, after all, some of which exhibit rather less familiar takes on historical progress. One of the things I do in this series is to play with the history of development economics, very much in the non-quantitative SF tradition of asking "what would be the consequences if X happened instead of Y".