Charles Stross's Blog

The pivot

It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. (Here's looking at you, Ben Bova.)

Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that's going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It's pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we're seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point.

Until approximately 1750, humanity's energy budget was constrained by the available sources: muscle power, wind power (via sails and windmills), some water power (via water wheels), and only heat from burning wood and coal (and a little whale oil for lighting).

During the 19th century we learned to use combustion engines to provide motive power for both stationary machines and propulsion. This included powering forced ventilation for blast furnaces and other industrial processes, and pumps for water and other working fluids. We learned to reform gas from coal for municipal lighting ("town gas") and, later, to power dynamos for municipal electricity generation. Late in the 19th century we began to switch from coal (cumbersome, bulky, contained non-combustible inclusions) to burning fractionated oil for processes that demanded higher energy densities. And that's where we stuck for most of the long 20th century.

During the 20th century, the difficulty of supporting long-range military operations led to a switch from coal to oil—the pivotal event was the ultimately-disastrous voyage of the Russian Baltic fleet to the Sea of Japan in 1906, during the Russo-Japanese war. From the 1890s onwards Russia had been expanding into Siberia and then encroaching on the edges of the rapidly-weakening Chinese empire. This brought Russia into direct conflict with Japan over Korea (Japan, too, had imperial ambitions), leading to the outbreak of war in 1905—when Japan wiped out the Russian far-eastern fleet in a surprise attack. (Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not that surprising to anyone familiar with Japanese military history!) So the Russian navy sent Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, to the far east with the hastily-renamed Second Pacific Squadron, whereupon they were sunk at the Battle of Tsushima.

Rozhestvensky had sailed his fleet over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) from the Baltic Sea, taking seven months and refueling numerous times at sea with coal (around a quarter of a million tons of it!) because he'd ticked off the British and most ports were closed to him. To the admiralties watching from around the world, the message was glaringly obvious—coal was a logistical pain in the arse—and oil far preferable for refueling battleships, submarines, and land vehicles far from home. (HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine-powered all-big-gun battleship, launched in 1905, was a transitional stage that still relied on coal but carried a large quantity of fuel oil to spray on the coal to increase its burn rate: later in the decade, the RN moved to oil-only fueled warships.)

Spot the reason why the British Empire got heavily involved in Iran, with geopolitical consequences that are still playing out to this day! (The USA inherited large chunks of the British empire in the wake of the second world war: the dysfunctional politics of oil are in large part the legacy of applying an imperial resource extraction model to an energy source.)

Anyway. The 20th century left us with three obvious problems: automobile driven suburban sprawl and transport infrastructure, violent dissatisfaction among the people of colonized oil-producing nations, and a massive burp of carbon dioxide emissions that is destabilizing our climate.

Photovoltaic cells go back to 1839, but until the 21st century they remained a solution in search of very specific problems: they were heavy, produced relatively little power, and degraded over time if left exposed to the sun. Early PV cells were mainly used to provide power to expensive devices in inaccessible locations, such as aboard satellites and space probes: it cost $96 per watt for a solar module in the mid-1970s. But we've been on an exponential decreasing cost curve since then, reaching $0.62/watt by the end of 2012, and it's still on-going.

China is currently embarked on a dash for solar power which really demands the adjective "science-fictional", having installed 198GW of cells between January and May, with 93GW coming online in May alone: China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going. They've also acquired a near-monopoly on the export of PV panels because this roll-out is happening on the back of massive thin-film manufacturing capacity.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it's cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

China is also banking on the global shift to transport using EVs. High speed rail is almost always electrified (not having to ship an enormous mass of heavy fuel around helps), electric cars are now more convenient than internal combustion ones to people who live in dense population areas, and e-bikes don't need advocacy any more (although roads and infrastructure friendly to non-motorists—pedestrians and public transport as well as cyclists—is another matter).

Some forms of transport can't obviously be electrified. High capacity/long range aviation is one—airliners get lighter as they fly because they're burning off fuel. A hypothetical battery powered airliner can't get lighter in flight: it's stuck with the dead weight of depleted cells. (There are some niches for battery powered aircraft, including short range/low payload stuff, air taxis, and STOVL, but they're not going to replace the big Airbus and Boeing fleets any time soon.)

Some forms of transport will become obsolescent in the wake of a switch to EVs. About half the fossil fuel powered commercial shipping in use today is used to move fossil fuels around. We're going to be using crude oil for the foreseeable future, as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries, but they account for a tiny fraction of the oil we burn for transport, including shipping. (Plastic recycling is over-hyped but might eventually get us out of this dependency—if we ever get it to work efficiently.)

So we're going through an energy transition period unlike anything since the 1830s or 1920s and it's having some non-obvious but very important political consequences, from bribery and corruption all the way up to open warfare.

The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.

I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline, and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who benefited from it. When Germany is installing rooftop solar effectively enough to displace coal generation, that's a sign that PV panels have become implausibly cheap. We have cars and trucks with reasonably long ranges, and fast-charger systems that can take a car from 20% to 80% battery capacity in a quarter of an hour. If you can do that to a car or a truck you can probably do it to a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle, insofar as they remain relevant. We can do battery-to-battery recharging (anyone with a USB power bank for their mobile phone already knows this) and in any case the whole future of warfare (or geopolitics by other means) is up in the air right now—quite literally, with the lightning-fast evolution of drone warfare over the past three years.

The real difference is likely to be that energy production is widely distributed rather than concentrated in resource extraction economies and power stations. It turns out that PV panels are a great way of making use of agriculturally useless land, and also coexist well with some agricultural practices. Livestock likes shade and shelter (especially in hot weather) so PV panels on raised stands or fences can work well with sheep or cattle, and mixed-crop agriculture where low-growing plants are sheltered from direct sunlight by taller crops can also work with PV panels instead of the higher-growing plants. You can even in principle use the power from the farm PV panels to drive equipment in greenhouses: carbon dioxide concentrators, humidifiers, heat pumps to prevent overheating/freezing, drainage pumps, and grow lamps to drive the light-dependent reactions in photosynthesis.

All of which we're really going to need because we've passed the threshold for +1.5 ��C climate change, which means an increasing number of days per year when things get too hot for photosynthesis under regular conditions. There are three main pathways for photosynthesis, but none of them deal really well with high temperatures, although some adaptation is possible. Active cooling is probably impractical in open field agriculture, but in intensive indoor farming it might be an option. And then there's the parallel work on improving how photosynthesis works: an alternative pathway to the Calvin cycle is possible and the enzymes to make it work have been engineered into Arabidopsis, with promising results.

In addition to the too-many-hot-days problem, climate change means fluctuations in weather: too much wind, too much rain—or too little of both—at short notice, which can be physically devastating for crops. Our existing staple crops require a stable, predictable climate. If we lose that, we're going to have crop failures and famines by and by, where it's not already happening. The UK has experienced three of its worst harvests in the past century in this decade (and this decade is only half over). As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. We don't have the reserves we would need to survive the coming turbulence by traditional means.

This, in part, explains the polycrisis: nobody can fix what's wrong using existing tools. Consequently many people think that what's going wrong can't be fixed. The existing wealthy elites (who have only grown increasingly wealthy over the past half century) derive their status and lifestyle from the perpetuation of the pre-existing system. But as economist Herbert Stein observed (of an economic process) in 1985, "if it can't go on forever it will stop". The fossil fuel energy economy is stopping right now—we've probably already passed peak oil and probably peak carbon: the trend is now inexorably downwards, either voluntarily into a net-zero/renewables future, or involuntarily into catastrophe. And the involuntary option is easier for the incumbents to deal with, both in terms of workload (do nothing, right up until we hit the buffers) and emotionally (it requires no sacrifice of comfort, of status, or of relative position). Clever oligarchs would have gotten ahead of the curve and invested heavily in renewables but the evidence of our eyes (and the supremacy of Chinese PV manufacturers in the global market) says that they're not that smart.

The traditional ruling hierarchy in the west had a major shake-up in 1914-19 (understatement: most of the monarchies collapsed) in the wake of the convulsion of the first world war. The elites tried to regain a degree of control, but largely failed due to the unstable conditions produced by the great depression and then the second world war (itself an emergent side-effect of fascist regimes' attempts to impose imperial colonial policies on their immediate neighbours, rather than keeping the jackboots and whips at a comfortable remove). Reconstruction after WW2 and a general post-depression consensus that emerged around accepting the lesser evil of social democracy as a viable prophylactic to the devil of communism kept the oligarchs down for another couple of decades, but actually-existing capitalism in the west stopped being about wealth creation (if it ever had been) some time in the 1960s, and switched gear to wealth concentration (the "he who dies with the most toys, wins" model of life). By the end of the 1970s, with the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the traditional wealthy elites began to reassert control, citing the spurious intellectual masturbation of neoliberal economics as justification for greed and repression.

But neoliberalism was repurposed within a couple of decades as a stalking-horse for asset-stripping, in which the state was hollowed out and its functions outsourced to the private sector—to organizations owned by the existing elites, which turned the public purse into a source of private profit. And we're now a couple of generations into this process, and our current rulers don't remember a time when things were different. So they have no idea how to adapt to a changing world.

Cory Doctorow has named the prevailing model of capitalist exploitation enshittification. We no longer buy goods, we buy services (streaming video instead of owning DVDs or tapes, web services instead of owning software, renting instead of buying), and having been captured by the platforms we rent from, we are then subject to rent extraction: the service quality is degraded, the price is jacked up, and there's nowhere to go because the big platforms have driven their rivals into bankruptcy or irrelevance:

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This model of doing business (badly) is a natural consequence of the bigger framework of neoliberalism, under which a corporation's directors overriding duty is to maximize shareholder value in the current quarter, with no heed to the second and subsequent quarters hence: the future is irrelevant, feed me shouts the Audrey II of shareholder activism. Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel (who apparently believes Greta Thunberg is the AntiChrist.)

if it can't go on forever it will stop

What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so. It's already leading to resource wars, famines, political upheaval, and insecurity (and when people feel insecure, they rally to demagogues who promise them easy fixes: hence the outbreaks of fascism). The ultra-rich don't want it to stop because they can't conceive of a future in which it stops and they retain their supremacy. (Also, they're children of privilege and most of them are not terribly bright, much less imaginative—as witness how easily they're robbed blind by grifters like Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman Fried, and arguably Sam Altman). Those of them whose wealth is based in ownership of fossil fuel assets still in the ground have good reason to be scared: these are very nearly stranded assets already, and we're heading for a future in which electricity is almost too cheap to meter.

All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the room, which is the end of Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been on its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from parallelism. Aside from a very few tech bubbles which soak up all available processing power, belch, and ask for more, the all you can eat buffet for tech investors is over. (And those bubbles are only continuing as long as scientifically naive investors keep throwing more money at them.)

The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying. Massive AI data centres won't keep the coal mines running or the nuclear reactors building out (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware). They're the 2025 equivalent of 2020's Bored Ape NFTs (remember those?). The forecast boom in small modular nuclear reactors is going to fizzle in the face of massive build-out of distributed, wildly cheap photovoltaic power plus battery backup. Quantum computing isn't going to save the tech sector, and that's the "next big thing" the bubble-hypemongers have been saving for later for the past two decades. (Get back to me when you've got hardware that can factor an integer greater than 31.)

If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.

But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can't go on. So it's going to stop. And then—

Interim update

So, in the past month I've been stabbed in the right eye, successfully, at the local ophthalmology hospital.

Cataract surgery is interesting: bright lights, mask over the rest of your face, powerful local anaesthesia, constant flow of irrigation— they practically operate underwater. Afterwards there's a four week course of eye drops (corticosteroids for inflammation, and a two week course of an NSAID for any residual ache). I'm now long-sighted in my right eye, which is quite an experience, and it's recovered. And my colour vision in the right eye is notably improved, enough that my preferred screen brightness level for my left eye is painful to the right.

Drawbacks: firstly, my right eye has extensive peripheral retinopathy—I was half-blind in it before I developed the cataracts—and secondly, the op altered my prescription significantly enough that I can't read with it. I need to wait a month after I've had the second eye operation before I can go back to my regular ophthalmologist to be checked out and get a new set of prescription glasses. As I spent about 60 hours a week either reading or writing, I've been spending a lot of time with my right eye screwed shut (eye patches are uncomfortable). And I'm pretty sure my writing/reading is going to be a dumpster fire for about six weeks after the second eye is operated on. (New specs take a couple of weeks to come through from the factory.) I'll try cheap reading glasses in the mean time but I'm not optimistic: I am incapable of absorbing text through my ears (audiobooks and podcasts simply don't work for me—I zone out within seconds) and I can't write fiction using speech-to-text either (the cadences of speech are inimical to prose, even before we get into my more-extensive-than-normal vocabulary or use of confusing-to-robots neologisms).

In the meantime ...

I finished the first draft of Starter Pack at 116,500 words: it's with my agent. It is not finished and it is not sold—it definitely needs edits before it goes to any editors—but at least it is A Thing, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My next job (after some tedious business admin) is to pick up Ghost Engine and finish that, too: I've got about 20,000 words to go. If I'm not interrupted by surgery, it'll be done by the end of the year, but surgery will probably add a couple of months of delays. Then that, too, goes back to my agent—then hopefully to the UK editor who has been waiting patiently for it for a decade now, and then to find a US publisher. I must confess to some trepidation: for the first time in about two decades I am out of contract (except for the UK edition of GE) and the two big-ass series are finished—after The Regicide Report comes out next January 27th there's nothing on the horizon except for these two books set in an entirely new setting which is drastically different to anything I've done before. Essentially I've invested about 2-3 years' work on a huge gamble: and I won't even know if it's paid off before early 2027.

It's not a totally stupid gamble, though. I began Ghost Engine in 2015, when everyone was assuring me that space opera was going to be the next big thing: and space opera is still the next big thing, insofar as there's going to be a huge and ongoing market for raw escapism that lets people switch off from the world-as-it-is for a few hours. The Laundry Files was in trouble: who needs to escape into a grimdark alternate present where our politics has been taken over by Lovecraftian horrors now?

Indeed, you may have noticed a lack of blog entries talking about the future this year. It's because the future's so grim I need a floodlight to pick out any signs of hope. There is a truism that with authoritarians and fascists, every accusation they make is a confession—either a confession of something they've done, or of something they want to do. (They can't comprehend the possibility that not everybody shares their outlook and desires, to they attribute their own motivations to their opponents.) Well, for many decades now the far right have been foaming about a vast "international communist conspiracy", and what seems to be surfacing this decade is actually a vast international far-right conspiracy: from Trump and MAGA in the USA to Farage and Reform in the UK, to Orban's Fidesz in Hungary, to Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey and Modi's Hindutva nationalists in India and Xi's increasingly authoritarian clamp-down in China, all the fascist insects have emerged from the woodwork at the same time. It's global.

I can discern some faint outlines in the darkness. Fascism is a reaction to uncertainty and downward spiraling living standards, especially among the middle classes. Over the past few decades globalisation of trade has concentrated wealth in a very small number of immensely rich hands, and the middle classes are being squeezed hard. At the same time, the hyper-rich feel themselves to be embattled and besieged. Those of them who own social media networks and newspapers and TV and radio channels are increasingly turning them into strident far-right propaganda networks, because historically fascist regimes have relied on an alliance of rich industrialists combined with the angry poor, who can be aimed at an identifiable enemy.

A big threat to the hyper-rich currently is the end of Moore's Law. Continuous improvements in semiconductor performance began to taper off after 2002 or thereabouts, and are now almost over. The tech sector is no longer actually producing significantly improved products each year: instead, it's trying to produce significantly improved revenue by parasitizing its consumers. ("Enshittification" as Cory Doctorow named it: I prefer to call the broader picture "crapitalism".) This means that it's really hard to invest for a guaranteed return on investment these days.

To make matters worse, we're entering an energy cost deflation cycle. Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they're still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere. It turns out that many agricultural crops benefit from shade: ground-dwellers coexist happily with PV panels on overhead stands, and farm animals also like to be able to get out of the sun. (This isn't the case for maize and beef, but consider root vegetables, brassicae, and sheep ...)

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they've been overtaken by renewables. (Some oil is still going to be needed for a very long time—for plastics and the chemical industries—but it's a fraction of that which is burned for power, heating, and transport.)

We can see the same dynamic in miniature in the other current investment bubble, "AI data centres". It's not AI (it is, at best, deep learning) and it's being hyped and sold for utterly inappropriate purposes. This is in service to propping up the share prices of NVidia (the GPU manufacturer), OpenAI and Anthropic (neither of whom have a clear path to eventual profitability: they're the tech bubble du jour—call it dot-com 3.0) and also propping up the commercial real estate market and ongoing demand for fossil fuels. COVID19 and work from home trashed demand for large office space: data centres offer to replace this. AI data centres are also hugely energy-inefficient, which keeps those old fossil fuel plants burning.

So there's a perfect storm coming, and the people with the money are running scared, and to deal with it they're pushing bizarre, counter-reality policies: imposing tariffs on imported electric cars and solar panels, promoting conspiracy theories, selling the public on the idea that true artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and promoting hate (because it's a great distraction).

I think there might be a better future past all of this, but I don't think I'll be around to see it: it's at least a decade away (possibly 5-7 decades if we're collectively very unlucky). In the meantime our countries are being overrun by vicious xenophobes who hate everyone who doesn't conform to their desire for industrial feudalism.

Obviously pushing back against the fascists is important. Equally obviously, you can't push back if you're dead. I'm over 60 and not in great health so I'm going to leave the protests to the young: instead, I'm going to focus on personal survival and telling hopeful stories.

August update

One of the things I've found out the hard way over the past year is that slowly going blind has subtle but negative effects on my productivity.

Cataracts are pretty much the commonest cause of blindness, they can be fixed permanently by surgically replacing the lens of the eye—I gather the op takes 15-20 minutes and can be carried out with only local anaesthesia: I'm having my first eye done next Tuesday—but it creeps up on you slowly. Even fast-developing cataracts take months.

In my case what I noticed first was the stars going out, then the headlights of oncoming vehicles at night twinkling annoyingly. Cataracts diffuse the light entering your eye, so that starlight (which is pretty dim to begin with) is spread across too wide an area of your retina to register. Similarly, the car headlights had the same blurring but remained bright enough to be annoying.

The next thing I noticed (or didn't) was my reading throughput diminishing. I read a lot and I read fast, eye problems aside: but last spring and summer I noticed I'd dropped from reading about 5 novels a week to fewer than 3. And for some reason, I wasn't as productive at writing. The ideas were still there, but staring at a computer screen was curiously fatiguing, so I found myself demotivated, and unconsciously taking any excuse to do something else.

Then I went for my regular annual ophthalmology check-up and was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes.

In the short term, I got a new prescription: this focussed things slightly better, but there are limits to what you can do with glass, even very expensive glass. My diagnosis came at the worst time; the eye hospital that handles cataracts for pretty much the whole of south-east Scotland, the Queen Alexandria Eye Pavilion, closed suddenly at the end of last October: a cracked drainpipe had revealed asbestos cement in the building structure and emergency repairs were needed. It's a key hospital, but even so taking the asbestos out of a five story high hospital block takes time—it only re-opened at the start of July. Opthalmological surgery was spread out to other hospitals in the region but everything got a bit logjammed, hence the delays.

I considered paying for private private surgery. It's available, at a price: because this is a civilized country where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, I don't have health insurance, and I decided to wait a bit rather than pay ��7000 or so to get both eyes done immediately. It turned out that, in the event, going private would have been foolish: the Eye Pavilion is open again, and it's only in the past month—since the beginning of July or thereabouts—that I've noticed my output slowing down significantly again.

Anyway, I'm getting my eyes fixed, but not at the same time: they like to leave a couple of weeks between them. So I might not be updating the blog much between now and the end of September.

Also contributing to the slow updates: I hit "pause" on my long-overdue space opera Ghost Engine on April first, with the final draft at the 80% point (with about 20,000 words left to re-write). The proximate reason for stopping was not my eyesight deteriorating but me being unable to shut up my goddamn muse, who was absolutely insistent that I had to drop everything and write a different novel right now. (That novel, Starter Pack, is an exploration of a throwaway idea from the very first sentence of Ghost Engine: they share a space operatic universe but absolutely no characters, planets, or starships with silly names: they're set thousands of years apart.) Anyway, I have ground to a halt on the new novel as well, but I've got a solid 95,000 words in hand, and only about 20,000 words left to write before my agent can kick the tires and tell me if it's something she can sell.

I am pretty sure you would rather see two new space operas from me than five or six extra blog entries between now and the end of the year, right?

(NB: thematically, Ghost Engine is my spin on a Banksian-scale space opera that's putting the boot in on the embryonic TESCREAL religion and the sort of half-baked AI/mind uploading singularitarianism I explored in Accelerando). Hopefully it has the "mouth feel" of a Culture novel without being in any way imitative. And Starter Pack is three heist capers in a trench-coat trying to escape from a rabid crapsack galactic empire, and a homage to Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat—with a side-order of exploring the political implications of lossy mind-uploading.)

All my energy is going into writing these two novels despite deteriorating vision right now, so I have mostly been ignoring the news (it's too depressing and distracting) and being a boring shut-in. It will be a huge relief to reset the text zoom in Scrivener back from 220% down to 100% once I have working eyeballs again! At which point I expect to get even less visible for a few frenzied weeks. Last time I was unable to write because of vision loss (caused by Bell's Palsy) back in 2013, I squirted out the first draft of The Annihilation Score in 18 days when I recovered: I'm hoping for a similar productivity rebound in September/October—although they can't be published before 2027 at the earliest (assuming they sell).

Anyway: see you on the other side!

PS: Amazon is now listing The Regicide Report as going on sale on January 27th, 2026: as far as I know that's a firm date.

Obligatory blurb:

An occult assassin, an elderly royal and a living god face off in The Regicide Report, the thrilling final novel in Charles Stross' epic, Hugo Award-winning Laundry Files series.

When the Elder God recently installed as Prime Minister identifies the monarchy as a threat to his growing power, Bob Howard and Mo O'Brien - recently of the supernatural espionage service known as the Laundry Files - are reluctantly pressed into service.

Fighting vampirism, scheming American agents and their own better instincts, Bob and Mo will join their allies for the very last time. God save the Queen��� because someone has to.

Crib Sheet: A Conventional Boy

A Conventional Boy is the most recent published novel in the Laundry Files as of 2025, but somewhere between the fourth and sixth in internal chronological order—it takes place at least a year after the events of The Fuller Memorandum and at least a year before the events of The Nightmare Stacks.

I began writing it in 2009, and it was originally going to be a long short story (a novelette—8000-16,000 words). But one thing after another got in the way, until I finally picked it up to try and finish it in 2022—at which point it ran away to 40,000 words! Which put it at the upper end of the novella length range. And then I sent it to my editor at Tor.com, who asked for some more scenes covering Derek's life in Camp Sunshine, which shoved it right over the threshold into "short novel" territory at 53,000 words. That's inconveniently short for a stand-alone novel this century (it'd have been fine in the 1950s; Asimov's original Foundation novels were fix-ups of two novellas that bulked up to roughly that length), so we made a decision to go back to the format of The Atrocity Archives—a short novel bundled with another story (or stories) and an explanatory essay. In this case, we chose two novelettes previously published on Tor.com, and an essay exploring the origins of the D&D Satanic Panic of the 1980s (which features heavily in this novel, and which seems eerily topical in the current—2020s—political climate).

(Why is it short, and not a full-sized novel? Well, I wrote it in 2022-23, the year I had COVID19 twice and badly—not hospital-grade badly, but it left me with brain fog for more than a year and I'm pretty sure it did some permanent damage. As it happens, a novella is structurally simpler than a novel (it typically needs only one or two plot strands, rather than three or more or some elaborate extras). and I need to be able to hold the structure of a story together in my head while I write it. A Conventional Boy was the most complicated thing I could have written in that condition without it being visibly defective. There are only two plot strands and some historical flashbacks, they're easily interleaved, and the main plot itself is fairly simple. When your brain is a mass of congealed porridge? Keeping it simple is good. It was accepted by Tor.com for print and ebook publication in 2023, and would normally have come out in 2024, but for business reasons was delayed until January 2025. So take this as my 2024 book, slightly delayed, and suffice to say that my next book—The Regicide Report, due out in January 2026—is back to full length again.)

So, what's it about?

I introduced a new but then-minor Laundry character called Derek the DM in The Nightmare Stacks: Derek is portly, short-sighted, middle-aged, and works in Forecasting Ops, the department of precognition (predicting the future, or trying to), a unit I introduced as a throwaway gag in the novelette Overtime (which is also part of the book). If you think about the implications for any length of time it becomes apparent that precognition is a winning tool for any kind of intelligence agency, so I had to hedge around it a bit: it turns out that Forecasting Ops are not infallible. They can be "jammed" by precognitives working for rival organizations. Focussing too closely on a precise future can actually make it less likely to come to pass. And different precognitives are less or more accurate. Derek is one of the Laundry's best forecasters, and also an invaluable operation planner—or scenario designer, as he'd call it, because he was, and is, a Dungeon Master at heart.

I figured out that Derek's back-story had to be fascinating before I even finished writing The Nightmare Stacks, and I actually planned to write A Conventional Boy next. But somehow it got away from me, and kept getting shoved back down my to-do list until Derek appeared again in The Labyrinth Index and I realized I had to get him nailed down before The Regicide Report (for reasons that will become clear when that novel comes out). So here we are.

Derek began DM'ing for his group of friends in the early 1980s, using the original AD&D rules (the last edition I played). The campaign he's been running in Camp Sunshine is based on the core AD&D rules, with his own mutant extensions: he's rewritten almost everything, because TTRPG rule books are expensive when you're either a 14 year old with a 14-yo's pocket money allowance or a trusty in a prison that pays wages of 30p an hour. So he doesn't recognize the Omphalos Corporation's LARP scenario as a cut-rate knock-off of The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and he didn't have the money to keep up with subsequent editions of AD&D.

Yes, there are some self-referential bits in here. As with the TTRPGs in the New Management books, they eerily prefigure events in the outside world in the Laundryverse. Derek has no idea that naming his homebrew ruleset and campaign Cult of the Black Pharaoh might be problematic until he met Iris Carpenter, Bob's treacherous manager from The Fuller Memorandum (and now Derek's boss in the camp, where she's serving out her sentence running the recreational services). Yes, the game scenario he runs at DiceCon is a garbled version of Eve's adventure in Quantum of Nightmares. (There's a reason he gets pulled into Forecasting Ops!)

DiceCon is set in Scarfolk—for further information, please re-read. Richard Littler's excellent satire of late 1970s north-west England exactly nails the ambiance I wanted for the setting, and Camp Sunshine was already set not far from there: so yes, this is a deliberate homage to Scarfolk (in parts).

And finally, Piranha Solution is real.

You can buy A Conventional Boy here (North America) or here (UK/EU).

Another update

Good news/no news:

The latest endoscopy procedure went smoothly. There are signs of irritation in my fundus (part of the stomach lining) but no obvious ulceration or signs of cancer. Biopsy samples taken, I'm awaiting the results. (They're testing for celiac, as well as cytology.)

I'm also on the priority waiting list for cataract surgery at the main eye hospital, with an option to be called up at short notice if someone ahead of me on the list cancels.

This is good stuff; what's less good is that I'm still feeling a bit crap and have blurry double vision in both eyes. So writing is going very slowly right now. This isn't helped by me having just checked the page proofs for The Regicide Report, which will be on the way to production by the end of the month.

(There's a long lead time with this title because it has to be published simultaneously in the USA and UK, which means allowing time in the pipeline for Orbit in the UK to take the typeset files and reprocess them for their own size of paper and binding, and on the opposite side, for Tor.com to print and distribute physical hardcovers—which, in the USA, means weeks in shipping containers slowly heading for warehouses in other states: it's a big place.)

Both the new space operas in progress are currently at around 80% complete but going very slowly (this is not quite a euphemism for "stalled") because: see eyeballs above. This is also the proximate cause of the slow/infrequent blogging. My ability to read or focus on a screen is really impaired right now: it's not that I can't do it, it's just really tiring so I'm doing far less of it. On the other hand, I expect that once my eyes are fixed my productivity will get a huge rebound boost. Last time I was unable to write or read for a couple of months (in 2013 or thereabouts: I had Bell's Palsy and my most working eye kept watering because the eyelid didn't work properly) I ended up squirting the first draft of novel out in eighteen days after it cleared up. (That was The Annihilation Score. You're welcome.)

Final news: I'm not doing many SF convention appearances these days because COVID (and Trump), but I am able to announce that I'm going to be one of the guests of honour at LunCon '25, the Swedish national SF convention, at the city hall of Lund, very close to Malm��, from October 1th to 12th. (And hopefully I'll be going to a couple of other conventions in the following months!)

Books I will not Write: this time, a movie

(This is an old/paused blog entry I planned to release in April while I was at Eastercon, but forgot about. Here it is, late and a bit tired as real world events appear to be out-stripping it ...)

(With my eyesight/cognitive issues I can't watch movies or TV made this century.)

But in light of current events, my Muse is screaming at me to sit down and write my script for an updated re-make of Doctor Strangelove:

POTUS GOLDPANTS, in middling dementia, decides to evade the 25th amendment by barricading himself in the Oval Office and launching stealth bombers at Latveria. Etc.

The USAF has a problem finding Latveria on a map (because Doctor Doom infiltrated the Defense Mapping Agency) so they end up targeting the Duchy of Grand Fenwick by mistake, which is in Transnistria ... which they are also having problems finding on Google Maps, because it has the string "trans" in its name.

While the USAF is trying to bomb Grand Fenwick (in Transnistria), Russian tanks are commencing a special military operation in Moldova ... of which Transnistria is a breakaway autonomous region.

Russia is unaware that Grand Fenwick has the Q-bomb (because they haven't told the UN yet). Meanwhile, the USAF bombers blundering overhead have stealth coatings bought from a President Goldfarts crony that even antiquated Russian radar can spot.

And it's up to one trepidatious officer to stop them ...

Another brief update

Bad news: the endoscopy failed. (I was scheduled for an upper GI endoscopy via the nasal sinuses to take a look around my stomach and see what's bleeding. Bad news: turns out I have unusually narrow sinuses, and by the time they'd figured this out my nose was watering so badly that I couldn't breathe when they tried to go in via my throat. So we're rescheduling for a different loction with an anesthetist who can put me under if necessary. NB: I would have been fine with only local anaesthesia if the bloody endscope had fit through my sinuses. Gaah.)

The attack novel I was working on has now hit the 70% mark in first draft—not bad for two months. I am going to keep pushing onwards until it stops, or until the page proofs I'm expecting hit me in the face. They're due at the end of June, so I might finish Starter Pack first ... or not. Starter Pack is an unexpected but welcome spin-off of Ghost Engine (third draft currently on hold at 80% done), which I shall get back to in due course. It seems to have metastasized into a multi-book project.

Neither of the aforementioned novels is finished, nor do they have a US publisher. (Ghost Engine has a UK publisher, who has been Very Patient for the past few years—thanks, Jenni!)

Feel free to talk among yourselves, especially about the implications of Operation Spiders Web, which (from here) looks like the defining moment for a very 21st century revolution in military affairs; one marking the transition from fossil fuel powered force projection to electromotive/computational force projection.

Brief Update

The reason(s) for the long silence here:

I've been attacked by an unscheduled novel, which is now nearly 40% written (in first draft). Then that was pre-empted by the copy edits for The Regicide Report (which have a deadline attached, because there's a publication date).

I also took time off for Eastercon, then hospital out-patient procedures. (Good news: I do not have colorectal cancer. Yay! Bad news: they didn't find the source of the blood in my stool, so I'm going back for another endoscopy.)

Finally, I'm still on the waiting list for cataract surgery. Blurred vision makes typing a chore, so I'm spending my time productively—you want more novels, right? Right?

Anyway: I should finish the copy edits within the next week, then get back to one or other of the two novels I'm working on in parallel (the attack novel and Ghost Engine: they share the same fictional far future setting), then maybe I can think of something to blog about again—but not the near future, it's too depressing. (I mean, if I'd written up our current political developments in a work of fiction any time before 2020 they'd have been rejected by any serious SF editor as too implausibly bizarre to publish.)

Meanwhile, In real life ...

I'm probably going to be scarce around these parts (my blog) for the next several weeks, because real life is having its say.

In the short term, it's not bad news: I'm going to the British Eastercon in Belfast next weekend, traveling there and back by coach and ferry (thereby avoiding airport security theatre) and taking a couple of days extra because I haven't been back to Belfast since 2019. Needless to say, blogging will not be on my list of priorities.

Yes, I'm on some programme items while I'm there.

Longer term: I'm 60, I have some health problems, those go with the territory (of not being dead). I've been developing cataracts in both eyes and these are making reading and screen-work fatiguing, so I'm seeing a surgeon on May 1st in order hopefully to be given a schedule for being stabbed in both eyes over the coming months. Ahem: I mean, cataract surgery. Note that I am not looking for advice or help at this time, I've got matters well in hand. (Yes, this is via the NHS. Yes, private surgery is an option I've investigated: if the NHS can handle it on roughly the same time scale and not bill me ��3500 per eye I will happily save the money. Yes, I know about the various replacement lens options and have a good idea of what I want. No, do not tell me your grisly stories about your friends who went blind, or how different lens replacement surgery is in Ulan Bator or Mississippi, or how to work the American medical insurance hellscape—all of these things are annoying and pointless distractions and reading is fatiguing right now.)

I have another health issue under investigation so I'm getting a colonoscopy the day after I see the eye surgeon, which means going straight from blurred vision from mydriatic eye drops to blurred vision from the world falling out of my arse, happy joy. (Again: advice not wanted. I've have colonoscopies before, I know the routine.)

Of course, with eye surgery likely in the next couple of months of course the copy-edits for The Regicide Report will inevitably come to me for review at the same time. (Again: this is already taken into account, and the editors are aware there might be a slight scheduling conflict.)

... And while I'm not dealing with medical stuff or copy edits I've got to get my annual accounts in order, and I'm trying to work on two other novels (because the old space opera project from 2015 needs to be finished some decade or other, and meanwhile a new attack novel is badgering me to write it).

(Finally, it is very difficult to write science fiction when the wrong sort of history is dominating the news cycle 24x7, especially as the larger part of my income is based on sales of books paid for in a foreign currency, and the head of state of the nation that backs that currency seems to be trying to destroy the international trade and financial system. I'm managing, somehow—I now have the first two chapters of a Stainless Steel Rat tribute novel set in my new space opera universe—but it's very easy to get distra—oh fuck, what's Trump done now?)

PS: the next book out, in January 2026, will be The Regicide Report, the last Bob/Mo Laundry novel (for now). It's been accepted and edited and it's in production. This is set in stone.

The space opera I began in 2015, my big fat Iain M. Banks tribute novel Ghost Engine, is currently 80% of the way through it's third re-write, cooling down while I try and work out what I need to do to finally stick the ending. It is unsold (except in the UK, where an advance has been paid).

The other current project, begun in 2025, is going to be my big fat tribute to Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat, titled Starter Pack. It's about 1 week old and maybe 10% written in first draft. Do not ask when it's coming out or I will be very rude indeed (also, see health stuff above).

Those two are both set in the same (new) universe, a fork of the time-line in my 2010 Hugo winning time travel novella Palimpsest.

There's also a half-written New Management novella gathering dust, pending feedback on the Laundry/New Management and what to do next, but nothing is going to happen with that until after The Regicide Report is in print and hopefully I've got one or two space operas written and into production.

Bear in mind that these are all uncommissioned/unsold projects and may never see the light of day. Do not make any assumptions about them! They could be cancelled tomorrow if Elon Musk buys all the SF publishers or Donald Trump imposes 10,000% tariffs on British exports of science fiction or something. All warranties expired on everything globally on January 20th 2025, and we're just along for the ride ...

Living in interesting times

Last month I yanked all my US dollars out and put them into my home nation's currency. I didn't get a great exchange rate, but at least they're not in free fall right now.

Last week, with the end of the 2024/25 financial year approaching, I transferred those savings into a Cash ISA (a tax-exempt high interest savings account), rather than the Stock and Share ISAs that Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are urging everyone to take out—share accounts that potentially pay a much higher return on investment, but track the markets. Which wouldn't have been good, as the FTSE100 is down 5.2% today as of lunchtime on the Monday after the Friday when the Tangerine Shitgibbon tore up 80 years of free trade agreements and imposed tariffs on the South Atlantic penguins and the few civilian residents of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, home of most of the USAF's B-2 stealth bomber fleet this month.

We are living through interesting times.

Of the anti-Trump demonstrations at the weekend, I have to say that despite estimates of 3-5 million marchers, my Sunday thoughts were, "it's going to suck to be them." The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration's Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won't be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they'll just dig mass graves. (If you're really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won't be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.)

But all that has changed because Trump has completely shat the economic bed. I'm not going to re-hash the reasons why everyone stopped using tariffs as an instrument of trade policy, let alone taxation, nearly a century ago. But the epic stupidity of asking ChatGPT how to use tariffs to balance a trade deficit and then accepting its incorrect answer and using them to set policy is jaw-dropping even by Trumpian standards. But what happens next?

Trump's narcissism won't let him admit imposing tariffs on the entire planet is an idiotic idea. So he'll blame China for the market crash and the galloping stagflation he's just kicked off. Most of the goods, materials, and products that he's choked the supply of have no domestic US sources, or none that can be ramped up in less than years. For example, China just choked the supply of rare earth elements to the USA in retaliation, which used to be mined in the USA ... but it takes years and billions of dollars to build a new mine and refinery. He's applied sanctions to Taiwan, which sliced $300Bn off Apple's market cap in 24 hours because Taiwan's TSMC supplies most of the world's bleeding-edge semiconductors. They've been trying to build a plant in the USA for years, but are still years away from producing anything: it's not just the machinery, it's the skilled and experienced technical staff.

The immediate consequence was obvious: the markets crashed today, and crashed hard, down 5-10% around the world in one day. Market panics are contagious even when there's no valid underlying cause: I expect the sell-off to continue for some time.

Longer term, the consequences are even more frightening. The USA is no longer a safe trading partner or a safe place to plan business investment. All businesses require government to provide a predictable environment: they need the rule of law, and courts to enforce contracts and property rights. Multinationals also need a reasonably predictable trade policy so they can plan ahead. In just 70 days, Trump has taken a pick axe to the predictability of long term US economic policy and contemptuously told the rest of the world to take a hike.

It appears that Trump expects individual nations to come to him, hat in hand, like terrified shopkeepers pleading for mercy from a mafia don. But he doesn't seem to realize that the USA only amounts to about 13% of global economic activity, and furthermore, is less engaged in foreign trade than many other countries. His mercurial temper and lack of insight make him a complete liability to do business with, and the entirely predictable consequence will be that other nations and trading blocks won't come to him pleading for mercy: they'll turn their backs on the USA and trade with each other instead.

And now let's loop back to those big demonstrations—the bigliest demonstrations! The bestest, most Trumpian demonstrations!—at the weekend. The marchers were generally good-tempered and peaceful and went home patting themselves on the back. And today their 401(K) savings have tanked, and so have everyone else's. This isn't going to hit the 50% of the US population who live hand-to-mouth and have less than $500 in savings, but it's going to absolutely enrage and energize the middle class, all the way up to the 0.1% of millionaires who normally don't see any common interest with the working stiffs.

I expect there to be more demonstrations, by and by. Bigger and uglier and more excitable demonstrations. Demonstrations where quite possibly the cops policing them will be on the side of the marchers, because their pensions and those of their spouses are threatened.

So my previous expectation that the demonstrations would die away was premature.

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on "insurrectionists", whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law. (This was part of the Project 2025 plan, incidentally.) SecDef Hegseth has already purged the top legal counsel for the Army, Air Force, and Navy to prevent them from blocking "orders that are given by a commander in chief." Go figure where all this is going.

Upshot: I think I was wrong as little as a week ago. The USA may very well be moving into a pre-revolutionary crisis within the next month, with an authoritarian administration seizing emergency powers and preparing to execute an increasingly violent crackdown on the public.

I am willing to put this on my blog because, it saddens me to say this, I do not expect to be returning to US soil in the foreseeable future—quite possibly never again. (I still have tentative plans to visit Canada for the Montreal worldcon in 2027, if it goes ahead, but that's the nearest I'm willing to get to the CBP.)

If you are a US citizen or resident you should be very cautious about what you say in the comments on this blog entry.