Charles’s Comments (group member since Dec 14, 2012)

Charles’s comments from the Ask Charles Stross ANYTHING! group.

Not gonna happen, Antonios.

(I'm under contract to write a trilogy during the next 18 months. Don't have time for collaborations! Which in any case require each collaborator to put in about 75% of the work of writing the whole thing themself.)

I'm not planning to set something in Shanghai. You're safe.

(Kuala Lumpur ... I hope to get a chance to poke my nose around the place later this year. In which case, you never know!)

Carly: Yes, there's an overall story line for the Laundry Files. It was going to run to nine books, but it seems to be expanding somewhat, much like Jim Butcher's series.

I'll give you the first line of The Rhesus Chart for free:

"Don't be silly," said Mo: "Everybody knows vampires don't exist!"

David: there's a sort of stand-alone coming this July (2013): "Neptune's Brood". It's marketed as a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but, really, apart from being set in the same universe 5000 years later with an entirely different cast of characters, it has nothing in common with the earlier book. (Unless you count the style of the US cover. Groan ...)

However, my publishers like sequels a lot. They're easier to quantify, and in turbulent times they offer a kind of security blanket. So the four novels coming after "Neptune's Brood" are a fifth Laundry Files novel ("The Rhesus Chart", due in 2014), and a trilogy, currently without titles, but which I'm thinking of as "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation".

Amsterdam: I was actually there when the purulent emotional abscess that powered "Lobsters" was lanced. In the pub mentioned in that story (later to become first chapter of "Accelerando"). Details here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...

Milton Keynes ... no emotional connection, but I lived not far away (in Hertford) for a year, and knew it well enough that when I wanted a surreal mission to send Bob on, the concrete cows sprang instantly to mind.

That works for me!

I haven't participated actively in goodreads before now, so am unsure of the protocol; feel free to invite your friends!

(This AMA is by way of light distraction while I redraft "The Rhesus Chart" for submission and begin outlining work on the trilogy with the working title, "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation".)