So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about to head off for a fortnight of vacation time, mostly in Germany (which has the best Christmas markets) before coming home in mid-December and getting down to work on the final draft of Starter Pack.

Starter Pack is a book I wrote on spec--without a contracted publisher--this summer when Ghost Engine just got a bit too much. It's a spin-off of Ghost Engine, which started out as a joke mashup of two genres: "what if ... The Stainless Steel Rat got Isekai'd?" Nobody's writing the Rat these days, which I feel is a Mistake, so I decided to remedy it. This is my own take on the ideas, not a copy of Harry Harrison's late 1950s original, so it's a bit different, but it's mostly there now and it works as its own thing. Meanwhile, my agent read it and made some really good suggestions for how to make it more commercial, and "more commercial" is what pays the bills so I'm all on board with that. Especially as it's not sold yet.

Ghost Engine is still in progress: I hit a wall and needed to rethink the ending, again. But at least I am writing: having working binocular vision is a sadly underrated luxury--at least, it's underrated until you have to do without it for a few months. Along the way, Ghost Engine required me to come up with a new story setting in which there is no general AI, no superintelligent AI, no mind uploading to non-biological substrates, and above all no singularity--but our descendants have gone interstellar in a big way thanks to that One Neat Magictech Trick I trialed in my novella Palimpsest back in 2009. (Yes, Ghost Engine and Starter Pack are both set very loosely in the same continuum as Palimpsest. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that Palimpsest is to these new novels what A Colder War was to the Laundry Files.) So I finally got back to writing far future wide screen space opera, even if you aren't going to be able to read any of it for at least a year.

Why do this, though?

Bluntly: I needed to change course. After the US election outcome of November 2024 it was pretty clear that we were in for a very bumpy ride over the next few years. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the economy is teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice. It's not just the over-hyped AI bubble that's propping up the US tech sector and global stock markets--that would be bad enough, but macro policy is being set by feces-hurling baboons and it really looks as if Trump is willing to invade Central America as a distraction gambit. All the world's a Reality TV show right now, and Reality TV is all about indulging our worst collective instincts.

It's too depressing to contemplate writing more Laundry Files stories; I get email from people who read the New Management as a happy, escapist fantasy these days because we've got a bunch of competent people battling to hold the centre together, under the aegis of a horrific ancient evil who is nevertheless a competent ancient evil. Unfortunately the ancient evil wins, and that's just not something I want to explore further right now.

I'm a popular entertainer and it seems to me that in bad times people want entertainments that take them out of their current quagmire and offers them escape, or at least gratuitous adventures with a side-order of humour. I'm not much of an optimist about our short-term future (I don't expect to survive long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel) so I can't really write solarpunk or hopepunk utopias, but I can write space operas in which absolutely horrible people are viciously mocked and my new protagonists can at least hope for a happy ending.

Upcoming Events

In the new year, I've got three SF conventions planned already: Iridescence (Eastercon 2026), Birmingham UK, 3-6 April: Satellite 9, Glasgow, 22-24 May: and Metropol con Berlin (Eurocon 2026), Berlin, 2-5 July. I'm also going to try and set up a reading/signing/book launch for The Regicide Report in Edinburgh; more here if I manage it.

As during previous Republican presidencies in the USA it does not feel safe to visit that country, so I won't be attending the 2026 worldcon. However the 2027 world science fiction convention will almost certainly take place in Montreal, which is in North America but not part of Trumpistan, so (health and budget permitting) I'll try to make it there.

(Assuming we've still got a habitable planet and a working economy, which kind of presupposes the POTUS isn't biting the heads off live chickens or rogering a plush sofa in the Oval Office, of course, neither of which can be taken for granted this century.)