Charlie's Diary

(This blog essay is overdue because I'm still waiting for new prescription glasses and writing while cross-eyed with text zoomed to 250% is tedious. They should be here later this week. Meanwhile ...)

Back in January 2022 I wrote an essay revisiting my predictions for 2017. My review of 2017's stab in the dark began, "it spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here, continue with this, and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth."

I'll actually stand by those 2017 predictions, which were weirdly not that far off the mark although Queen Elizabeth II outlasted my prediction by several years.

But my 2022 predictions?

Oh boy.

So, I had my second round of eye surgery, and it worked fine. I got a short distance lens, leaving me myopic, which was expected, and I've booked an opthalmology appointment for the earliest possible date post-surgery (in mid-May, the eye needs to settle for six weeks post-op). In the meantime, I'm without visual correction.

And guess what? My vision is changing. My left eye is increasingly myopic, to the point where it's now difficult to read on screen. (And I can barely read with my right eye at all, due to a retinal occlusion that covers about half the visual field.) For writing/editing I've blown up the text size to 250%, which is just tolerable but gives me a headache after a while: new prescription specs can't come soon enough.

NB: don't suggest half-assing corrective lenses using off-the-shelf stuff, my eyes are kinda complex and I'm not just myopic, there's other stuff going on there. Also, don't suggest dictation software: I use a complex vocabulary and punctuation that aren't a normal part of the use case the designers of such software anticipated, i.e. business correspondence. And absolutely don't suggest podcasts or text-to-speech software: I can't absorb information that way. I'm fed up with people trying to convince me to try something I've tried repeatedly to use (and that has failed for me) over the past 30 years: it's irritating, not helpful.

... In other news: despite the above I'm still plodding along at book 2 of the proposed duology (but making very slow progress because writing 1000 words in a day is the new writing 4500 words in a day). And I'll be at Satellite 9 in Glasgow next month, probably before I have new glasses, so if you see me and I fail to make eye contact across a room it's not you: I'm just blind as a bat.

It's the end of March. Since the last blog update I've had my second cataract surgery (it went much better this time), written a portion-and-outline of a new novel (for my agent, who will hopefully have feedback or maybe just go ahead and sell it so I can write the rest), and ... been diagnosed with exertional angina. Happy joy. I swear, you hit 60 and the warranties on all your body parts expire simultaneously. (NB: keep your medical advice to yourselves!)

We've also been treated to the unedifying sight of the Paedopotus Rex attacking Iran for no sane reason (the main beneficiary appears to be Benjamin Netanyahu), setting off a conflagration in the Middle East that is already having global repercussions. Per United Airlines, aviation fuel is expected to be over $175 a barrel through the end of 2027 even if the Straits of Hormuz are unblocked within a week or two; J. P. Morgan prognosticate that the last pre-closure consignments through the Straits should be reaching European ports this week, the far east in about 10 days, and the USA by the middle of April, after which all bets are off. Supply chain shocks, here we come!

It's not just crude oil, of course, although it's looking as if the shortages we're in for are going to be as bad as both the oil crises of the 1970s stacked. About 30% of the world's ammonia, required as a feedstock for fertilizer, is manufactured close to the gas wells in the region. And it's getting into growing season in the northern hemisphere. This promises to spike the price of food and trigger famines and eventually revolutions in poorer nations.

Helium, vital for any number of advanced tech (such as hard disk drives, semiconductor fab lines, MRI machines ...) is a by-product of natural gas wells: about 20% of the global supply comes from the Gulf. So TSMC, Samsung, and the other fabs will be hitting crisis levels of supply shortages within a few weeks.

This is not only an emergency for fuel, food production, and electronics: it's going to trigger inflation globally. Iran has had the great idea of allowing ships through the Straits of Hormuz if they pay a transit fee of about US$2M ... in Yuan. Which means oil is now de facto denominated in Chinese currency, not dollars (great win for Trump!).

The truth of the matter is, we're being forced to confront an iron law of economics: you can optimize a system for efficiency or for robustness, but not for both. Just-in-time supply chains are efficient, but there's no slack in the system. Systems with warehousing and storage and redundancy built-in are resilient, but they're not efficient. And over the past 50 years we've abandoned them, in the name of efficiency, so that the excess capacity could be sold off and turned into profits. This war is payback time for the cult of efficiency over robustness in business.

As for the war itself, it's a shit-show. Mass murder of innocent schoolgirls aside, Pete Hegseth is demonstrating the truth of the aphorism that lieutenants study tactics, majors study strategy, generals study logistics, and field marshalls study economics. Going by his demonstrated expertise, Hegseth is clearly a lieutenant: he seems mystified that the US defense industry giants can't throw together a new factory producing Tomahawk or Patriot missiles in a week. (He seems to have AI-pilled himself into believing that all military hardware problems can be solved in software. Or maybe he just believes that his Warrior Jesus will provide.)

I would have more to say on this subject if I wasn't gibbering in a corner about the stupidity of it all, but meanwhile I have hospital and other appointments coming up, then a science fiction convention at the weekend. I'll try to lighten the topic of conversation when I get back: this reality is getting to me (again).

... The TLDR is: the cataract in my one mostly working eye (the other has about 50% retinal occlusion) is steadily getting worse, and I'm scheduled for surgery on March 27th.

NB: no need to lecture me about cataract surgery, I've already had it on the other eye. Same team, same hospital, same prognosis. I know exactly what to expect. Nor are your best wishes welcome: replying to them gets tiring after the fiftieth time (see: poor eyesight, above).

But worsening eyesight means that reading (and writing!) is fatiguing, so I gradually do less and less of it in each session.

Consequently I've been spending my screen time, not on the blog, but on a revision pass over my next novel, and on writing the follow-up.

(No, I can't give you any details: let's just say they're space operas, not Laundry Files, and I'll talk about them when my agent gives me the go-ahead. Book 1 is written, subject to editing, and Book 2 is about 10-15% written. And neither of them is Ghost Engine, the white whale I've been fruitlessly hunting for the past decade, although the viable chunks of GE may get recycled into Book 2.)

After my eye surgery I'll be going to Iridescence, the 2026 British Eastercon, the following weekend in Birmingham. I have some program items: I'll update this blog entry when I have a final schedule.

After Iridescence, I'll be heading to Satellite 9 in Glasgow (May 22nd to 24th). And after that I'll be attending Metropol Con in Berlin, July 2nd to 5th.

I'm not attending any US SF conventions for the forseeable future (being deported to a concentration camp in El Salvador is not on my bucket list), but I will try to attend the 2027 World Science Fiction convention in Montreal, assuming the Paedopotus Rex hasn't gone on a Godzilla-style rampage north of the border by then, and that intercontinental air travel is still possible. (See, my inability to resist that kind of cheap shot is exactly why I'm not visiting the US these days: ICE want to see your social media history going back 5 years, and I gather they're using some horrible LLM tool from Palantir to vet travellers.)

We now return you to your regular scheduled kvetching about the state of world affairs until my eyeballs are firing on all cylinders again. (Say, did you know that 30% of the world's fertilizer is shipped through the Straits of Hormuz? And about 20% of the sulfur that ends up as feedstock in sulfuric acid for industrial processes comes from sour Gulf crude, so ditto? Not to mention the helium that is required to keep MRI machines and TSMC's semiconductor fab lines running, never mind your grandkids' party balloons? Happy days ...)

Sorry I haven't updated the blog for a while: I've been busy. (Writing the final draft of a new novel entirely unconnected to anything else you've read—space opera, new setting, longest thing I've written aside from the big Merchant Princes doorsteps. Now in my agent's inbox while I make notes towards a sequel, if requested.)

Over the past few years I've been naively assuming that while we're ruled by a ruthless kleptocracy, they're not completely evil: aristocracies tend to run on self-interest and try to leave a legacy to their children, which usually means leaving enough peasants around to mow the lawn, wash the dishes, and work the fields.

But my faith in the sanity of the evil overlords has been badly shaken in the past couple of months by the steady drip of WTFery coming out of the USA in general and the Epstein Files in particular, and now there's this somewhat obscure aside, that rips the mask off entirely (Original email on DoJ website ) ...

The Regicide Report, the last novel in the main Laundry Files series, is coming out on January 27th in the US (from Tor.com Publishing) and the UK (from Orbit).

If you want to order signed hardcovers, contact Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh. (I believe Mike is currently willing to send books to the USA, but don't take my word for it: check first, and blame Donald Trump if there are customs/tariff obstacles.)

Audiobooks: there will be audio editions. The Audible one is showing a January 27th release date on Amazon.com; Hachette Digital will be issuing one in the UK but it's not showing up on Amazon.co.uk yet. (For contractual reasons they're recorded and produced by different companies.)

Ebooks and DRM: The ebook will be available the same day as the hardcover. Tor.com does not put DRM on their ebooks, but it's anybody's guess whether a given ebook store will add it. (Amazon have been particularly asshole-ish in recent years but are promising DRM-free downloads of purchases will be available from late January.) Orbit is part of Hachette, who are particularly obstreperous about requiring DRM on everything electronic, so you're out of luck if you buy the Orbit edition. (I could tell you how to unlock the DRM on purchases from the UK Kobo store, but then my publisher would be contractually obliged to assassinate me. Let's just say, it can be done.)

What next?

The Regicide Report is the last Bob/Mo/Laundry novel. It's set circa March-May 2015 in the time line; the New Management books are set circa November 2015 through May 2017, so this one slots in before Dead Lies Dreaming.

There may be a Laundry Files short story collection, and/or/maybe including a final New Management novella (it's half-written, but on "hold" since mid-2024), at some point in the future. But not this year or next. (I'm taking time off to get back in touch with space opera.)

None of the above precludes further Laundry Files novels getting written, but it's up to the publishers and market forces. If it does happen, I expect they'll be set in the 2020s in the internal chronology, by which time the Laundry itself is no more (it's been superseded by DEAT), and we may have new protagonists and a very new story line.

No, but really what's next?

I don't know for sure, but I'm currently working on the final draft of Starter Pack, my Stainless Steel Rat homage, and planning yet another rewrite of Ghost Engine, this time throwing away my current protagonists and replacing them with the ones from Starter Pack (who need another heist caper). Do not expect publication before 2027, though! I'm also awaiting eye surgery again, which slows everything down.

It's been years and years since I last went trawling for webcomics worth reading, so it's time for an update: obviously online search is pretty much useless, but we ought to be able to crowdsource something here.

I keep a separate browser window for webcomics; here's a selection of my currently-open tabs, excluding syndicated stuff that shows up in newspapers. (So no "This Modern World" or "The Far Side".) What am I ignoring? Preferably new in the past decade, which rules out old-timers like "Digger" or "Girl Genius" (arguably I should have ommitted QC and xkcd too, but they're favourites of mine).

It should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the tech news that many companies are pushing the adoption of "AI" (large language models) among their own employees--from software developers to management--and the push is coming from the top down, as C-suite executives order their staff to use AI, Or Else. But we know that LLMs reduce programmer productivity-- one major study showed that "developers believed that using AI tools helped them perform 20% faster -- but they actually worked 19% slower." (Source.)

Another recent study found that 87% of executives are using AI on the job, compared with just 27% of employees: "AI adoption varies by seniority, with 87% of executives using it on the job, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees. It also finds that executives are 45% more likely to use the technology on the job than Gen Zers, the youngest members of today's workforce and the first generation to have grown up with the internet.

"The findings are based on a survey of roughly 7,000 professionals age 18 and older who work in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. It was commissioned by HR software company Dayforce and conducted online from July 22 to August 6."

Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity?

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

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

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

Why do this, though?

So, I'm cross-eyed and typing with one eye screwed shut, which sucks. Seeing an ophthalmologist tomorrow, expecting a priority referral to get the other eyeball stabbed. (It was not made clear to me at the time of the last stabbing that the hospital wouldn't see me again until my ophthalmologist referred me back to them. I'm fixing that oversight—hah—now.)

Anyway, my reading fatigue has gotten bad again, to about the same extent it had gotten to when I more or less stopped reading for fun and writing ground to a halt (because what do you spend most writing time doing, if not re-reading?). So don't expect to hear much from me until I've been operated on and ideally gotten a new set of prescription lenses.

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.

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 ...

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.

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).

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 Malmö, from October 1th to 12th. (And hopefully I'll be going to a couple of other conventions in the following months!)