So what's left to say ...?

Forward to 1997. I'd read a short story by Bruce Sterling, The Unthinkable. It's a short throw-away in which a pair of arms negotiators are reminiscing about how they agreed to back away from the precipice and cut the Cold War horror arsenals by ditching the ICBMs and Hydrogen bombs chained Lovecraftian horrors ... and I suddenly realised what my analyst was looking at. I'd also been re-reading "At The Mountains of Madness" and decided, in classic naive non-metaphorical science fictional mode (where a rocket ship is just a rocket ship every time) to tackle the alienation and ennui engendered by constant exposure to the threat of annihilation, and also to make the Mythos frightening again by linking Lovecraft's horrors (by then reduced to the stuff of silly jokes and plush bedroom slippers) to a terrifying reality that had only receded into the background in the past few years.

The result was a story titled "A Colder War". I sold it, and it garnered quite a bit of attention—I get a reprint request pretty much every year.

Fast-forward to 1999. I'd finished working on "Festival of Fools" (aka "Singularity Sky") and it was on its way to an editor's in-tray. I'd written "Lobsters" and it was doing the rounds ("meritless, vapid, style-obsessed trash" said the rejection letter from the first editor I sent it to, he who had just bought "A Colder War": there's no accounting for taste). I needed a novel-length project and I had bits of the wreckage of "The Harmony Burn" to cannibalize (this was the unpublishable novel from 1994-96—unpublishable for structural/characterisation reasons, not because publishers are stupid). Secret government agencies dealing with the suppression of hard take-off singularities seemed a bit dubious to me by then, but I'd just sold "A Colder War" and, while that particular story was far too bleak to work with, the idea of rebooting the Lovecraftian/spy nexus appealed. So I began writing. And the first thing I came up with was Bob, mentally swearing at his boss as the rain trickles down the back of his neck and he tries to break into an office I used to work at in Watford to steal a deadly thesis.

At which point everything was hopelessly cross-infected by my memories of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy inside that particular company's technical publications department. And then I had Bob go back to work the next day in a grim little civil service office maze not unlike to one I'd spent three months working in as a contractor in 1996. Both jobs were so soul-destroying that you had to view them as black farce in order to work there: the software company, for example, was the one where whenever senior executives came to visit our managers would trawl the cubicle farm first thing in the morning to take down all the Dilbert cartoons pinned to the walls.

I was working in a dotcom startup at the time, and spending too much time reading Slashdot. And it occurred to me that the staid British civil service would have serious indigestion if it tried to swallow a Slashdot-era dotcom geek. But what if the bureaucracy in question wasn't allowed to fire him? There's scope for comedy there, the comedy of dissonance: round peg in a square hole, and so on.

So there you've got the ingredients. Lovecraftian horror; the secret agency dedicated to protecting us from the scum of the multiverse: the protagonist (Bob, a put-upon hacker who is an utterly inappropriate hire but who can't be gotten rid of): the cold war ambiance: the dark humour. I probably ought to mention the novels of Len Deighton, which I was re-reading at the time—one of the most significant of the British cold war thriller writers.

The whole thing snowballed into a short novel. In early 2001 I sold first serial rights to the same small Scottish magazine who'd published "A Colder War" and "Antibodies"; it ran in Spectrum SF issues 7-10 after John Christopher's last novel and was read by maybe a thousand people. (Thereafter, Spectrum SF ceased publication. I like to think I didn't kill it.) This was my first published novel, and I sold it myself; my agent's first reaction when I sent it to her was, "this is great fun but it'll be impossible to sell: it's far too cross-genre". She was, in fact, quite correct ... for a non-name author in 2001.

The rest is history, although it's a rather weird history: at some point I'm going to have to write down the tortured publication track of the first four Laundry novels just to provide some context, just to show that rules are for breaking. This series broke all the rules of publishing and somehow prospered, never mind merely surviving—even though the dice were stacked against it from the beginning.

But that's enough for now. (I've just finished the first draft of a new Laundry novella, set between "The Jennifer Morgue" and "The Fuller Memorandum", and my hands are too sore to continue typing!)

But as the story in question is set early-ish in the Laundry Files continuity (between "The Jennifer Morgue" and "The Fuller Memorandum"), I think it will make perfect sense if I blog about the gestation and germination of "The Atrocity Archive(s)" next. So that's on my to-do list — just as soon as I finish this novella (hopefully by the end of the week).

(If you have any questions about TAA, feel free to ask them here.)

What I'm going to add here is merely the history of the project. Which, with 20/20 hindsight, was a nightmarish mire of despair ...

What do you do when you have a crisis of confidence in what you've seen as your vocation (write science fiction) since age 15? You either give up completely, or you double-down.

Contemplating the smoking wreckage of my first decade of writing and selling SF, I concluded that I was Doing It Wrong. I'd been selling short stories to British magazines and anthologies, hoping to build a name and visibility and acquire an agent and a publisher for the novel manuscripts I was producing at a rate of, roughly, three a decade. But the British short fiction market was ... well, nobody paid much attention to it. And my experiences with British literary agents were, shall we say, not terribly good. (1996 was the year my second agent fired me.) So: if one wants to write SF and do nothing else, it follows that one needs to be successful enough to earn a living at it, which means cracking the North American market, because as Willie Sutton said when a journalist asked him why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is". (Not that there's much money in SF publishing anywhere, but there are more readers in the 350-million strong market of the USA and Canada than in the 60-million strong market that is the UK.)

So, I worked up a task list. Item: sell stories to the Big Three magazines (Asimov's SF magazine, Analog, F&SF). Ideally get shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula. (Yeah, right. As if that'll ever happen.) Write novels. Each novel must be #1 in a series in a different sub-genre, but don't write #2 next — go do something different while #1 is slumbering in a cobweb-afflicted slushpile.

(Digression time: Received wisdom in the 1980s was that unsolicited novels would be glanced at and returned or looked at more intensively within 2-3 months. But the 1980s saw the advent of affordable word processors, and you do not want to know what the combination of word processors and schizophrenics with hypergraphia did to your average publisher's open slushpile. By the late 1990s turnaround times for submissions were up to a year and climbing—and submitting a novel to more than one publisher simultaneously was and remains a big no-no: it's a small world, editors at rival houses talk to each other, and they don't like time-wasters. If you want to run an auction you need to get an agent, which is a whole 'nother story.)

My end goal was to get a publisher interested to the point of issuing a contract — then, rather than signing it (a mug's game), to sign up with a young, hungry literary agent who would smoke out the booby traps hidden in the legal boilerplate and hopefully extort a bigger advance. (Note: the issue of getting a literary agent is one of the most vexatious Catch-22 situations I can think of. I'll try to remember to rant entertainingly about it at a later date.)

Anyway ...

I began writing short stories: 3-4 a year. And the first place I sent them was Asimov's SF Magazine. Where Gardner Dozois read them and knocked them back, but with an actual written explanation rather than the regular checkbox form. (Asimov's back then were averaging 30 submissions a day. Getting an actual human-drafted rejection letter meant you were in the top 10%.) After a while I got dispirited and began sending them to a local British SF magazine first, which was a mistake: that's why "Antibodies" and "A Colder War" came out in Spectrum SF (which you haven't heard of) rather than debuting in Asimov's and maybe making a splash.

In the meantime, I set to work on The Novel Project. I finished "Scratch Monkey" in 1993. I'd then written another novel-shaped object, which in 1996 I took out behind the barn and shot — the recyclable bits turned up later in "The Atrocity Archives" and "Antibodies", but John Jarrold's lengthy rejection letter (he was editorial director at Earthlight, Simon and Schuster's UK SF imprint) shone a sufficiently bright light on precisely why it was unpublishable that even I couldn't kid myself that it was salvageable. So: what to do?

Enter the idea of the ACME General Purpose Space Opera Universe. This being 1996 or thereabouts, I needed to figure out a way to dodge the implications of the Singularity for space opera that Vernor Vinge had so irritatingly pointed out to us in "A Fire Upon The Deep". So I decided to embrace it with open arms, give it a name and a face, and make it a plot McGuffin. Hence the Eschaton and it's human agent (Martin, initially a bit of a cipher), and the rather more interesting interstellar arms control inspector Rachel. Who were investigating a tap-dancing-around-the-rules gambit being contemplated by the space navy of a backwater empire, in a novel titled "Festival of Fools".

I'd been reading too much David Weber at the time, and noting the uncritical enthusiasm with which readers seemed to receive his tales of Napoleonic Navies in Spaaaaace. Alas, I'm prone to tearing apart my toys, and after a couple or eight books in the series I began to ask questions. Such as, why are the opponents in this sub-genre of space opera always evenly matched? Surely in a diverse space operatic universe you'll occasionally see a Napoleonic space navy run into a nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine? Or the equivalent of wooden tall ships encountering an unarmed modern ice-breaker ... on whose decks some desperate amateur has parked a TOS-1 Buratino? (Wooden ships and thermobaric warheads just don't mix.)

You can also note my nascent aversion to absolutist monarchism coming out here. We in the modern world have a technical term for absolutist monarchies of the kind who deploy Napoleonic Space Navies (or would, if NSN's existed): we call them hereditary military dictatorships. Poster child: Kim Jong-Un. Or maybe the House of Saud: I digress. Let's just say that the political systems in most military space opera really suck.

Final ingredient: if you're going to play in the David Weber sandbox, or even satirize it effectively, you need a military campaign. I decided to pick on the most barkingly insane naval expedition of recent history, the voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet commanded by Admiral Rozhestvensky in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese war. TL:DR; the Imperial Japanese Navy bushwhacked the Russian Pacific Fleet in the opening weeks of the Russo-Japanese war (to be fair, the Russians started it: "what this country needs is a short, victorious war" as one of the Tsar's ministers put it). They then laid siege to Port Arthur. The Russian response was to tell Rozhestvensky to do the impossible — to sail his fleet of superannuated and obsolescent coal-burning battlewagons from their port on the Baltic (north of Europe) the long way round to the Sea of Japan to lift the siege. Wikipedia says, "Under Admiral Rozhestvensky's command, the Russian navy holds the record of sailing an all-steel, coal-powered battleship fleet over 18,000 miles one way, to engage an enemy in decisive battle." What wikipedia doesn't say is just how dumb this was, because the battle in question was the most decisive victory in a fleet engagement since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805—for the Japanese.

Seriously, go read that wikipedia article. When you're done, go read the wikipedia article about the Dogger Bank Incident as well, then boggle — why on Earth did the Russian navy expect to encounter Japanese torpedo boats in the North Sea of all places? (Nearly lighting the fuse for the first world war nine years early, for the British government was Not Amused ...)

Anyway. I wrote 130,000 words about the most insane, doomed space operatic navy campaign in future history. And then I realized I had a Problem. The fleet was shortly to arrive at it's destination ... and I hadn't bothered to give them an adversary. Trust me, plot-driven mil-SF, even the satirical sub-species, doesn't thrive without an enemy to go up against.

It was August 1997 and I was wandering around Leith with friends, looking for a pub, and as I frequently do, I was chewing over my dilemma in the presence of an audience. And as I recall (warning: my memory of conversations held 15 years ago in the presence of alcohol is less than reliable) I was muttering aloud along the lines of, "what I need is a threat they don't understand, one that they can't understand." And a friend said, "something like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?"

The whole reason we were wandering around Leith in search of beer in the first place was that we'd been driven out of our normal den of iniquity pub by the presence of Festival-goers. Edinburgh in August is a city on the receiving end of an alien invasion spearheaded by unicycling mimes and bagpiping elephants. Add the fleeting twilight nights (we get maybe 4 hours of complete full dark at that time of year) and the pervasive random weirdness—you can go shopping dressed as a Dalek or a 17th century French aristocrat and nobody will blink at you—and it seemed like the perfect metaphor for what the New Republican Navy was going up against. Result!

So I ripped the guts out of the novel — I think I ditched 80,000 words, a full-length novel's worth in its own right a decade or two earlier — then wrote the opening sequence, complete with the rain of telephones (because I'd just acquired my very own first personal cellphone) and it was the sort of thing that something like the Festival would do that would be totally incomprehensible to the NR.

And from there it was downhill all the way, until I finished the novel in 1998.

Now for the confessional about what happened later, and my own fit of unprofessional behavior.

Intending to have a crack at the US market, I sent "Festival of Fools" to an editor at Tor who I happened to have met and who I thought wouldn't leave it on the slushpile unread. Unfortunately my Tor kremlinology was underdeveloped in those days. I was aware that individual editors run their own lists. I was aware that I was submitting to a fairly senior editor. What I didn't recognize was that Patrick Nielsen Hayden was Tor's editorial director, massively overworked at all times: and that his backlog was a thing of legend, spoken of in hushed voices in the halls of New York Publishing.

And after about a year Patrick stopped answering my 3-monthly email queries.

Fast-forward to April 2000, and the British Eastercon, held that year in the Central Hotel in Glasgow. I mostly recall that convention as being rather badly programmed. (At one point I was sitting in a bar, kibitzing on a three-way discussion of the state of Scottish SF between Andrew J. Wilson (SF reviewer for The Scotsman), Ken MacLeod, and Iain Banks ... none of whom had been offered a seat on any of the panel discussions at the con, much less a chance to discuss the state of Scottish SF in front of an audience with some advance warning.) But the bad programming had a silver lining, as it turned out. I ran into an old friend, Ben Jeapes. These days Ben is best known as a British author and academic publisher. But back then, he was making a decent fist of setting up a small British SF press, Big Engine. And some years earlier we'd workshopped together. I was grumbling about the lengthy slushpile delays to Ben, and he said, "well, I see where you're coming from: how about letting me see it? If Patrick wants it he can have it, you sent it to him first: but I wouldn't mind reading it. It sounds interesting." So I sent "Festival of Fools" to Ben, and he said, "there are some changes I want making, but if you make them, I'll buy it." And I sent a "sorry, but if you don't tell me you want it I'm going to withdraw it from submission" note to Patrick. Who didn't reply.

(Many years later I mentioned this to a different Tor editor. And she said, "oh yes, I remember that! Patrick was going to buy it and hand you over to me to edit. But he never quite got round to making the offer." I like to think that, if we live in a multiverse, somewhere in one of the other multitudinous trouser-legs of time there is a world where my primary SF publisher is Tor and my editor is Teresa Nielsen Hayden. But that's not how things turned out ...)

Anyway: the consequences of my fit of unprofessional behaviour were that I landed a rather poor contract from a British small press. But I had enough wits not to sign immediately. Instead, I went looking for an agent based in New York. And found one at exactly the best stage in the literary agent life-cycle from an author's point of view: a publishing insider (actually a senior editor at an SF imprint, changing jobs because being an agent is easier to combine with having babies — it's easier to work from home) with no existing clients above me on the totem pole. (I can guarantee you that the best way for a new author to get a literary agent's undivided attention is by opening with "I have an offer from [PUBLISHER] sitting here and I haven't signed it yet ...") Caitlin rolled up her sleeves, went to work, removed the landmines from the Big Engine contract, then auctioned North American rights to the book. (Tor — in the shape of the inimitable David Hartwell, who is my editor for the Merchant Princes series — and Ace turned up to bid: Ace's opening offer was slightly better and Tor didn't counter-offer.) Then headaches happened.

Editors like to edit, unless they're too busy managing production workflow on a list that handles hundreds of books a year. Ben edited "Festival of Fools" his way. But Ace also wanted to edit it. One edit went into British English; the other went into American English. The two drafts began to diverge subtly. Ace decided to retitle the novel, because Richard Paul Russo had a book out titled "Ship of Fools" and they didn't want to confuse everybody; could I come up with a new title, and by the way, could it have the word "Singularity" in it? (The Singularity was hot in 2001.) But Ben wanted to stick with the original title. Checking copy-edits and page proofs is time consuming for the author, and doing it twice for subtly different versions of the same book is ... well, you don't get paid any extra money for doing it twice, and it's a lot of extra work. Finally, the publishing schedules began to diverge. Big Engine was running into cash flow trouble. Ben recognized this, and finally took the decision to shut down his company ... one month before "Festival of Fools" was due to be published in the UK, and about a month or two after a very similar but non-identical novel titled "Singularity Sky" debuted in the United States.

Caitlin had done her work on the contract properly: we re-acquired the British and Commonwealth rights to "Festival of Fools" without any great difficulty. She then sold the American variant, "Singularity Sky", to Orbit, which is why the British edition came along 1-2 years after the American publication and, to this day, I am effectively marketed in the UK as an imported American author. And why I always, ever since, have made a point of trying to use American spelling in my novels and ensure that only one publisher gets to edit any given novel.

Final note: I wrote FoF from 1996 to 1998. Gave it a polish in 1998/1999 before submitting it to Tor. Had to edit it again in 2000 for Ben, then again for Caitlin before the US agent-mediated auction. Then copy edits for both Big Engine and Ace in 2001. Ace published it in July 2003; Orbit in 2004 (if memory serves). Upshot: it took 7 years from writing to first print publication. And this is now not unusual for a first novel. The subsequent books came along much faster ...

However, I've got a slight dilemma about how to tackle the subject.

Do I do it chronologically? If so, I'd have to start with "The Web Architect's Handbook" from 1996, or maybe "Toast, and other rusted futures" from 2000. But hang on, I wrote "Scratch Monkey" circa 1990-94, so doesn't that come first? And how do I deal with "Accelerando", which took 5 years to emerge, during which I wrote at least four other novels?

Alternatively, do I approach the problem by series? Not all my books are parts of a series, and — I'm somewhat alarmed to realize — not one of the actual series has an actual no-shit end (although "The Trade of Queens" comes close to ending the Merchant Princes; the next book, provisionally titled "Dark State", picks up the threads nearly 17 years later) ...

Then there's the question of what to write about. Do I discuss where the ideas and plot points emerged? The characters? Or do I discuss the methods I used to write the books, and the obstacles and encountered in the technical process? And what about possible spoilers or explanations of what I was trying to achieve when I wrote them, as opposed to what reviewers and regular readers thought they were about?

What would you like to know about my books, that isn't obvious from reading them? This is a serious question and I want answers, dammit. Because this project is going to be the main preoccupation of this blog for the next few months ...

Just a reminder: The Traders War is showing up in shops now, and although Amazon.co.uk think it's due out on the 9th, you can find it on some bookstore shelves right now.

(Small print: this is an omnibus edition — with extensive revisions — of "The Clan Corporate" and "The Merchants War", reassembled as the single book it was originally meant to be; in this case, the middle of a trilogy. It's published in the UK and Commonwealth territories. You can't buy the ebook in North America, but if you really want to, you can order the dead tree edition from amazon.co.uk if you're willing to pay the shipping fee. It will not be published in the USA in 2013, but will probably show up in 2014 or 2015.)

Case in point: while out and about shopping with my spouse, we happened to pass an off-license (liquor store, to those of you in the US) which had a window display of amusing beverages. One of which was a bottle of vodka in the shape of a human skull. "Cool bottle!" Remarked herself; "I wonder if it tastes as good as it looks?" (Said with the cynical tone of one who recognizes marketing aimed at late-teen goths when she sees it.) "I doubt it," I began to reply. And then my muse grabbed me by the ear. (My muse is not a frail willowy thing; they're a bit like this (NSFW cartoon) when they're not AWOL and engaged on a massive bender. But I digress.) "Oi!" roared the Muse, "Get down and gimme an Iain Banks style black comedy plot trope, and do it now!"

"Got it," I said. "Opening chapter of novel: our protagonist has got hold of one of those skull-shaped bottles. He's a bit depressive and is considering suicide, so he fills it up with Polish 80% spirit and then adds mushrooms to make a liqueur. Using Death Cap—Amanita Phalloides. Then in the last chapter someone else drinks it by mistake."

"They misread the label as Liberty Cap!" Suggested she who can read my mind too damned well after all these years. (Psilocybe.)

Well, okay. If I was planning on writing a noir Iain Banks mainstream novel, that bottle would find a way into it for sure, now. But anyway, this prompts me to suggest a blog game. To those of you who can be arsed playing: pick an everyday object you see in your day to day routine, be it shopping or cooking or at work or at play. Then try to come up with a grand guignol story idea anchored by it! C'mon. Show me what you can do ...

Trying to explain the psychological effects of this period to the young is difficult—all I can do is point then at Threads. However, despite the Lovecraftian horror lurking in the background—the constant awareness that coolly calculating intellects in distant countries might at any time decide out of game-theoretic considerations to rain thunderbolts and earthquakes on my world, effectively destroying it—I was not a supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

But times have changed and I'm reconsidering my position on that subject. Here's why.

The A-bomb promised to shorten wars by making it possible to destroy strategic targets such as weapons factories and armoured divisions with a single strike. But then it turned out to be surprisingly, dismayingly easy for other countries to build such devices. The focus switched from the A-bomb to the delivery system—first strategic bombers, then ballistic missiles, and finally cruise missiles and artillery. And in the meantime, better ways of destroying strategic targets came along: the H-bomb made possible the destruction of just about any hardened target, and then of an entire capital city. The term "balance of terror" was coined; by the time the USA and USSR began to gradually step back from the brink in the mid-1970s with the SALT arms limitation talks, the US nuclear forces were targeting individual sub-post-offices in Moscow with quarter megaton nukes.

The UK was caught in an odd position. It had proven, during the second world war, to have a vital strategic role as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier and resupply depot, moored 50 kilometres off the coast of Europe. In any US/Soviet war scenario, the UK played a critical role. Nor were the British political elite necessarily opposed to this. The Conservatives hated and feared the threat of Soviet communism; the Labour Party leadership hated and feared the Soviets even more (as first cousins once removed in the family tree of left wing ideology, they were seen as class traitors by the first generation of Bolsheviks). A post-war consensus saw the British government devote significant resources to developing nuclear weapons, and indeed the first British A-bomb test took place in 1952.

But the UK was the head of an empire in long-term decline. In 1956 the political elite in both the UK and France faced a crisis after the Suez crisis effectively slammed on the brakes on British imperial influence east of the Nile; the USA had asserted the primacy of its own interests. What to do? To paint with a very broad brush, the French response was, "we cannot rely on the perfidious Americans to back us up: we need to preserve the capability to act independently at all costs". The British response was, "we can no longer act alone without American support, so we need to preserve a good relationship with the Americans at all costs."

Prior to 1956, the British nuclear deterrent had the goal of preventing the USSR from threatening the UK by promising a nuclear counter-attack, in the absence of third-party support: it was independently built and operated, carried by the independently designed and operated V-bomber force. Their job, in accordance with established strategic bombing doctrine and the balance of terror theory, was simple: destroy Moscow. It made a certain sense, when the chief occupant of that city was a hyper-paranoid dictator with proven territorial ambitions; the point was to make the cost of direct aggression against the UK unthinkably high.

After 1960, however, the direction of British strategic nuclear thought shifted. The USSR was now run by committee, headed by a first among equals who could be deposed (as indeed Nikita Kruschev was in 1964); it was perhaps more stable and less likely to launch a surprise invasion, but deadly crises could still arise through miscalculation. Meanwhile, the significance of the Special Relationship continued to gather weight in the minds of British strategic planners. A decision was taken to replace the V-Force in the mid-1960s with a less vulnerable-to-missiles submarine force, carrying American-built Polaris missiles with British MRV warheads. And in the early 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher's government decided to replace the aging Polaris submarines with new boats carrying the Trident D5. Again, the goal remained unchanged: "maintain the capability to destroy Moscow, independent of the United States, in order to deter the USSR from acts of aggression against the UK". (Note the "independent of the United States" clause. The constant fear of British war planners during the Cold War was that in some recondite USA/USSR stand-off, the USA might sacrifice their allies in order to avoid direct conflict with the enemy.)

And that's how things stood during the Cold War.

From my point of view as a native of Airstrip One, the existence of the British strategic deterrent didn't seem to make things significantly worse. Unilateral disarmament, though superficially attractive (was it conceivable that anyone would ever willingly use those missiles other than in a second strike? No. Would a second strike bring back the dead? No. So what's the point?), had the worrying problem that it wouldn't take the UK out of the firing line. Soviet nuclear doctrine, as we now know, saw nuclear war as a winnable battle; they expected to fight with nukes from the outset, and merely being part of the enemy alliance would be enough to draw down a tactical nuclear bombardment on the UK.

But then the Cold War ended. And we continued to maintain the Trident boats, even as the proximate justification for their existence went away. New justifications came along: we needed the capability in case a new threat emerged—a nuclear-armed China, or maybe Iraq, or even North Korea. (Leaving aside the fact that China is more interested in trade, Iraq was a paper tiger, and the UK has had no actual involvement in the Korean peninsula for the past sixty years.)

Meanwhile, it became apparent that the Vanguard boats were serving as an unofficial annex to the US Navy's Trident capability; the START treaties permit the US to operate 12 such submarines, but the UK effectively gives them another 4. The Royal Navy Trident rockets are maintained and refurbished from the same depot as the US Navy's missiles. The warheads are, according to some, built in the UK from designs supplied directly from the United States, and are effectively interchangeable with the American payloads. There are even rumours that some years ago the UK stopped independently building and maintaining warheads and now shares a common pool with the United States, complete with US built and operated permissive action links on the "British" missiles.

And in the meantime, the nature of warfare changed.

Let's remember those thousand-bomber raids and their original purpose: to put strategic targets out of operation. They were necessary because bombers were inaccurate. Horrendously so. In 1940, the RAF calculated that bombs dropped during night raids fell, on average, within 5 kilometres of their target. If that's an A-bomb, it may do some good; if it's a 500lb high explosive device, it's a joke. By the end of the war they had substantially improved their accuracy, but it still took either a huge raid or a highly trained elite squadron to put a major target out of commission.

Then came the new technologies. First LGBs; a single bomb that could take out a bridge, replacing multiple-squadron strength bomber forces with unguided bombs. Then came JDAMs. Cheap, droppable in any weather, harder to jam than an LGB. A single bomber with JDAMs could strike many targets scattered over a range of kilometres with a single pass! In the wake of the Kosovo war, which featured the first major bombing campaign mediated by stealth aircraft with JDAMs, I'm told that some bright sparks calculated what it would have taken to recapitulate the strategic impact of the RAF/USAAF 1943-45 heavy bombing campaign against Germany, and came up with the figure of: one squadron of F-117A Nighthawks with JDAMs, and six weeks, with a 50/50 probability of one hull loss.

As strategic weapons, it seems to me that nuclear weapons are obsolescent. Yes, they could do the door-breaking job of destroying factories and cities. But there are cheaper, less destructive ways of doing the same job—and the other methods are politically acceptable. Any nation that actually used strategic nuclear weapons in war-fighting these days would be a pariah state thereafter, with incalculable long-term consequences (none of them good). H-bombs only serve one purpose these days: state terrorism.

You can't use H-bombs in war. You can use JDAMs and LGBs and drones. So why is David Cameron so keen on spending £70Bn on replacing an aging weapons platform that is of no actual use to the British military and which sucks vital resources away from the bits of the Royal Navy that actually do things?

In claiming that North Korea could launch a nuclear strike at the UK, Cameron inadvertently blew the cover on why the current British political elite support maintenance of a vastly expensive nuclear weapons force. It's not to serve British interests; rather, it's to shore up the special relationship by supporting US interests. North Korea, outside of its immediate neighbours, is very much a US political shibboleth. The idea of a North Korean nuclear strike on the UK is so ludicrous as to be laughable; why would they bother, when Seoul is so much closer? (Or Tokyo, if they want to look for hated former colonial oppressors.)

The political purpose behind the drive to replace the V-class submarines is to provide a 25% boost to the US Navy's Trident force. And the thrust behind the construction of the Queen Elizabeth class Aircraft Carriers (the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy, just as the UK is declining to clear second-rank status as a global power) is to provide fill-in support for the US Navy's carrier force, which itself appears to be in long-term decline. And if it isn't obvious to you, I'd just like to note that this is a complete reversal of the pre-1956 logic underpinning the British independent nuclear deterrent—a shift from independent capability to its opposite.

As to why this might be, it's the logic of Suez coming home to roost: having given up on the idea of a UK that can operate without US support, our political elite have enthusiastically adopted Americanophilia as an ideological assumption. If they can just be American enough, maybe the Americans will forget that they're foreigners? Something like that. It wasn't a bad idea, in the wonder years of the 1950s to 1960s, when the United States could send Navy aviators to play golf on the Moon and bestrode the Earth like an economic colossus. But the United States today is visibly recapitulating the usual path of imperial decline, losing relative advantage in a 21st century that is now clearly coming into view: hot, crowded, dense, multipolar, dominated by international capital and labour flows. The idea of the monolithic anglophone superpower is a dangerous mast to nail your colours to, if you're a small island nation that lost its empire a lifetime ago.

Anyway, this is a long-winded explanation of how I've come to change my views on the British nuclear deterrent. I think that during the 1960s to 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were wrong, although I'll give them credit for idealism. But in the 21st century, I can see no convincing case for the UK retaining nuclear weapons. We should at most maintain a plutonium stockpile and a pool of expertise such that we could design and build new bombs from scratch if given a couple of years' notice, if circumstances change: but we don't need actually-existing nuclear weapons any more, and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

People periodically ask me about audiobooks—mostly in the UK (Audible do spoken editions of most of my books in the US). The UK is a smaller market than the USA, and it costs quite a bit to pay a voice actor and a sound engineer to go over an entire novel: consequently many of my books haven't been issued in audio editions so far. However, Orbit are doing a refresh of the covers of "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue" this summer, and to go with the reissue, they're planning a first UK/Commonwealth audiobook release of these titles! They'll be unabridged, and available as download-only releases from Audible.co.uk and iTunes in early July (sadly, demand for CD audiobooks is too low to make a CD release practical). I believe they'll also be available in Australia, New Zealand, and a few other places (but not the USA or Canada—where a different audiobook edition is already available).

I'll add links to the buy my books page as and when they become available for pre-order.

This sounded like pop psychology to me, but interesting enough to send me scurrying around the Internet looking for more. I couldn't find any other mention of Professor Simonton's theory of eminence and a decline in creativity, but I did go on to read several articles on creativity and novelty-seeking in middle age.

When I was growing up, "middle aged" was a synonym for "boring." Looking ahead across the gulf of years it appeared to me to be a time of life inhabited by people content with a dull routine, with little interest in the new.

Having reached the respectable middle age of fifty-two, I'm happy to report the reality I've experienced is quite a bit different from that.

Everyone who arrives at this phase of life arrives along a different path, but for many, the tumultuous years of teenage children and aging parents are passing and the focus begins to shift. There is an awareness that the clock is ticking ever more loudly, which can be a great motivation to buckle down and concentrate on whatever your personal interests might be—be that traveling the world, writing a new novel, starting your own business, or something else particular to you—because if you don't do it now, when will you?

Assuming, of course, that you're still interested in pursuing new goals...

Ironically, the lure of nostalgia often seems strong among SF fandom, but my guess is that as a regular reader of Charlie's Diary, you've probably got the whole curiosity/novelty-seeking behavior pattern intact, no matter where you sit along the timeline.

I ultimately tracked down an interview with Professor Simonton in the New York Times in which he's asked questions on creativity and aging. He says that whether creativity burns out or not depends a lot on the sort of creativity you engaged in during youth.

"[...the painter Paul] Cézanne had a particular vision of the world that was so complex and rich that it would take more than one lifetime to explore, and so he kept on going...

"Usually the people who keep going are the ones who are open to new experiences... Do something different. Take a risk. Try to believe in the future tense."

For women especially, middle age can be liberating. Maybe it's a generational thing, but in my experience men commonly acquire self-confidence early on (maybe too early) while many women take longer to reach a point where they really believe in their own talents. Self-doubt gets enforced by a sense of being forever judged by society, (and by other women), on looks, accomplishments, social adeptness, family, etc. On twitter there have been intermittent back-and-forths about women's "self-talk" and how we tend to berate ourselves, and tear ourselves down because we're never "good enough". But I've asked around, and there comes a point for a lot of us where it gets much easier to say, "Whatever". One of the rewards of aging is learning to not give a damn about the opinion of those with nothing productive to say, as well as the nagging little perfectionist voice in the back of your own head.

Even so, it's a great time to optimize. It's a goal at any age to stay fit, but more so, the older you get. I try not to proselytize, but if you're not working out and you're in a mood to be persuaded, there's a fun book on fitness called Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge. It's premise is simply that you should exercise hard six a days a week and don't eat crap. Everything else is details and inspiration, but it's definitely worthwhile to read and I highly recommend it. And no, I don't actually manage to exercise six days a week, but that remains the ever-elusive goal, because I have a lot of books I still want to write, challenging books, and research shows that the best way to nurture the mind and to maintain creativity is to exercise.

Charlie will be returning home before too long. I want to thank him for the opportunity to guest blog, and thank all of you for the conversation this past week. It's been a great experience.

When a particular incident like today's bombing of the Boston marathon kicks off a news cycle, a common pattern asserts itself. First, there's photographic evidence and rumour. Then there's some initial information—immediate numbers of dead and injured, scary photographs. But the amount of new information coming out tapers off rapidly after the first hour or two, and gives way to rumour and speculation. There probably won't be any meaningful updates for a couple of days: but the TV channels and newpapers have to fill the dead air somehow, to keep the eyeballs they've attracted on the advertisements, so they cobble together anything they can grab—usually talking heads speculating without benefit of actual information. Such speculation in turn increases anxiety levels and causes depression, bringing the onlookers back for more.

Which is why I am about to back away from the keyboard, stop looking for more updated news from Boston, and go swimming. Terrible though the bombings may be, we won't learn anything significant about the responsible parties for some time: and in the meantime I see no reason to allow my emotional state to be manipulated for the benefit of advertisers. (And neither should you, unless you're a Bostonian or a relative or friend of someone directly affected, in which case, you have my deepest sympathy. This goes for you, Dan.)

Update: And here's Bruce Schneier with some words of sense.

Additional update: The comments on this blog entry are not intended for wild speculation about the identity and motivation of the bombers; comments on those lines may be deleted, especially if I think they amount to hate speech directed against minorities.

But is Hawaii a good place to grow a science fiction career? The lack of working SFF novelists here seems to indicate otherwise. The two that I know of are myself and Kate Elliott, and we're on different islands.

Another negative indicator—as much as I hate to say it—is that there isn't a big fan base here, especially for the kind of extrapolative SF I like best. When was the last time you attended a science fiction convention in Hawaii, right? (For those interested, there is a big and growing anime convention called Kawaii-kon... but that isn't quite what I'm talking about.)

So Hawaii lacks SFF writers as well as active fans, and traveling anywhere else to meet them requires at minimum a five-hour plane flight, because we are a long way from anywhere. Professionally then, it's an isolated existence. Still, there are advantages to living here. Metaphorically speaking, Hawaii has a multitude of worlds.

We're positioned just north of latitude twenty in the Pacific Ocean, far from any landmass, and we are "high islands," meaning we have significant mountains up to 14,000 feet [4200 meters]. These peaks catch the moisture-bearing trade winds, creating rainforest on one side of an island and a desert rain shadow on the other. Altitude produces additional variation, resulting in a wide range of microclimates over very short distances. It's fascinating to get out and explore.

Living here, I've been able to visit lush, windward shorelines where dense foliage reaches almost to the sea. On leeward coasts, everything is different. I've hiked for miles along a barren, lava-rock shoreline where tough trees grow only in pockets fed by underground springs. It's another adventure to hike through steamy forests, or dense groves of bamboo sheltered within the walls of narrow valleys, with a high waterfall the reward at the end. On other days, on different hikes, there have been cold, moss-laden, cloud forests empty of any sign of human presence beyond the trail, or savannah-like landscapes, with dry grass rustling beneath thorny trees, and the distant lowing of cattle. And at the high volcanic summits: barren cinder fields, storms, and winter snow.

I've rarely set stories in Hawaii, but over and over I've used parts of Hawaii to extrapolate the experience of being on another world, or in another part of this one, taking what I've experienced and changing it, using realistic details while making the story world more dangerous—because while it's nice for me to live in the happiest state in the USA, my characters must struggle and suffer. Excessive happiness is the death of compelling fiction.

So I get to take the relatively benign world-building models I've experienced in Hawaii and make them all much, much worse. To this end, strange, dangerous creatures begin to swim in the sparkling blue offshore waters. The forests become tainted with ancient alien plagues. Artificial life begins to grow in the paddies of innocent farmers. Dense fog on the mountain slopes becomes a deadly nanotech mist. And soldiers powered by exoskeletons move at night through a savannah landscape, watched over by an unseen drone.

There are settings I haven't used yet, but still might someday. We have two active volcanoes, one that has been continuously erupting for thirty years, and when the wind is in the wrong direction, we have the dense air pollution the volcano generates, known as "vog" (volcanic+smog). Here on Maui, it sometimes looks like the fumes of Mordor have rolled in to envelope us.

And beyond the landscapes, we have the people. According to the US Census Bureau via Wikipedia, we have a small population of only about 1.3 million residents, but they're a diverse mix: 38.6% Asian, 24.7% White/Hispanic, 23.6% from two or more races, and 10.0% native Hawaiians and other Pacific islanders. The culture here is strongly influenced by native Hawaiian as well as by Asian cultures, particularly that of Japan, yielding diverse points of view to adapt into fiction.

So Hawaii has a lot of advantages for an SFF writer, but of course we don't have everything. Travel does open your eyes—which is why I'm heading east in a few weeks to visit Washington, D.C. My newest novel, The Red: First Light, is the beginning of a trilogy. In the second book, The Red: Trials, the opening takes place in Washington. There's nothing in Hawaii that can stand-in for the American capital, and while I can get a sense of the setting from Google Street View, I want to see it for myself, be there, experience it. Feed the process that blends reality with imagination, to make the best story out of it that I can.

Margaret Thatcher's funeral will have a Falklands War theme, Downing Street reveals: The Independent break the news that 700 armed forces personnel from units which served in the Falklands conflict will take part in the funeral.

Family veto Argentine officials at funeral.

Police ask Margaret Thatcher protesters to identify themselves (according to The Independent, so that their "right to protest can be upheld".)

I'm very glad to be overseas for the next week and a half. I fully expected Cameron et al to use the Maggon's funeral as a rallying point for their clan, but I wasn't expecting a full-blown Nuremberg Rally. Disgraceful.

Update: For those who couldn't make it at short notice, there will be a repeat: same time, same place, on Wednesday 17th.

First, it feels necessary to say that there is no best path in this business of writing fiction and every author's career is different. I started in the usual way, with traditional publishing, and had six science fiction novels published by New York houses between '95 and 2003. My work garnered good reviews and there were a couple of awards, but despite my best efforts no meaningful amount of money was going into the family coffers. Economically, I was wasting my time. Emotionally I was inhabited by a deep, dark sense of failure, with no viable means to turn things around. So circa 2000 I more or less walked away from the field for almost ten years. I did not stop writing entirely, but it was close.

In 2009 I woke up to the ebook revolution.

My background and situation let me jump right into self-publishing. I'd worked in web development for nine years, so I knew how to handle the HTML behind ebooks, I was familiar with Photoshop, I'd learned the basics of InDesign, I had the rights back to all my novels, and I had time to devote, since the recession had ended my programming job. So I became my own publisher and reissued the novels, first as ebooks and then in print-on-demand editions.

I found that I loved this new business, because I was in control.

As my own publisher, I make mistakes too, but because my business model--low upfront costs and no warehoused inventory--is radically different from that of traditional publishing, I'm in a position to correct those mistakes. I can--and I have--changed cover art, cover copy, and pricing after publishing a book.

Of course these days, self-publishing out-of-print backlist isn't controversial. The question writers debate is what to do with original fiction. I looked at it from a business perspective, asking What's best for me? And I couldn't justify trying New York again.

Charlie cites time as a major reason for sticking with traditional publishing. His time is best invested in writing books, not publishing them. This is how he makes a living, and the figures add up for him. He sells a lot of books.

For me, the equation is different, in large part because I'm operating on a very different scale. If I try to market a manuscript, I can expect to wait months (years?) on a response, more months to negotiate a contract, and no doubt the advance would be low. Suppose I accepted $10,000. Fifteen-percent would go to the agent, my home state of Hawaii would take 4%, and I would be left with only $8,100, stretched out in multiple payments. Going by past experience the advance is all I'd ever see. Traditional publishing, even when done well, is no guarantee of success.

Of course financial success with self-publishing is unlikely too.

There. I said it. Self-publishing is not a magic solution, and still the odds of success look better to me because my profit per unit sold is much higher than it would be for a traditionally published book, and the potential exists to generate that profit for the life of the copyright (subject to the risks of piracy, irrelevance, or the end of the world, of course).

As I mentioned, my business model includes low upfront costs. The biggest cost for me is the time it takes to write and revise a novel, but that's the same regardless of how I publish. Less than a month ago I released a new novel, a near-future military thriller called The Red: First Light. I wrote it last summer, beginning in early June and finishing a first draft at the end of September. After incorporating suggestions from beta readers, I sent the manuscript to a professional editor and then spent the month of January rewriting it. This is the same process used in traditional publishing except that I paid out-of-pocket for the editor (and it got done much faster).

Copyediting was next. I solicited an estimate from a professional and was told $2000-$3000. Ahem. I couldn't justify the amount, so I had a fellow member of the writers cooperative Book View Café copyedit the manuscript for me.

To this point, the time I'd invested in The Red: First Light went to writing and revision. Next came the time required to publish. Here's how that worked out: It took me two or three days to process the copy edits, less than a day to hand-code the ebook, and two to three days to do the interior layout of the print book.

Did I do a professional job? You can see the result for yourself. Go look up the book on Amazon and grab a free ebook sample, or use the "Look Inside the Book" feature to see the layout of the print book. In either case, is the work comparable to that of a traditional book? I like to think it is.

In my experience, cover art is the most challenging part of the publishing process. For The Red: First Light, the cover art was done by my daughter and I'm very pleased with it. The title text was added by me and I wrote the back cover copy.

So if I can write the book, hire an editor, get the favor of a copyeditor, coerce an artist, create the ebook, and do the print layout--with the whole process taking less than ten months--what benefit is a traditional publisher to me?

Well, discovery, maybe. Readers can't buy books they've never seen from writers they've never heard of.

Most readers are turned on to a new book by word of mouth--someone they know or follow online tells them a book is good, so they look for it. Another common method of discovery is bookstore browsing--and here traditional publishers win, at least for now. Because of the way the distribution system works, you will not find The Red:First Light in chain bookstores. Of course, not every traditional book makes it into physical stores either, and those that do tend to stay for a very short time.

Would I have benefitted from discovery in stores? I'm sure I would have made a few more sales, but enough to make it worth giving up my independence? Unlikely, especially given the declining number of bookstores.

In the end, it's the total revenue that matters. Ten thousand copies sold of an original novel is not going to impress a traditional publisher or lead to meaningfully higher income for me. But working on my own gives me a bigger cut of the list price. So if I manage to sell online ten thousand copies of TR:FL at list ($7.99 ebook/$16 trade USD) in 2013, I'll have made a nice (but not spectacular) annual income.

So for me--and every writer is different--traditional publishing does not have much to offer anymore. If I'm going to gamble my time, my art, my potential, then I want a large share of the potential profits. Indie publishing gives me that. So far, I am not an indie success story, but my work is mine. I control it. I can do what I want with it. I can try new things. I like that. A lot.

I'm on vacation and I am not going to waste a valuable tourism day venting a third of a century of bile at a person who is, in any case, no longer present. But I'd like to draw your attention to Hugo Young's epitaph; as Thatcher's biographer and sometime interviewer he gives a fairly balanced appraisal. (And I'd like to remind non-Brits that strong leaders are more popular abroad than in their home land, because foreigners don't get to see the skulls that were smashed in the process of building that reputation for "strength".)

Besides, I'm in a contemplative, listening frame of mind right now. So if you have any particular memories of Thatcher, feel free to tell me about it in the comments.