I write fiction for a living. But that's not the only job I've had, and a third of a century ago I used to be a pharmacist. I'm pretty certain this means I've forgotten more about poisons (and drugs in general) than most of you ever knew: and I feel the need to emit a brain dump about the misuse of poisons in fiction (specifically SF and fantasy fiction).
I have a new book coming out on Tuesday 7th of January: it's A Conventional Boy, a short standalone novel in the Laundry Files. (It takes place at roughly the same time as The Rhesus Chart.)
It's published in the USA (and Canada) by Tor.com and in the UK (and EU) by Orbit. Both publishers are dropping hardback and ebook editions at the same time: as is usual Tor.com is a hardback-only publisher, but Orbit will eventually issue a paperback.
You can buy it at all good bookstores and ebook storefronts, but if you want a signed copy currently the only source is Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh, my home town's SF specialist bookstore. (I do not plan to visit the USA while Trump is president, and I'm attending fewer SF conventions than during the pre-COVID years, but I'll be able to sign books at the British Eastercon this year in Belfast.)
As for what it's about ...?
Meet Derek Reilly. Derek is portly, short-sighted, middle-aged, and has spent his entire adult life in prison for playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not his fault: it was 1984, the Satanic D&D panic was in full swing, and Mistakes Were Made (by the Laundry).
Derek still pays D&D, after a fashion. He's got postal privileges and runs the camp newsletter: he also runs a play by mail campaign, with a set of mutant homebrew rules nobody in authority has any inkling about.
One day, Derek gets two pieces of very important news. Firstly, Camp Sunshine (the cultist deprogramming centre where he's spent most of his life) is closing for reconstruction in a few weeks. And secondly, a gaming convention is coming to the next town up the road.
Derek is upset—but sees an opportunity. He's had a foolproof escape plan for the past 20 years: he's just never had anywhere to go. Now he decides to go to his first ever convention.
Little does he suspect that he's not the only DM with a very dangerous set of rules converging on DiceCon 16 ...
This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.
This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.
Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).
And it comes into effect on March 15th.
Accordingly ...
The blog will continue to exist.
However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.
(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.)
If I am forced to close the pub for good, maybe someone other than me can set up a forum somewhere outside UK legal jurisdiction where you can all stay in touch. But it won't be me, because then I'd be breaking the law and it's alway sunwise to bend over and hang a sign on your back saying "POLICE PLEASE KICK ME".
Meanwhile, you can already find me on:
Mastodon: @cstross@wandering.shop
Bluesky: @cstross.bsky.social
Reddit: /u/cstross
(And if someone I know opens up a Discord or other non-UK, non-UK-run forum for fans of Charlie Stross, I'll add it here.)
Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).
Because we are obviously living in the silliest, darkest time line—or maybe the darkest, silliest time line—Donald Trump's pick to lead American healthcare next year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an anti-vaxxer crank. And this week the New York Times broke the news that Kennedy's Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine. They add, "Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services."
(Suffice to say, this is a terrible idea: it's about the safest, cheapest, life-saving intervention 20th century medical research has given us, and polio is a horrible, awful disease that cripples people for life.)
Donald Trump is on the record as saying he's open to abolishing childhood vaccine mandates. All of them. Because he's a moron and a narcissist whose first instinct in a pandemic was to tell outrageous lies then try and work out how to use it to make himself rich by promoting ineffective medical treatments we can't discount this as a possibility.
I emphasize: this is a thing that actually happened in 2020, during the previous Trump administration. So there is every reason to expect it to happen again, harder and faster.
I am a writer. I am always looking for a new Torment Nexus angle these days. So, in anticipation of a resumed Reign of Trump—I mean, Reign of Malignant Idiocy—here is my 2025 business plan:
My US publisher, Tor.com, is discounting the most recent Laundry Files/New Management novel, Season of Skulls, to $2.99 in all North American ebook stores this month (December 2024). The price of the ebook will go back up in January.
(It's a promotion to support the release of A Conventional Boy on January 7th 2025.)
This offer does not apply to ebook stores outside the USA and Canada (where the ebook is published by Orbit, not Tor.com), nor does it apply to audiobook or paper editions.
I'm not going to deep-link into Amazon and life's too short to link to every ebook store that sells it (Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes and Noble, etc) but if you go to your regular supplier and search for "Stross Season of Skulls" you should find it.
The subject here needs some unpacking ...
Over the past 20+ years I've published a bunch of novels (over 30 at last count) and a couple of short story collections. In that time I've covered a bunch of tropes, that is, genre-specific shibboleths that authors feel the need to play with. (Vampires? Check. Time police? Check. Interstellar war? Check. Elves? Check. The Singularity? Check. Waking up in the wrong body? Check. And so on.)
Let's briefly split the question in half: science fiction, or fantasy? It's a hair-splitting distinction (and one mostly dictated by reader preferences and marketing requirements) but let's just call science fiction fiction that needs to stay within bullshitting distance of reality, while fantasy can wave a magic wand and thereby shred the rule book of the physical sciences.
There are a bunch of science-fictional ideas I haven't tacked because they don't make sense to me. I haven't done a full on zombie rising, although I've considered it (detailed explanation here): the Residual Human Resources in the Laundry Files are the closest I've gone. Psionics and telepathy and psychic powers in general were pretty thoroughly debunked by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit's research, so I don't go there outside of fantasy. Alien life is another matter and one that falls on the science fictional side of the genre fence, but the idea of tool-using, communicative aliens that can survive in a human-compatible biosphere is one I find difficult to swallow (hint: microbiology and immunology militate against it--even H. G. Wells in 1895 got that right).
Anyway.
I'm nearing the end of the Laundry Files, and have finished with the Merchant Princes. So I'm trying to figure out if there's anything I haven't done in terms of genre tropes that I should add to my to-do list for the next decade.
Discuss?
Greetings from the New Management! I'm currently up to my elbows in The Regicide Report (coming to you in 2026). In the meantime, I wrote a bundle of world building notes that won't ever make it into a novel because they're far too policy-oriented (translation: deathly boring to normal readers). After all, it's a civil service/politics satire series, and to give it some substance I had to work out what the politics would be.
In particular, I sat down a while ago (before the Labour election victory in May) to work out what the New Management's version of "Project 2025" might look like, except the in-universe dateline is 2015. Here are my notes: make of them what you will, and feel free to contribute your own suggestions.
So, my next novel, A Conventional Boy, is coming out in two months time. (The publication date is January 7th; in the USA it's going to be published by Tor.com, and in the UK, EU, Australia, and NZ it'll be coming from Orbit.)
In the 1980s evangelicals fomented a moral panic around Dungeons and Dragons, claiming it was corrupting children and leading them onto a slippery slope to Satanism. But this is the world of the Laundry, and Lovecraftian Elder Gods are very real. When the Laundry collided with Dungeons and Dragons, Mistakes were Made (and swept under the rug, in true bureaucratic fashion). Thirty five years later one of those mistakes, named Derek Reilly, has been thoroughly institutionalized in Camp Sunshine, a centre for deprogramming cultists. Everyone takes him for granted: everyone's forgotten him. But Derek hasn't forgotten the outside world. And when he hears about a gaming convention that's coming to the nearest town, he finally has a reason to activate his foolproof escape plan—he's going to go to his first ever con.
Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy ...
This is Derek the DM's long-overdue origin story (in the works since 2009). Originally it was going to be a novelette (an overgrown short story) but it just kept growing and growing and growing until it turned into a novel in its own right. If you've ever wondered what would happen if I wrote a Laundry Files LitRPG/progression fantasy? This is for you: it's published here for the first time, along with two other Laundry Files novelettes (the Hugo-shortlisted Overtime, and Dowm on the Farm), and an afterword about the history of the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic.
Purely by coincidence this very week the Satanic D&D Panic is back in the news in the UK: the D&D stuff is about five paragraphs down in this news item. I wish real life would stop stealing the most dystopian pieces of my work! But in the meantime, please buy my book? I mean, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review: "This is urban fantasy with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and it reads a bit like Terry Pratchett trying his hand at Lovecraftian horror," so it can't be that bad!
Here's a universal ebook link (to all US ebook stores that list it for sale).
(Small print: The universal link, via Books2Read.com, is experimental and sometimes breaks. It's particularly iffy if the book is published with different ISBNs in different markets, like A Conventional Boy. If it doesn't work for you, you can search your preferred online bookstore for "Stross Conventional Boy" to find it: I'll try and update later. (Obviously I'm trying to stop prioritizing Amazon over other bookshops.)
So, there was an election yesterday in the United States. (This is not that blog entry or discussion thread: that'll come later, when I've got my thoughts in order and gotten tired of swearing.)
Much smaller things also happened yesterday. In particular, I had a first appointment with my new ophthalmologist, who has taken over the practice from my previous ophthalmologists (who retired). I had about a six week wait for this session, because they're moving to an entirely new IT system and in addition to getting up to speed with her patients needs she used the session to move all the old notes into the new set-up (and confirm that they were correct).
I thought there'd been a change in my vision, and that I'd need new lenses, and I was half-right: there has indeed been a change, but I don't need new glasses as much as I need surgery, because I'm developing cataracts in both eyes.
I am going away for the next 10 days, so updates will be infrequent ...
I'm thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit, "the Earth's too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket", and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed in his Mars trilogy in the 1980s.
And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?
This is a brain dump about a gadget I acquired recently—a Japanese grey-market import Pomera DM250—and it's of limited interest so I wouldn't normally write about it here, except the manufacturer has pre-announced a kickstarter campaign, coming in the next couple of months, to sell a US/English version of the machine. I still have the occasional vestigial tech journalist itch, even though it's been nearly 20 years since I stopped doing that for a living, so you can take this as me scratching that itch.
(This essay is late because I came home from worldcon with a wonderful prize--COVID19. It was a very mild dose and I'm better now but it put everything on hold for about a week.)
In the past I've blogged about how difficult it is to write the near future, ten years out (I used to have a working recipe); and then more recently about how the error bars on such predictions are getting longer: and most recently about how bad fifties SF is in a feedback loop with the real world, delivering dystopian outcomes through the medium of deeply superficial billionaires and their pet projects. But is that all that's making the near future hard to write about? What if it isn't just the postulated near future, but the readers themselves who I'm writing for, that are changing?
This year's World Science Fiction convention is taking place at the Scottish Events Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, from August 8th to August 12th (next month).
You will be unsurprised to know that, unless I come down with COVID19 in the next week, I'm going to be there. I'm also going to be appearing on a few panels and other events during the convention, which I'm listing below the cut.
(The names after the time identify the function space in the SEC where the events are held. An (M) in brackets after a particpant's name indicates the person moderating the discussion.)
Almost exactly six months ago I blogged in The Coming Storm about how 2024 looked like a "somewhat disruptive" year. Hoo, boy!
Let's recap point by point from that piece.
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