Ask the Author: Charles Stross
Answered Questions (51)
Charles Stross
It's in the works! The next book due out is "The Regicide Report", in early 2026. "Ghost Engine" is about 80% finished … but I got stale, so I've been taking time out since early April to work on a new project that bit me and wouldn't let go, set in the same universe as "Ghost Engine". Whichever of the two is finished first will probably be the next book to show up, some time after 2026. (TLDR: it's not just one book any more, it's a whole new setting.)
Charles Stross
You're not missing anything: I slipped a decimal place in my mental arithmetic! (And it's a decade or so too late to fix ...)
Charles Stross
"Iron Sunrise" is a direct sequel to "Singularity Sky", featuring two of the main protagonists. (There are no other books in this series, whatever Amazon's database thinks.)
Charles Stross
The Rhesus Chart was written in 2010; Season of Skulls was written in 2021-22, seven books (and nearly a million words) later! It's a retcon. Also, to Old George his relationship with Eve was water under the bridge from 200 years previously—he had no reason to even think about it at the time when Rhesus Chart took place.
"Will Old George return" is an as-yet-unanswered question. (I can say with some certainty that if the fourth New Management book is commissioned -- I have plans -- he won't be in it.)
"Will Old George return" is an as-yet-unanswered question. (I can say with some certainty that if the fourth New Management book is commissioned -- I have plans -- he won't be in it.)
Charles Stross
Toast is out of print and staying that way. (It's over 20 years old: when I have a spare day I will probably try and turn it into a free epub download off my website.)
Wireless *is* available as a Kindle ebook, in both the US and UK kindle stores! (It's periodically discounted in the US one.) If it's not available, let me know and I'll chase it up? (I'm no longer with the US publisher for newer books, so it may take a while to find out who's responsible.)
Wireless *is* available as a Kindle ebook, in both the US and UK kindle stores! (It's periodically discounted in the US one.) If it's not available, let me know and I'll chase it up? (I'm no longer with the US publisher for newer books, so it may take a while to find out who's responsible.)
Charles Stross
Yes, but not immediately. (Next up is "A Conventional Boy", which is about Derek the DM. Bob does not appear.) Bob is due to get one final outing in the Last Laundry novel (no title yet, not writing it yet, won't be out before the end of 2024 at the earliest).
Charles Stross
Imminently. (The US audiobook is due on June 20th; not sure when the UK edition is due out, but it'll be similar).
The reason the audiobooks don't drop at the same time as the paper and e-book editions is that recording can't start until the narrator has a copy of the final, as-published text, which isn't available until quite late in the day—right before it goes to the printers. To add to the complexity, the audio version is prepared by another company, so you can add editorial/workflow delays to the pipeline. An audiobook typically runs to something like 10-15 hours, so it takes a multiple of that time for the narrator to record it (think in terms of re-takes, time off to avoid a sore larynx, and so on: nobody records a novel in a single session!). Then it has to go to a sound engineer to mix down. So it's actually a few weeks work, at minimum, which can't start until after the ebook/paper book is done.
The reason the audiobooks don't drop at the same time as the paper and e-book editions is that recording can't start until the narrator has a copy of the final, as-published text, which isn't available until quite late in the day—right before it goes to the printers. To add to the complexity, the audio version is prepared by another company, so you can add editorial/workflow delays to the pipeline. An audiobook typically runs to something like 10-15 hours, so it takes a multiple of that time for the narrator to record it (think in terms of re-takes, time off to avoid a sore larynx, and so on: nobody records a novel in a single session!). Then it has to go to a sound engineer to mix down. So it's actually a few weeks work, at minimum, which can't start until after the ebook/paper book is done.
Charles Stross
Short answer: it's running very late, but is slowly progressing.
Long answer: I shelved it in 2017 due to family medical stuff. (Nothing sours you on a creative project quite like associating a book with family members dying. NB: both death certificates said "old age". It comes to us all eventually.)
In the meantime, Ghost Engine got sidelined by a new toy—the New Management books, which really wanted to be written right now. But once they were done I got back to work on GE last year ... only to be interrupted by editorial requests relating to yet another project, in this case a novella I began writing in 2009. (Hopefully it comes out next year. You might be seeing a pattern here?)
I hope to get back to work on Ghost Engine—again—next week. I'm currently halfway through the second draft: it'll take at least one more pass after that, then maybe, if nothing else interrupts me, it might make it onto bookshelves in 2024/25, in time for its tenth birthday!
Long answer: I shelved it in 2017 due to family medical stuff. (Nothing sours you on a creative project quite like associating a book with family members dying. NB: both death certificates said "old age". It comes to us all eventually.)
In the meantime, Ghost Engine got sidelined by a new toy—the New Management books, which really wanted to be written right now. But once they were done I got back to work on GE last year ... only to be interrupted by editorial requests relating to yet another project, in this case a novella I began writing in 2009. (Hopefully it comes out next year. You might be seeing a pattern here?)
I hope to get back to work on Ghost Engine—again—next week. I'm currently halfway through the second draft: it'll take at least one more pass after that, then maybe, if nothing else interrupts me, it might make it onto bookshelves in 2024/25, in time for its tenth birthday!
Charles Stross
Short answer: I have no idea.
Longer answer: The Rhesus Chart (and the Laundry books in general) are published in the UK and throughout the EU by Orbit, an imprint of Hachette. There is indeed an audiobook edition, and it's available via Audible on amazon.co.uk. I have no idea why audible.de don't carry it, and will ask my editor.
The situation may be something to do with Brexit, which utterly screwed up a lot of stuff. I just looked at amazon.de, and the Audible edition isn't visible there, either.
Longer answer: The Rhesus Chart (and the Laundry books in general) are published in the UK and throughout the EU by Orbit, an imprint of Hachette. There is indeed an audiobook edition, and it's available via Audible on amazon.co.uk. I have no idea why audible.de don't carry it, and will ask my editor.
The situation may be something to do with Brexit, which utterly screwed up a lot of stuff. I just looked at amazon.de, and the Audible edition isn't visible there, either.
Charles Stross
Yes!
New series: 2020's "Dead Lies Dreaming" was sold in the US as book 10 of the Laundry Files but is actually book 1 of the tales of the New Management -- different series, different focus and feel, different characters, but same universe. Book 2, "Quantum of Nightmares", comes out in January 2022 (book 3, "Season of Skulls", doesn't have a firm date yet but is probably going to show up 12 months later).
New standalone: my to-do list for 2022 includes "finish the (long overdue) standalone space opera I worked on in 2016". It exists in first draft, but got interrupted by family medical stuff: I'm ready to go back to work on it again. Won't be out before 2023 (probably 2024 -- it's big): title may or may not be "Ghost Engine" (that's up to the publishers).
Beyond that, I can't say -- I don't want to commit to stuff I won't even start writing for another couple of years -- but with the Merchant Princes/Empire Games series finished, I've got room to start something new.
New series: 2020's "Dead Lies Dreaming" was sold in the US as book 10 of the Laundry Files but is actually book 1 of the tales of the New Management -- different series, different focus and feel, different characters, but same universe. Book 2, "Quantum of Nightmares", comes out in January 2022 (book 3, "Season of Skulls", doesn't have a firm date yet but is probably going to show up 12 months later).
New standalone: my to-do list for 2022 includes "finish the (long overdue) standalone space opera I worked on in 2016". It exists in first draft, but got interrupted by family medical stuff: I'm ready to go back to work on it again. Won't be out before 2023 (probably 2024 -- it's big): title may or may not be "Ghost Engine" (that's up to the publishers).
Beyond that, I can't say -- I don't want to commit to stuff I won't even start writing for another couple of years -- but with the Merchant Princes/Empire Games series finished, I've got room to start something new.
Charles Stross
It's a "leave the door open" situation.
The "Empire Games" trilogy was conceived of as exactly that—a lone trilogy that would stand as a sequel/continuation of the previous "Merchant Princes" series. At this point, I am done with it—finished with this cast of characters, tired of the setting, burned out, and the editor who provided the impetus for the whole series since 2002 is dead.
However, I don't like to say "never", and I was exactly this burned-out back in 2009, when I finished the original series. It took five years before I was willing to talk about another series, but here we are! So there might at some future date be another story in this setting.
The "Empire Games" trilogy was conceived of as exactly that—a lone trilogy that would stand as a sequel/continuation of the previous "Merchant Princes" series. At this point, I am done with it—finished with this cast of characters, tired of the setting, burned out, and the editor who provided the impetus for the whole series since 2002 is dead.
However, I don't like to say "never", and I was exactly this burned-out back in 2009, when I finished the original series. It took five years before I was willing to talk about another series, but here we are! So there might at some future date be another story in this setting.
Charles Stross
Whoops, sorry it took me so long to get to this! (I don't hang out on Goodreads much.)
There are going to be two more novellas and one more novel in the main Laundry files sequence: the first of those novellas ("Escape from Puroland") comes out this year but is a fill-in, as is the other planned novella. For what happened to Mo, you really need to wait for either the final, untitled, novel, or for at least book 4 in the New Management series, of which "Dead Lies Dreaming" was the first installment.
(I'm working on edits to book 2 right now, and book 3 is half-written in first draft. I couldn't cope with writing civil service/spy stuff in the midst of the whole Brexit/Trump/COVID19 period, and in any case spies don't mean in 2021 what they meant in 1998 when I began writing the first book, so I'm getting the follow-on series fired up before I close out the first one.)
As for what happened to Mo and Bob, yes they get back together: but by the end of the Laundry Files, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN—the Lovecraftian singularity—has happened, and the question isn't so much who survives as *what* survives.
There are going to be two more novellas and one more novel in the main Laundry files sequence: the first of those novellas ("Escape from Puroland") comes out this year but is a fill-in, as is the other planned novella. For what happened to Mo, you really need to wait for either the final, untitled, novel, or for at least book 4 in the New Management series, of which "Dead Lies Dreaming" was the first installment.
(I'm working on edits to book 2 right now, and book 3 is half-written in first draft. I couldn't cope with writing civil service/spy stuff in the midst of the whole Brexit/Trump/COVID19 period, and in any case spies don't mean in 2021 what they meant in 1998 when I began writing the first book, so I'm getting the follow-on series fired up before I close out the first one.)
As for what happened to Mo and Bob, yes they get back together: but by the end of the Laundry Files, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN—the Lovecraftian singularity—has happened, and the question isn't so much who survives as *what* survives.
Charles Stross
(Sorry for the delay answering—been in Finland without a laptop, then Goodreads' author page was down for some days.)
I've never been a civil servant as such but I've worked in a couple of related roles, notably as an IT contractor for a local government organization, and as a pharmacist in NHS regional hospital units, both of which were run along very similar lines.
I've also worked for other organizations (such as a US-headquartered software multinational and smaller start-ups) which exposed me to different management practices.
(And some my friends are career civil servants.)
Ultimately bureaucracy is all about management quality control. If you set out to accomplish a one-person task you don't need to coordinate with anyone else, and as the task scales up a bit a small team can scrape by on conversations as long as someone's clearly in charge, but at some point (usually somewhere between 8 and 20 bodies in anything more complex than rote repetition) it stops being easy for your single-person-in-charge to keep track of what everybody else is doing. At which point you need more than one person-in-charge, which means meetings so that your managers know what each other are doing, and relief managers (your managers get sick or need time off), and they need to write up what they're doing and circulate memos … and gradually the process of managing the work becomes more complex than the work itself.
This same stuff happens everywhere when you get lots of people working towards a common goal, and it happens faster in creative or technical areas where the underlying work is idiosyncratic or complex.
The same dysfunctions keep showing up: fads imposed by senior management (in an attempt to get a grip on the complexity), ambitious greasy pole-climbers, petty sabotage, paperclip theft, bullying, and stress. It's not even a problem unique to government, bureaucracy, and management: many of the same problems show up in any high school classroom.
So I take the general principles of what happens when you get a bunch of people working together (who don't necessarily like each other but have a common task to focus on and a management figurehead making demands they have to satisfy) and then see where it leads.
I've never been a civil servant as such but I've worked in a couple of related roles, notably as an IT contractor for a local government organization, and as a pharmacist in NHS regional hospital units, both of which were run along very similar lines.
I've also worked for other organizations (such as a US-headquartered software multinational and smaller start-ups) which exposed me to different management practices.
(And some my friends are career civil servants.)
Ultimately bureaucracy is all about management quality control. If you set out to accomplish a one-person task you don't need to coordinate with anyone else, and as the task scales up a bit a small team can scrape by on conversations as long as someone's clearly in charge, but at some point (usually somewhere between 8 and 20 bodies in anything more complex than rote repetition) it stops being easy for your single-person-in-charge to keep track of what everybody else is doing. At which point you need more than one person-in-charge, which means meetings so that your managers know what each other are doing, and relief managers (your managers get sick or need time off), and they need to write up what they're doing and circulate memos … and gradually the process of managing the work becomes more complex than the work itself.
This same stuff happens everywhere when you get lots of people working towards a common goal, and it happens faster in creative or technical areas where the underlying work is idiosyncratic or complex.
The same dysfunctions keep showing up: fads imposed by senior management (in an attempt to get a grip on the complexity), ambitious greasy pole-climbers, petty sabotage, paperclip theft, bullying, and stress. It's not even a problem unique to government, bureaucracy, and management: many of the same problems show up in any high school classroom.
So I take the general principles of what happens when you get a bunch of people working together (who don't necessarily like each other but have a common task to focus on and a management figurehead making demands they have to satisfy) and then see where it leads.
Charles Stross
I don't watch TV drama, as a rule, and have never seen House MD. (It's American TV, right?)
Charles Stross
The back-story to the series is kind of broken—I should really have separated "Iron Sunrise" completely from "Singularity Sky" and started it with a clean sheet. Here's a full explanation, with links to a couple of supplementary essays on what went wrong with it.
(And in answer to your immediate questions: I don't know, because I gave up before I got far enough into planning the third book to come up with answers to them.)
(And in answer to your immediate questions: I don't know, because I gave up before I got far enough into planning the third book to come up with answers to them.)
Charles Stross
Short answer: nope.
Longer answer: As the narrator of that novel is female, it was decided to use a female narrator for the audiobook as well; Jack Hawkins is, regrettably, not female.
Also, to be blunt, you're the only reader (listener?) so far to complain about the US audiobook edition of Annihilation Score. Recording an audiobook edition is quite expensive — you're paying union rates for roughly 40-50 hours of voice actor time and 20-40 hours of sound studio engineer time, which comes to some thousands of dollars. A re-recording simply won't happen for any non-bestseller book in the absence of some overriding external factor, such as a TV/movie adaptation (and probably not even then).
You do have one option, though. Little, Brown, the British publisher of the Laundry Files, recorded their own audiobook editions using different voice actors. As I'm not an audiobook user myself I can't advise, but you might be able to get hold of a UK audiobook copy?
Longer answer: As the narrator of that novel is female, it was decided to use a female narrator for the audiobook as well; Jack Hawkins is, regrettably, not female.
Also, to be blunt, you're the only reader (listener?) so far to complain about the US audiobook edition of Annihilation Score. Recording an audiobook edition is quite expensive — you're paying union rates for roughly 40-50 hours of voice actor time and 20-40 hours of sound studio engineer time, which comes to some thousands of dollars. A re-recording simply won't happen for any non-bestseller book in the absence of some overriding external factor, such as a TV/movie adaptation (and probably not even then).
You do have one option, though. Little, Brown, the British publisher of the Laundry Files, recorded their own audiobook editions using different voice actors. As I'm not an audiobook user myself I can't advise, but you might be able to get hold of a UK audiobook copy?
Charles Stross
AFUtD wasn't a direct influence on "Accelerando" at all—but it was a strong influence on "Singularity Sky"/"Iron Sunrise"; meanwhile, Vernor's essay on The Technological Singularity from 1993 bears reading if you're interested in "Accelerando". He asserted, among other things, that you can't actually tell stories about the singularity, only about the prior conditions and what it's like afterwards: in "Accelerando" I deliberately tried to prove him wrong. (In "Accelerando" the singularity happens off-stage midway through "Router", at the point when the passengers are arguing about whether it's possible/when it happened ... in an upload realm aboard a coke-can sized starship, which is the real tell.)
Charles Stross
Yes, very probably!
Right now I've got a couple of novels to finish that are soaking up all my energy and time, leaving me just about enough left over to write maybe one short story or novelette on the side per year. (For example, I've got a novelette coming out in "Knaves over Queens", one of the next Wild Cards anthologies edited by GRRM.)
However, as I grow older I'm slowing down (a little). So rather than trying to write 1.5-2 novels a year, I'm thinking of cutting down to just one book a year ... and the balance in novellas and novelettes.
Right now I've got a couple of novels to finish that are soaking up all my energy and time, leaving me just about enough left over to write maybe one short story or novelette on the side per year. (For example, I've got a novelette coming out in "Knaves over Queens", one of the next Wild Cards anthologies edited by GRRM.)
However, as I grow older I'm slowing down (a little). So rather than trying to write 1.5-2 novels a year, I'm thinking of cutting down to just one book a year ... and the balance in novellas and novelettes.
Charles Stross
I cannot comment on this subject at this time.
(Ask me again in a month or two ...)
(Ask me again in a month or two ...)
Charles Stross
Short answer:
Book nine, "The Labyrinth Index", is written and on its way to publication (October 30th); beyond that, nobody knows.
Longer answer:
In the beginning there was just one short novel. Then it was going to be a trilogy. Now ...
Provisionally I am thinking in terms of a final three book story arc (after "The Labyrinth Index") to close out the core series. There are also some shorter stories to be told in the setting, and possibilities for spin-off novels (ever wondered what the Invisible College got up to in the 1920s, for example?). But I don't want to commit to an open-ended series or string you along for too long, and it's very hard to keep track of everything in a continuity that's already over 1.1 million words.
So right now, I plan to step back for a while (after "The Labyrinth Index" comes out), work out how exactly I want to run the last three books, and then get them done.
However, no plan survives contact with the real world. Upheavals or disruption in the publishing industry could kill the series prematurely. Or, on the other hand, it could be optioned and turned into a massively successful television franchise in which case I'll be compelled to write endless sequels. Who knows? All I know is that I have a provisional plan, and I want to keep writing them as long as it's fun.
Book nine, "The Labyrinth Index", is written and on its way to publication (October 30th); beyond that, nobody knows.
Longer answer:
In the beginning there was just one short novel. Then it was going to be a trilogy. Now ...
Provisionally I am thinking in terms of a final three book story arc (after "The Labyrinth Index") to close out the core series. There are also some shorter stories to be told in the setting, and possibilities for spin-off novels (ever wondered what the Invisible College got up to in the 1920s, for example?). But I don't want to commit to an open-ended series or string you along for too long, and it's very hard to keep track of everything in a continuity that's already over 1.1 million words.
So right now, I plan to step back for a while (after "The Labyrinth Index" comes out), work out how exactly I want to run the last three books, and then get them done.
However, no plan survives contact with the real world. Upheavals or disruption in the publishing industry could kill the series prematurely. Or, on the other hand, it could be optioned and turned into a massively successful television franchise in which case I'll be compelled to write endless sequels. Who knows? All I know is that I have a provisional plan, and I want to keep writing them as long as it's fun.
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