Episode 282: Charles Stross

Summary

Eating the Fantastic – Episode 282: Lunch with Charles Stross

Podcast Date: May 17, 2026
Host: Scott Edelman
Guest: Charles Stross
Location: Cafe Soya, Birmingham (during Eastercon 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Scott Edelman shares a lively meal with acclaimed science fiction author Charles Stross during Eastercon in Birmingham. Their conversation covers Charles’ long writing journey, the evolution and conclusion of his celebrated Laundry Files series, reflections on fandom, publishing mishaps, the challenges of series-writing, and a preview of his daring new project, Starter Pack. They intersperse deep dives into writing craft with laughter, anecdotes, food commentary, fandom memories, and sharp observations on the state of the genre and the world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Writing Life and Career Trajectory

• First Publications & Early Influences:

  • Charles’ first commercial story, “The Boys,” was published in Interzone in 1987 (07:39).
  • Early influences: under the spell of cyberpunk, attempted many “novel-shaped objects” as a teenager.
  • “I accidentally wrote about 5% of a fiend folio when I was 15...” — on young contributions to D&D (13:17).
  • He describes his early self as "very, very different" and admits, "I think I can reasonably say I got better eventually." (07:53)

• On Writing While Holding Day Jobs:

  • Stross began as a pharmacist, “which was some spectacularly bad careers advice...” (08:16), and switched to tech after cross-training during a UK computer science crunch in the 1980s.
  • Balancing work and writing was slow at first; when he went full-time as a novelist, he “wrote three novels in one year, which is a bit of a turnaround.” (10:05)
  • Discusses the intermittent nature of success: "I was kind of the failure to launch of the Interzone generation of writers..." (10:31)

• Fandom and Writers Workshops:

  • Discovered fandom at Eastercon 1983: “...my first convention... was absolute living proof that time travel does not exist... There was this tall, gawky goth bloke... Neil Gaiman... There was a short, irascible guy in a hat with a beard propping up the bar... Terry Pratchett...” (16:11, 17:18)
  • Workshopping roots in the Cassandra Workshop and later Milford, leading to a philosophy of taking—and sifting—feedback:

    “If half of them love it and half of them hate it, you’ve got something interesting on your hands.” (21:08) “Whatever you put on the page, 25% of your readers will not merely misunderstand it, they'll get whatever message you're trying to convey absolutely backwards.” (22:41)

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2. The Laundry Files: Twists, Business, and Conclusion

• Origins and Series Structure:

  • Laundry Files grew from a joke: the idea of “hotel space” and portals started as a running gag (06:42).
  • Character development: protagonist Bob moves through real time, aging and changing realistically.
    • “One of the things I got very right about it was to advance the clock in the series in step with the real world.” (34:07)
    • "Older authors are better at writing older characters and more likely to do a good job of it." (34:05)
  • Experimented with unreliable narration from Book 2 onward as a means to keep the series flexible (36:13).

• Publishing Upheaval and Series Demise:

  • Impact of the Penguin/Random House merger (“the random penguin merger”) on the series’ fate:

    “One of the Random House execs decreed... I want you to rank urban fantasy series by their sales figures in the fourth quarter and get rid of a bottom third... I was not commercially viable anymore.” (25:21) “My agent... said, ‘I think we should walk. This place is a dumpster fire.’” (26:11)

  • Shift to Tor.com, trying to reboot with “Laundry Files: The Next Generation” failed due to COVID-era marketing chaos (27:41).
  • Health and productivity: “I caught Covid twice in 2022... couldn’t hold that many plot strands together for a 120,000 word book.” (28:31)

• A Series Ends—But Not the Whole Universe:

  • Final book was always intended: “I've been heading in this direction since about book eight... this is the end of the main story arc about Bob.” (30:11, 30:24)
  • Series branding woes:

    “I don’t like that name [the Laundry Files]... it gives me a bit of a cringe reflex because it’s very derivative of Jim Butcher’s series, but it’s a successful format, so...” (37:28)

• Easter Eggs and British Humor:

  • Hidden references for British readers—e.g., Inspector Angel (from Hot Fuzz) and riffs on Vincent Price films (38:39, 39:45).
  • Use of real-world events and figures (e.g., Prince Andrew/“nonce” jokes) and remarks on flying under the royal radar (41:06).

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3. Starter Pack — A New Direction

• Origins, Influences, and “Crapsack Universes”:

  • Intended as “the massively overambitious attempt to colonize the territory vacated by Iain Banks...” (42:43)
  • Emphasis on literary and playful space opera with dark, political satire at heart:

    "It's also a political allegory for our times because, you know, we're living in a world dominated by Bond villains right now..." (52:45)

  • Ghost Engine (the earlier attempted litfic space opera) was abandoned after 130,000 words and three drafts; Starter Pack spun off from a single compelling sentence about “lossy, machine-mediated reincarnation.” (46:50)
  • Heavy nod to the Stainless Steel Rat books—“inspired by” but more contemporary, anarchic, and subversive (49:15).

• Narrative Structure and Process:

  • Uses non-linear storytelling with multiple reincarnations of the protagonists Jom and Tabitha; written in order, flashbacks and all (54:08).
  • Describes himself as a "pantser" but uses iterative revisions:

    “The first draft was done organically. The second draft... my agent came back and said I’d like to make a few additions to it. Can we have more of Jum and Tabitha doing all the crimes together?” (54:52)

• Meta-Commentary on Publishing:

  • Starter Pack is unsold but likely to go to Orbit in the UK; Tor.com is probable or possible for the US (50:44).
  • Concern over series branding—perhaps “The Trickster King and the Murder Queen” as working title for future books (67:33).
  • Dream of Banksian standalone universe—a publishing model allowing interconnected but distinct novels (65:50).

• Future Books and World-building:

  • Describes plans for book two, including a plot featuring graveyard planets and an “archaeologist cosplay contest” (62:36).
  • Touched on genetic engineering, post-humans, and the dangers of techno-utopian religion:

    “One of the things I was going to do with Ghost Engine was take a pickaxe to pedestrian [transhumanist] ideology... Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and quite a lot of attack bros... believe in this shit as a religion.” (60:59)

  • Motivation and creative process: waiting to hear from agent before writing more but eager to continue (61:50).

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4. Reflections on Fandom, Conventions, and Community

• Experiencing Eastercon and fandom as both insider and once-outsider:

  “I’d call it a safe space. Yeah, we were all a bit weird.” (19:10)

• On evolving feelings towards convention stardom:

  “...could not wander around the main hall of a worldcon or an Easter Con without being waylaid... That was a bit trying. That’s too much fame.” (71:00)

  • Notes on the shambolic programming at the current con, contrasted with the joys of organic bar conversations (68:19, 70:33).
• Value of conventions:

  “Once you've been in a while, I could pretty much have fun anywhere... the problem with any convention that is not being run well is the person for whom it's the first convention who... might not come back.” (70:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Bob from the Laundry Files aging with the series:

  “A protagonist who interests you when you’re 35 is of less interest when you’re 60.” (30:24)

• On publishing mergers:

  “This place is a dumpster fire and it’s not going to recover for at least five years.” (26:11)

• On reader feedback:

  “25% of your readers will not merely misunderstand it, they'll get whatever message you're trying to convey absolutely backwards.” (22:41)

• On unreliable narration as a writing tool:

  “If I hadn’t done it, I don’t think I could have made the series work because I had no idea it was going to be a series until about book three.” (37:13)

• On catching COVID and writing:

  “Brain fog. I was unable to write for six months, and when I did acquire viability again, the next novel I wrote after recovering was half the normal length because I couldn't hold that many plot strands together…” (28:31)

• On fandom as a homecoming:

  “I'd call it a safe space. Yeah, we were all a bit weird.” (19:10)

• On space opera aspirations:

  “I wanted to get back to space opera, which I had... starting with Singularity Sky... but I was working on this thing called Ghost Engineering, which was my massively overambitious attempt to colonize the territory vacated by Iain Banks...” (42:43)

• On the darker side of the new project:

  “It’s funny, but it’s not light-hearted. There’s a darkness at the heart of that book.” (51:48)

• On current political landscape:

  “We’re living in a world dominated by Bond villains right now. For real.” (52:45)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:46] – Food order and start of conversation
• [07:39] – Stross’s first publication
• [13:17] – Teen D&D contributions & early writing
• [16:11] – Fandom origin story, first Eastercon, meeting Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• [21:08] – Value of Milford workshop and feedback philosophy
• [25:21] – Penguin/Random House merger and publishing woes
• [27:41] – Attempted Laundry reboot, impact of COVID
• [30:24] – Bob’s character evolution and series arc
• [38:39] – Easter eggs for UK readers, Hot Fuzz reference
• [42:43] – Genesis of Starter Pack and Banksian space opera ambitions
• [46:50] – Discussing the scrapped Ghost Engine project
• [54:08] – Structure of Starter Pack: writing with non-linear timelines
• [62:36] – Teasing the plot of Book 2, “cosplay contest” heist
• [67:33] – Naming woes: possible series title for new books
• [68:19] – Convention experiences and thoughts on programming

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Food Moments

• Charles orders Singapore vermicelli and a Malteser shake; Scott orders Vietnamese lemongrass with pork and fruit tea (05:46)
• Charles shares sweet tofu dessert, “It’s their speciality. It’s why we came here.” (65:21)

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Conclusion

This rich, spontaneous conversation captures both the breadth of Charles Stross’s career and the evolving world of science fiction publishing. He’s candid about false starts, industry pitfalls, and the anxieties of long-term series, but also brims with excitement for new creative territory. His reflections on fandom, literary influences, and the enjoyment (and pitfalls) of convention life round out a meal that’s as satisfying intellectually as it is gastronomically.

If you're a fan of Charles Stross, the Laundry Files, science fiction writing, or the realities of publishing and fandom, this episode is a deep and intimate listen that pulls back the curtain on both creation and community in the SFF world.

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For more details, behind-the-scenes photos, and future episodes, visit Eating the Fantastic's homepage.

Transcript

[Scott Edelman]

Welcome to episode 282 of Eating the Fantastic, the Hugo Award nominated podcast, which invites listeners to take a seat at the table as I chat and chew with creators of science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, anywhere the fantastic can be found. I'm Scott Edelman, a writer and editor and for more than 10 years now your podcast host and learning I'm a Hugo Award finalist 27 years after my last Hugo nomination for editing, Science Fiction Aid magazine had me wondering who's had the longest gap between nominations. I knew it had to be someone other than me, so I tossed the question out to the Internet and the Internet answered. For a while we thought the longest gap was 35 years held by Steve Stiles, a previous guest of the podcast who after his 1968 nomination for Best Fan Artist, didn't receive another until 2003. But it turned out there were multiple nominees whose gaps were even longer than that which was sussed out by Mark Kelly over at Locus. Pat Lupov, the person with the longest gap, saw 42 years between nominations, all the way from 1963 when she co edited the amateur magazine Zero a Hugo she won to 2005 when she was co nominated for the best of zero in the related book category. Coming in second at 41 years was Ellsbraig de Camp, who was nominated in 1956 for his novelette A Gun for Dinosaur, and then not again until 1997 for his autobiography Time and Chance, an award he actually won that second time around. And speaking of awards, my guest, this third of five conversations recorded during the UK National Convention Eastercon last month is Charles Strauss, an 18 time Hugo Award nominated writer who's won three times for his novellas. Though I'd read him earlier. The first story which really blew me away was his 2001 Asimov's novelette Lobsters, which I guess made an impression on the rest of the world as well,

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

because it went on to become the

[Scott Edelman]

first of his stories to be nominated for Yugo and A Nebula. He's also won Locus Awards for both Best Novel and Best Novella and and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His novels have also won the Curd, Lazewitz and Italia awards. The Regicide Report, the final book in his Laundry Files series, was released in January. His other series include Merchant Princess and the Singularity. And he's got a whole new series in the works, one for which I got an advance peek at the first book. As you'll hear us talk all about in the conversation which follows, we headed out the Saturday of Easter Con to the Chinatown area of Birmingham for lunch at Cafe Soya, which he praised highly before we visited and I can praise highly now that I visited. Definitely worth a visit of your own if you're ever in the area. And as eating the Fantastic's Hugo nomination, for which thank you all very much, has resulted in an uptick in downloads of Let me briefly explain why I do what I do, where I do it. The reason these conversations I bring you are recorded over meals in restaurants is because of something I suspected at the start and which after nearly 300 episodes I've learned to be true. In a studio, people can get performative. They can start playing to the microphone, they can start playing to you. And ironically, it's when they're not doing that, when there's the distraction of food interfering with them doing that, when their brain and tongue tells them they're only having a meal, when they're not thinking of you, that they can best serve you and reveal to you who they really are nibbling away, they relax, I relax, and we become just a couple of friends chatting, which brings you an intimacy I believe a studio wouldn't get either us or you. And thanks to the Nimano sound capsule I use to record the the ambient noise is suppressed way into the background, our voices soaring over what remains. And sometimes, as in this episode, even though it was recorded in a noisy dining room, it's almost entirely gone. And having been in that room and remembering how noisy it was, honestly, I'm gobsmacked. I'll mention here too, before we dive in, that I started using the game changing Nimano sound capsule for Nina Kuriki Hoffman's episode, which was 2:14 and here we are at 282. Something to keep in mind should you go back and check out the earlier episodes for which I did the best I could for nowhere near as good as what that device can do. And who knows, the YUA nomination you all gave the podcast, some of it was probably due to those folks at the Mono. One last thing before you take your seat at the table. And coming up just a couple of days from now, if you're listening to this podcast as it goes live, I'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of eating the Fantastic at Balticon Sunday morning at 10am in the Con Suite with donuts and door prizes. If you'll be at the con, I hope you'll drop by. Now please join Charles and me at the table at Cafe Soya as the lunch ordering begins. So you're Getting the Singapore vermicelli.

[Charles Stross]

Yep.

[Scott Edelman]

Right, I'm going to get the Vietnamese lemongrass with pork. Then the drinks you were getting.

[Charles Stross]

Yep. A Malteser shake.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And what is the ice?

[Scott Edelman]

Fruit tea.

[Charles Stross]

What fruit is that, Ms. Berry?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Okay, I'll have one of those. Before we begin talking about you and your work, I want you to know that your latest book completely terrified me because of the location in which we are recording.

[Scott Edelman]

Because in the final book of the

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Laundry series, you mentioned that if you are wandering a hotel in Birmingham and go through the wrong portal, you could very well end up inside a Trump hotel in Chicago. And I need you to assure me that this weekend we were spending in Birmingham in a hotel that might have a portal in it will not take me back to Chicago into a Trump hotel.

[Charles Stross]

Luckily, the Laundry Files is entirely fictional.

[Scott Edelman]

Okay.

[Charles Stross]

Hotel Space is sort of a joke that grew over a period of several books. It started off as just a throwaway joke in one of the early ones, and I kept using it because. Have you noticed how the service areas in hotels always look the same? So they're interchangeable? And the joke is you can go into one hotel service area and find yourself in another hotel.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, in this particular situation, since I happen to be reading the book on the way to Birmingham and you're talking about Birmingham. Yeah, it terrified me a bit.

[Charles Stross]

So not as much as the Daleks.

[Scott Edelman]

No. I'm glad to know that.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

No, not as much as I know Trump terrifies me more than any Dalek.

[Scott Edelman]

What can I say?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

But he's an engine of chess.

[Charles Stross]

Daleks are predictable, they're destructive. But you know what they're gonna do when they turn up? Trump could do anything.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, I have been reading you for about as long as you've been published because I remember first encountering you.

[Scott Edelman]

Your story of the boys.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Oh, boy.

[Charles Stross]

Hell.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Which was in the Winter 1987 issue of Interest Zone, because I was subscribing from the very beginning of Interest Zone.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah. So that was the first story I had commercially published.

[Scott Edelman]

So who was that guy back then?

[Charles Stross]

Me. Very, very different, because, oh, it's two thirds of a lifetime ago. So. Yeah. And I was very much under the influence of early cyberpunk back then. I recovered afterwards, but. Yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And who did you expect? We're now 39 years later. What kind of career were you anticipating for yourself at the time that first story ended up getting?

[Charles Stross]

Back when I had. Back when I was writing that story, I was working as a pharmacist, which was some spectacularly bad careers advice. I'M almost certainly autistic and very probably ADHD as well. These are not traits you want in a pharmacist because you tend to get obsessive compulsive shit. And also not great at completing on tasks sometimes.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

But there's an attention to detail. I think that would be helpful, wouldn't it?

[Scott Edelman]

Or.

[Charles Stross]

No, no, no, it does not work like that. And I kind of quit that career the next year because I was managing a small pharmacy in Halifax, a town in Yorkshire. And to cut a long story short, it was a bit grim. I was staked out for an armed robbery by the police twice in one month. The armed robbers never showed up. But the police terrified me. And luckily back then you did not have to pay tuition fees for university. In fact, you could get a grant from the government to go to university. I should add. The shop I was running that got staked at for an armed robbery twice was owned above a richest junkie in West Yorkshire. He'd built up a chain of 10 pharmacies, but it wrecked his family. Wife left him, kids left him. He began hitting the substances he was selling. He ended up in prison for half the time I was running that shop. So it was all a bit too much excitement. And I'd been getting interested in computers around this time anyway because who wouldn't be in the 1980s? And the government discovered the UK had far too few computer science graduates. So they panicked and started cross training people. So they paid me to go back to university and do a master's degree in computer science, which I did and then I ended up in tech, as one does.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, how were you with the. Having a day job and trying to get writing done? I know I was terrible in that split brain bifurcation, having a variety of day jobs and trying to write my short stories. It did not help.

[Charles Stross]

And as a sign of how it happened in the 90s, when I actually began writing novels that people wanted to read, it was taking me about three years to complete a novel in the 90s. Then the first year I was actually able to go full time as a novelist. I wrote three novels in one year, which is a bit of a turnaround.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Yeah, because at the time I started reading you, the first novel was something like 15 years in the future. At least the first published novel. Yeah, there might have been many unpublished ones.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, I was kind of the failure to launch of the Interzone generation of writers because, you know, people like Paul McCauley and Kim Newman and not really Al Reynolds, but Stephen Baxter, we all began Selling our short fiction in Interzone around the same time in the 80s. But I'm the one who didn't actually sell a book at that decade. Things happened fairly fast though in the noughties because I was the first back end developer hire at a successful dot com and then left just as the dot com bubble peaked. I've been offered a new job elsewhere with more money and I was burnt out. So I took a job offer just as a bubble burst and the job I was going to vanished. Luckily I was already writing a monthly magazine column in Computer Shopper, the British magazine Computer Shopper, about Linux. And I managed to leverage that into going full time as a freelance Linux journalist in 3 months flat. And suddenly once you're writing magazine articles for a living, doing novels on the side seems a lot more of a natural fit. And it was around that time that I sold a short story collection, began selling stories in Asimovs and then got on a Hugo shortlist, then acquired an agent and began selling novels all in about a 12 month period.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, that's the future from the boys. What about if we go earlier than the boys?

[Charles Stross]

Further back? Yes.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Meaning? So that was the first story you sold?

[Charles Stross]

The first story commercially sold.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

What did it take to get to that? How many rejections and how many toms. Like what number story written was it? That was your first story Song.

[Charles Stross]

I'd already written about 12 novel shaped objects on a manual typewriter and an electric typewriter before I got to the boys. And an inordinate number of short stories in a postal writers workshop that was running for a long time back then, the Cassandra Workshop. Ian Watson can probably tell you more about that. That was a regional writers workshop that did stuff around the whole of the UK back when we could afford postage. They privatized the post office a few years ago, it's now owned by a Czech billionaire. But anyway, yeah, I was writing for quite a long time, but it was in amateur outlets. Yep. Thank you.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you were doing a by mail writer's workshop?

[Charles Stross]

Well, how to put it? When I was 12, my English teacher at school set the class a task that took an entire term, which is fill an exercise book with a short story. I was one of a few people in my class, about 10% of us who filled two books and it was shit, but it existed and it proved to be like a right longer stuff. So around that time Dungeons and dragons hit the UK around 1979ish. And I was an early adopter of D and D. In fact, I Wrote some of the, it turns out now, some of the classic D and D monsters that are sort of famous parts of a canon who were first published in White Dwarf and then collected in an early D and D supplement, the Fiend Folio. I accidentally wrote about 5% of a fiend folio when I was 15, and the D and D group I was part of broke up when we graduated from grammar school and went to university. But by then I was trying to write short stories. I wrote my first novel, Shaped Object, when I was 15, about 40,000 words. If I find it, I'll burn it. It's that bad. But I was attempting to do that sort of thing at the time and didn't know what the hell I was doing. But I think I can reasonably say I got better eventually.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So what was the impetus for doing that sort of thing? Who were you reading that had you going, gee, I enjoy this stuff. I'd like to try giving it a hand myself?

[Charles Stross]

Back in the 1970s, there was not a lot of SF in the UK. I don't know if it was something like 40 to 60 books a year published in SF and fantasy combined. You could read pretty much everything. I drained the local library by the time I was 10. Reading the classics. I mean, obviously Asimov and Heinlein, Anne Clarke and a lot of Andrea Norton when she was in print here and kept going. I'm not sure why I latched onto the idea of writing SFN fantasy, but it seemed the only form of fiction that was interesting enough to be worth writing. This is probably the autism side talking.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you're reading more widely, but that's what grabbed you as opposed to mysteries?

[Charles Stross]

Well, I wasn't reading much more widely, but yeah. Now the British education system, you have to specialize at a fairly early age to decide what. You decide what you're going to do at university and pick your courses accordingly. When you're 16, which is way too early in my opinion, you don't have combined liberal arts degrees or STEM degrees that cover multiple topics. With minor studies, you just target a particular field. So it was very much a hobbyist thing rather than being taught writing MFAs as we now have barely existed. Back then, I might have, you know, these days I might have ended up doing a creative writing club course and then ended up being funneled through, I guess, a production line new authors do, but that didn't exist. You basically did it if you wanted to do it and taught yourself, then discovered other writers doing the same thing and workshopped with them. Peer to Peer.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So how did you discover the workshops? Were you involved in fandom prior to attempting to be a professional that you were aware of these things? Because often people don't know about.

[Charles Stross]

I went to Forbidden Planet in London. Big bookshop, big SF bookshop in. I think it would have been 1981 ish or 82 ish. And John Brunner was there doing a signing. And I think I mentioned something about wanting to write. Need look up these people. There are writers workshop in Northampton and I did and I ended up hooking up with this postal writers workshop. I also joined the British Science Fiction association who had their own orbiter workshops for basically groups run like an Appa but for people who wanted to write, commenting on each other's stories. And then I got into fandom as such in 1983 when the local newspaper in Leeds ran a headline, you know, science fiction fans beam into Leeds. It was talking about the Eastercom coming to Leeds. I think it was Yorcon 3. So I basically turned up at an eastacon with no idea what was going on or what I was doing. And that was my first convention. And I take this convention as absolute living proof that time travel does not exist. At least if time travel does exist. Is not interested in science fiction. Because I was wandering around this convention meeting people and just your general spotty youth carry a bag of manuscript in it. Because I knew nothing. And there was this tall, gawky goth bloke wandering around in drainpipe jeans wearing all black. He was called Neil, you may have heard of Neil Gaiman. And over on one side, this was well before he was famous. Over at the bar there was a short, irascible guy in a hat with a beard propping up the bar. I'm a fantasy writer, you know, Buy me a beer and I'll tell you all about my latest novel. It's called the Colour of Magic. It was Terry Pratchett catching beer off random fans because he was broke.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Were you gobsmacked at all of this? To see the actual human beings behind the well, I mean, what kind of newbie were you?

[Charles Stross]

I have no idea.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Were you shy and taken aback by it or were you in an introverted way? Because some people walk into these things. Oh, I couldn't possibly talk to these people. And other people can just go right up and oh, I love your books.

[Charles Stross]

And I was probably too talkative and very, very under socialized. I needed a long period of humanization thereafter, but I found myself sort of at home. There were quite a lot of like minded people there. And I ended up diving into fandom. I joined an appa, went to more conventions, all the stuff you'd expect, basically.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I mean, was it a homecoming of sorts? I know for some people it is. Out in the real world, we're the only one in our group who is as obsessed with this stuff as we are. Because there comes to be a time we realize, gee, not everyone is paying as much attention to this stuff as I am. I'm a little hyper focused on it. And then you get to fandom and realize, oh, I do have people somewhere else these days.

[Charles Stross]

I'd call it a safe space. Yeah, we were all a bit weird.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Now, you mentioned you had the manuscripts in your backpack. Did you do the mistake? You had a twinkle in your eye then. I couldn't tell whether that meant you were trying to force them on people to read them and give their opinions.

[Charles Stross]

I learned better very fast. But yeah, again, more proof that there is either no time travel or no time travelers are interested in sf. Because if there were, somebody would have taken that manuscript and then been very, very sorry. As I said, it's best burnt if I discover it.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So is that workshop you're mentioning, the Cassandra workshop? It is. Okay. I wasn't sure if there was more than one. And how long did you remain in that? Were you still in there when you began selling?

[Charles Stross]

No.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

No. Are any of the stories that I have read that you did sell from

[Scott Edelman]

that workshop and improved by that workshop?

[Charles Stross]

It's prior to me selling. All right, so sort of ancient prehistory.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Those first stories that I read are unworkshopped and entirely from your head without. Unless you sent them through some friends debater.

[Charles Stross]

They may have been workshopped because. Well, I left the Cassandra thing, which was a hotbed of amateurism. Basically it was a smarry authors helping each other. Subsequently I found myself being invited to the Milford Workshop, which is a week long residential workshop. Hotels around the uk.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And this is before you published or.

[Charles Stross]

No, this was after I began publishing short stories.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And you were seen as promising.

[Charles Stross]

They had a minimum professional requirement to be invited to Milford was to have published three short stories or a novel. Once I'd made that, I went a few times because Milford was much more useful in terms of feedback you got because it was run along Clarion rules only peer to peer rather than taught Clarion. And you had some fairly heavyweight authors turning up there.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

What do you feel you learned there?

[Charles Stross]

Learning how to handle high quality feedback actually from people who know what they're talking About. And also when you've got a group mind of about 12 people in a writer's workshop. If everybody loves a story, it's good. If everybody hates it and they all hate it for different reasons, it's bad if they are very, very divided. If half of them love it and half of them hate it, you've got something interesting on your hands, reasonable. And what it did was it helped me. You've got to have a bullshit detector when you're taking feedback. Everybody these days gets to read the Amazon one star reader reviews and chortle at them. You'll always find terrible one star reader reviews. It's fun every so often to just pick a classic book or two, say the Naked and the Dead or the Lord of the Rings. Go to it on Amazon or Goodreads, click on the one star reviews and look at the one star reviews. Are some side splitters there, but the point is you learn to read between the lines. And what you're looking for is what is the quality of this review? What is it telling me that's useful. It's very helpful to approach that stage when you've calibrated your baseline against professional authors. Yeah. Who will invariably look at a work much more critically and analytically than jrandom reader. What I've learned over many, many years is whatever you put on the page, 25% of your readers will not merely misunderstand it, they'll get whatever message you're trying to convey absolutely backwards. Absolutely guaranteed. If more than 25% of your readers are getting it backwards, this is a problem. Your problem. You need to know how people read stuff in order to know how you're communicating effectively. Because we are ultimately trying to communicate. Therapy writing is all very well, but if you want to do therapy writing, you should probably keep it to yourself and not try to inflict it on the public.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And there's also the fact though that, well, people don't like it, but you said what you intended to say and they don't like the message, but you put it forth successfully. So therefore the story was a success. And in that way. So you have to calibrate from that as well. I'm thinking there's an opposite of what you just mentioned, that no book, no matter how good, avoids having those one star reviews is the inverse. That no work, no matter how bad, is not someone's favorite work. Yeah, whatever movie, whatever TV show, whatever book, no matter how terrible it is, it's someone's favorite thing.

[Charles Stross]

Somebody liked it enough to make it. I mean, Somebody else liked it enough to publish it very often.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So, yeah, so there's some audience, no matter how small, out there somewhere. But oh, yeah, well, let's jump ahead 40 years and talk about the end of the Laundry series. I'm wondering why now, unless you're teasing us and it's all a pretense and it's not really the end, we're now only two months and a week away from the publication of that final book in our rear view mirror.

[Charles Stross]

Well, what happened?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

How did you come to decide? Well, I think it's time after all

[Charles Stross]

these, a couple of things happened. But number one, the random penguin merger in 2015, that killed the Laundry Files at Penguin. Because I was with Penguin, who were the smaller publisher of the merger, and it was an absolute bloodbath. My imprint, Ace, went through. Well, I was assigned three editors in one year because people kept leaving or being fired. That's never good. And then the shit really hit the fan because idiot executives from the Random House side of the merger began playing politics. One of the Random House execs decreed from a boardroom, we are overbought on urban fantasy. I want you to rank urban Fantasy series by their sales figures in the fourth quarter and get rid of a bottom third. Now, the Laundry Files are published as trade books, hardcovers in the first week of the third quarter, which meant by the first week of the fourth quarter those hardbacks had to be paid for by the bookstores or returned for credit. And no books were going out of the warehouse in the fourth quarter. Now, the two previous Laundry Files novels had actually been hitting the USA Today bestseller charts. But because they picked fourth quarter sales to rank the series on rather than third quarter sales, I was not commercially viable anymore. Now, my agent and I had been doing rolling two book deals of Ace for a science fiction novel and a laundry novel. And we went back, she went back to bat for another such deal and we said, well, we love the science fiction pitch. We'll give you a 50% increase in your advance, but we have to cancel the Laundry Files. They're not commercial.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Fascinating.

[Charles Stross]

I'm terribly sorry, but by the metric we've been ordered to use, you're not commercially viable. And my agent has raised her eyebrow and told me, you know, I think we should walk. This place is a dumpster fire and it's not going to recover for at least five years. So we walked and, and the Laundry Files survived. This was its second publisher failure. The first publisher was Golden Griffin, who were a small press and the bloke who ran the publisher retired and there was no successor. So then it went to Ace, and then Ace screwed the pooch. And, well, we were lucky enough that Tor.com decided to take it on. Well, they considered themselves lucky to get it. They'd already been publishing the short fiction and they'd actually had a Hugo win out of it under another Hugo nomination. So they were quite happy to acquire the series. But then I got a bit ambitious. Well, I pinned myself to a particular story ARC from about 2016, things getting worse and worse and worse until an elder God takes over the UK that was kind of locked in. And then in 2019, I was thinking, I've been writing this series for 20 years. My readers are raging. I need to get new readers on board. This was a fatal error. I'm going to do Laundry Files for Next Generation. This was going to be the new management series. And I wrote this novel, Dead Lies Dreaming, which did not feature a traditional laundry protagonist. It was in the same setting. And my big plan was go down to London and talk to the marketing people at Orbit, go to New York and talk to the marketing people at Tor. Get them to set it up as the start of a spin off series. We know how this is done. And I delivered it in January 2020. I think you can guess what happened to my plans for nobbling the marketing department. And because everything was complete chaos that year, they marketed the book as More Laundry Files. And the readers did not like this. Sales stalled and stopped going up and presently began to trend down.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So the new people who might have thought that an entryway did not know it was a new thing. And the old people were shocked that it wasn't the old thing. So it was sort of the worst of both worlds then.

[Charles Stross]

But then things got worse again because I caught Covid twice in 2022 and it did a number on me. Brain fog. I was unable to write for six months, and when I did acquire viability again, the next novel I wrote after recovering was half the normal length because I couldn't hold that many plot strands together for a 120,000 word book. I could only make 55,000 words. And I like it. I think it's a very solid 55,000 word short novel, but not full length. It sort of broke the rhythm I had of a full length novel every year, plus a few other short things. And I began getting some pushback from my editor. You know, sales are beginning to show signs of decline. Can you wrap the series? And as it turned out, I had a series ender. In mind from quite a way back. And that was the regicide report go out with a bang. So I think I did a creditable job of ending what is now a 1.7 million word series. It needed a series scale ending and I'm not too unhappy to have ended it because 25 years and 1.7 million words is a lot. It's a burden. I basically wrote nothing but laundry and Merchant princess novels for 10 years. And it's going to be good to do. It's good to be doing different stuff now.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you just mentioned that the ending was the ending that you had in mind. Does that mean that back when this began you already saw an end?

[Charles Stross]

It did not begin as a series.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I know it was. It surprised you that it was gonna be one and then it was gonna be a trilogy or something.

[Charles Stross]

I had been heading in this direction since about book eight, which came out in 2017.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So at that point you sort of knew what I have just read.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, I also knew at that point that this isn't the end of the Laundry universe. This is the end of the main story arc about Bob. And also Bob had become pretty tiresome by this point. As a main protagonist. A protagonist who interests you when you're 35 is of less interest when you're 60. But there is scope for more Laundry Files stuff. No, not more Laundry Files, but more in that universe. And there may indeed be another new management novella. But I need a few years off and I need to do something radically different for a while.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So I was wondering if that's why on the COVID at least on the COVID that I saw when I bought the book and on the COVID on my Kindle it does not say the amazing conclusion to the Laundry Files series. It says it within the body copy that this is the conclusion, but not on the COVID Is that because they want to scare people since you will be delivering more in the same universe?

[Charles Stross]

I don't know. They did not consult me on the marketing.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

But because you know, when I went to the site and bought a copy of the book. It does say in the copy that it is inclusion to encourage people to read the Smashbang ending. But I just saw it's interesting it wasn't on the COVID and I thought maybe

[Charles Stross]

in the UK the Laundry Files have been published from start to finish by Orbit. If you want a uniform edition, wait until August when the when the trade paperback comes out and you can get a complete run of 14 laundry file books in standardised dress and design language, which looks really nice on the shelf, if I say so myself. But in the US it's a mess. The first two books came out from Golden Griffin in hardcover. So ACE did trade paperbacks and then mass market paperbacks, but never did a hardcover. Then there were five more books in hardcover from Ace. So those hardcovers are different to the early two hardcovers. The mass market was declining from about 2005 onwards and I fell out of mass market after book six. So there's no mass market edition of book six in the US at all. And then it went to Tor.com who do hardcovers and occasionally trade paperbacks, but I think they're only really available in hardcover and ebooks because Tor.com is primarily an ebook publisher. So you, you cannot get a uniform edition in the US market for love nor money. There is. There wasn't one. And I think there may be an element at Tor of loss of confidence of a series where the first seven books are effectively owned by a rival publisher. I've not got the rights back to defer early laundry books, and if I did, I'm not sure Tor would want to run them again anyway. I mean, they might, but who knows? It just hasn't come up yet. So it's a bit patchy. The only reliable way to get them all in the US is as ebooks.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Who did you have to grow into over the course of the books to be able to write the final book? Obviously you became a better writer over the years writing the book. So. So what did you learn and how did you evolve and change in order to be able to pull off the end as you grew through the writing of them?

[Charles Stross]

Well, at the beginning of the book, Bob, our viewpoint protagonist is early 20s, somewhat cynical, computer science guy, tech sector who's think early.com type guy, sandal wearing nerd who has fallen into the British civil service. It's fish out of water comedy, basically, in a spy agency familiar to anyone who's read Valen Dayton. Bobby.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I think we should have a moment of silence right now.

[Charles Stross]

Right, yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

He only passed last month, I believe

[Charles Stross]

a couple of weeks ago.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Yeah. Anyway, go on.

[Charles Stross]

Anyway, by the end of a series, because it's moving. One of the things I got very right about it was to advance the clock in the series in step with the real world. So by the end of the series, Bob is 15 years older, a burnt out, cynical middle manager. Yeah, which I could not have written when I was subject to cynical burnt out middle managers myself. I think older authors are better at writing older characters and more likely to Do a good job of it. Also, from book six onwards, I had begun introducing other viewpoint characters. Book six overlaps with book five in the timeline, and it's told from the point of view of Mo, Bob's wife after their separation, which was caused by her Val in trying to murder him. There's a lot of arcane stuff going on there, but the point is you suddenly get her perspective on the events of the last third of the novel before, and she has a totally different view of what happened from him and an unvarnished and skeptical view of her husband of about eight years, because she would. That got me some hate reviews as well from readers who are basically there for Bob and not for the universe. The next book after that, different viewpoint character again, then yet then an ensemble cast novel with about three or four viewpoint characters, followed by another viewpoint character who had been introduced as a pure cardboard cutout in book one, and then by book nine, had her own entire novel and a whole lot of complexity. Because I've been living with these characters in my head for nearly 20 years at this point, I knew an awful lot more about them or learned a lot more about them without realizing how I'd done it along the way.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And about yourself and human nature and the way the world works.

[Charles Stross]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So the things you're talking about are the larger issues of plot and characterization and things like that. If I had gone back as I should have done and reread the first Laundry book and compared it to the last Laundry book, what would I have seen about style and sentence structure and how you.

[Charles Stross]

I don't know about sentence structure. I don't know about the sentence structure changing. But what I will note is the first Laundry book was very much a one trick pony. And Bob was pretty shallow on the characterization front. I learned a lot about what I was doing as I was going along and about people's motivations as human beings. And the other thing I got right in the laundry files, in addition to having Bob move forward by a year of wall clock time in the real world per year in the novel against the novel, so that 15 years take place over part of a half of a series, so there's room for growth. The other thing I got right was to very consciously from book two, make Bob an unreliable narrator who contradicts himself and corrects his own misconceptions from the earlier books. So if I've said something as a matter of law in book one, suddenly in book three, he contradicts himself and says, well, that's what I thought at that point I was wrong because.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Which is a wonderful escape hatch.

[Charles Stross]

Oh yeah. If I hadn't done it, I don't think I could have made the series work because I had no idea it was going to be a series until about hook three.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, I think that was the point when your editors said, hey, let's call this the Laundry Files as an overarching time.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, and I don't like that name

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

either, but what would you have called it?

[Charles Stross]

I couldn't think of anything better. What happened was Ginger Buchanan said, well, we've got an order from on high. All series of three or more books must now have a series title. Yours is the Laundry Files, unless you can suggest anything better. There was a night agent's working for the laundry and she picked the files thing because of Jim Butcher's VA Dresden Files, which were also ace. And it gives me a bit of a cringe reflex because it's very derivative of Jim Butcher's series, but it's a successful format, so.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So even all of these decades later you haven't thought, hey, I've got something that will substitute in and be better.

[Charles Stross]

I am terrible at series titles.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, we'll talk about a potential next series in a few moments, but I don't want to let go of the laundry piles just yet. I always wondered in reading them, what am I missing as an American that I'm not picking up on, that I am not finding as humorous as a Brit reading the books. There are surely Easter eggs in there that are caught by people who grew up in the same atmosphere that you did. So. Well, what am I missing? I mean, obviously we all know who the royal family is, universally.

[Charles Stross]

You mentioned the regiciacide report. Easter eggs and the regiciacide report. You might have missed the bit in Birmingham, the sequence where Bob is called in to deal with a siege situation in a comic shop. Yes, you may have noticed he enters a comic shop in company with a police inspector. Inspector Angel. How are you familiar with the movie Hot Fuzz?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I am not Silent Peg. I missed that one.

[Charles Stross]

It's a cop buddy movie in the UK in which a big swinging dick armed firearms unit cop from Birmingham gets sent to a village in rural shire with a very, very sleepy police force and then discovers a series of increasingly sinister and bizarre murders happening. It escalates to a point where we have a British copper riding into town on a white horse with a bunch of shotguns and a submachine gun during the high noon showdown sequence.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So he's made a guest starring Appearance in the Redecis Award.

[Charles Stross]

Yes. And that's not all. How familiar are you with Vincent Price's movie?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, I did send you a photograph I took with his daughter.

[Charles Stross]

Oh, right. Victoria.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So I have seen the. The ones you're referencing in the book. So I found it fascinating that I had a connection with his daughter when they was a screening with recipes from his cookbook.

[Charles Stross]

Right.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Being served at the Alamo Theater.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, well, it's just I saw those movies for the first time in about 2022 and a devout argument with them in my own head canon when I realized that neither of the two leading ladies had any spoken lines in either movie, which is just mad. And I had to mentally reckon how this might have emerged and how it was misrepresented. That's where the Fibers movies and the Laundry Files come from. Because if you look at them, the plots are increasingly bizarrely divergent from the actual as made movies. And then there's the third movie that never got made. Well, Anglo American were going to make a third movie, but cancelled it. In the Laundry universe, they cancelled it because the producer was murdered by fives when he saw the script.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, I did find that fascinating if you had all the additional books, all the additional films showing up within the book. So when did you lock down that final book? When was it handed in? And the reason I'm asking this is because there are an awful lot of references to Prince Andrew which since in the past few months have become more newsworthy than they might have been when you.

[Charles Stross]

He's had a dirty reputation over here for many years. And this was locked down in 2023.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Oh, really? Oh, you were done with the book back.

[Scott Edelman]

Okay.

[Charles Stross]

The Epstein stuff hadn't surfaced at that point, but he already had people backing off him, calling him the nonce. He had a bad reputation.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

But I found that popping. It also had me wondering, have you ever heard anything from any representative of the royal family saying, could you lay things off of it? Could you? You know? Or is it beneath their notice? So no one even.

[Charles Stross]

It's beneath their notice. They probably are astute enough to follow the Streisand effect. They're probably aware of that now to the point where they do not dignify trivial shit with their attention in public for fear of actually amplifying the message. Yes, I would be in that level as far as they're concerned. But also, I mean, why should they care? They've cut him loose.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, it's the same way. Maybe science fiction is just under the radar as you said, I've written several anti Trump stories. And someone said, well, surely he would have been complaining about them the way he did about South Park. And I had to explain, well, you gotta understand, south park is a much more visible thing than has millions of views publishing stories in Lightspeed and other magazines.

[Charles Stross]

He might notice if Stephen King wrote a novel in which Trump is the villain. Yes, nothing short of that.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, let's move on from the laundry files and talk to something which you've given me the great privilege of reading called Starter Pack, which as far as I know you have written and not yet sold it with your agent. And there's something new happening.

[Charles Stross]

Starter Pack is new since April 2020, but at the same time it goes back to 2015, at the point where Ace and I parted ways I had pitched from a new SF novel they were actually enthusiastic about, because space opera is the thing at the wave of the future. And I wanted to get back to space opera, which I had. I had several space opera novels out in the past, starting with Singularity sky and going on from there. But I was working on this thing called Ghost Engineering, which was my massively over ambitious attempt to colonize the territory vacated by Ian Banks, who isn't writing culture novels anymore for some reason. And I was basically planning a let's occupy the Banks space opera territory. I had a space opera universe left lying around from my 2008 Novella palimpsest time travel novella, which there were premises. An agency has access to a machine for generating wormholes between points in space time, and they use it for time travel. Ghost Engine was going to be set in the universe where a version of its agency uses it for space colonization instead. And humanity's expanded massively over two thirds of a million year period and colonized the entire Virgo supercluster of galaxies. There's this overarching thing called the Authority who will provide wormhole transits between any two points in spacetime if you pay them enough. And they mandate a trade currency, a universal time and coordinate framework, and a trade language. So there's the fundamental requirements of trade. And at this point we have many, many tens of millions of worlds on a grid. But there's a limit. The machine can only generate wormholes between two endpoints at once. The wormhole portals cannot be more than about a kilometer in radius. So of limited, you can't send entire planets whizzing around. And the setup and teardown time is measured in milliseconds. And it suppresses all other wormhole generators within the observable universe. There can only be one. And a whole lot of political consequences fall out of this. And Ghost Engine was going to be a space opera, but also because it's Ian Banks, it has to be a Litvik novel, because Ian was very much a literary writer even when he was doing space opera. And an interesting thing about this is a lot of people try to do Banksian space opera, but they think this just means starships with sarcastic senses of humor and strange names. There's more to it than that. So I decided to write a Lipwig novel. And here's where I got too clever for my own breeches. Ghost Engine was going to be an academic litvic novels, specifically one relying on the sad boner professor trope. The professor is sad and he has a boner. They may be connected. His relationship with his wife is increasingly chilly and frigid. He's at the height of his power, but something horrible from his past is coming towards him. His woes may have something to do with the extremely gorgeous postgraduate student he's having an affair with. Yeah, because this is space opera. It turns out that the wife is an assassin who's been set to keep an eye on his work and murder him if he's too successful. She's increasingly chilly because he's coming to the end of his research project and she doesn't actually want to murder him. The girlfriend side of it. Well, she's an industrial spy. And the silliest bit. They're living as humanoids in this kind of medieval crapsack society and where they will probably be burnt to the stake as witches if it is discovered they are in fact trisexual, gender swapping aliens. And all this is set up in the first third of the novel before the psychopathic space ninjas turn up in their flying monastery, blow up the ringworld this is set on and kidnap a professor, leaving the wife and girlfriend to team up and go after and steal a starship and give chase. And it refused to work.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And how much of this was written before you said, let me write something else?

[Charles Stross]

The third draft is 80% complete at 130,000 words. It's been through two previous drafts. As I said, it's been torturing me

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

for a decade and you've hit the wall.

[Charles Stross]

So I hit the wall, but there was a dangling thread implied by the first sentence and it implied lossy machine mediated reincarnation. It's a universe with no singularity and no true AI. But everybody believes in the rapture of the nerds and mind upload AI Heaven. And everybody is feverishly recording their brain scans for posterity and leaving behind graves. It's a universe where there are millions of inhabited planets and the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Hence the title Ghost Engine.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And you took that one sentence.

[Charles Stross]

The one sentence was about how our female protagonist awakened after her eighth successful suicide bombing mission in the reincarnation tank to receive new orders directing her to pursue a career in academia. And I began thinking, hang on, what are the ramifications of having brain scanning and uploading and then downloading into another body through the eyeballs and ears? It's like a 1970s blurry photo, you know, a smudgy semi legible photocopies on shiny paper. It's not what we'd think of as true, as accurate mind uploading a la John Varley's Eight Worlds universe where they can copy people into a new cloned body and they may not even realize they've been cloned. It's messy. And I began thinking about what the implications of this were and what ghastly uses a really hideous hereditary aristocracy or nobility or oligarchy would make of it for ensuring continuity of power. And that's how I began writing Starter Pack, which kind of rolled over me. And at the same time I'd been. I've always had a sneaking fondness for the Stainless Steel Rat novels of Harry Harrison and.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And why is it a sneaking fondness? Is it a guilty pleasure?

[Charles Stross]

It's a guilty.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Of course I know that's the first thing you asked me before sharing the manuscript was saying, do you like the Stainless Steel Rat? And I read them all as a kid and loved them.

[Charles Stross]

Right. Well, the thing is, Ian Banks is a really hard target to hit in a space opera. The Stainless Steel Rat is somewhat easier. And I had a beautiful MacGuffin. And you have read Starter Pack. You have some idea where I went

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

with this and you've dedicated the book to Harry Harrison.

[Charles Stross]

Well, obviously it's not a Stainless Steel Rat novel, but it's inspired by. In the sense of Our two protagonists are the Trickster King and the Murder Queen, who do crime together over a series of incarnations.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So how did it grow in your head once you put aside its use in the original book? Did one or the other of the characters come to you? I don't even know if I want to mention the names of the characters. I don't know how many spoilers you want to have for a book that has not yet been solved.

[Charles Stross]

There is only one character in common who survived from Ghost Engine into Starter Pack and that's their fence, Jaeger. However, having said that, having finished the draft of Starter Pack that you've read, I then realized the problem with my sad Boner professor plot was the Professor's idea of revenge for somebody murdering his wife and his girlfriend is to write a sternly worded letter to the editor. He's not a man of action. However, if I take that early novel and summarily sack the love triangle at the middle of it, an audition for replacements John and Tabitha fit perfectly if they're running a long con on the Empress staff from Glory Road by Heinlein. So if this proceeds to another book in the series, it's going to be the Stainless Steel Rat versus Glory Road.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And at the moment this is something you have just gone ahead and written for your own pleasure. It is unsold.

[Charles Stross]

It's unsold. Well, I've written the first 20,000 words of a second book. I'm stopping right there until my agent gets back to me. Now, I've got an existing publishing deal with Orbit for a space opera and we're reasonably confident that they will take Starter Pack and run it in the uk. I've got an existing book at a time deal with Tor.com we think they'd take it or some other publisher may go for it. But I'm reasonably certain that Starter Pack will be my next novel.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Now, there's a note at the beginning of this manuscript and I don't know whether that note is intended to be read by readers or is it only a note intended to be read by your agent in order to sell it or but to the editor in order to understand what you've written. And you've said this book takes place in a Crapsack universe. I don't know if that would be in the book as a warning to the reader or not. I think best because that led me to expect a far darker book than it ended up being because I actually found it a fun romp and a joyful book and a funny book. Yeah, but look, even though bad things

[Charles Stross]

happen to people, chapter three ends with a mass crucifixion of burning clowns. This is not light hearted. It's funny, but it's not light hearted. There's a darkness at the heart of that book.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

There is a darkness there, but there's a lot of fun going on with the the machinations and plans people are making.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, thank you.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So I was and because of that introduction dimension that it's a Crabsack universe. I was reading the final chapters with great dread, less because of the novel itself than because of the warning. Oh, he's telling me bad things are going to happen by that. So that's why I didn't know whether it was something that our protagonists die

[Charles Stross]

at the end of chapter one.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Yes, but it's. You get to come back. So I'm, you know, I mean, I ended up finding it a fun book and not a dark, depressing book, regardless of the bad things that end up happening to people.

[Charles Stross]

But it's also a political allegory for our times because, you know, we're living in a world dominated by Bond villains right now. For real. I mean, I'm not talking about just Trump. It's all over the place. Look at Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, who's a Hindutva nationalist, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and has frankly gone all full out Nazi. Except you're not allowed to call him a Nazi because Jewish. He's meant to have Nazi armor, moral armor. It's disgusting. And all over the bloody planet the fascists have crawled out of the woodwork.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, it may simply be that I am a hopeless romantic and therefore, as I was reading the novel, I was focusing on less on the terrible things done by terrible people who remain in power, as opposed to rooting for the. Whether you consider it a love story or not, a potential one for it to work out. So I was following along that happening over the ages.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, you have to have some sympathetic characters to read the route with, otherwise they'll just want to slash their wrists or give up in disgust.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And also, you do some fascinating things with time in this and that. You're going forward and back through various incarnations of the characters. We're necessarily reading them in the chronological time period they took place.

[Scott Edelman]

You're having.

[Charles Stross]

The thing that does in my head is that I actually wrote it linearly with those flashbacks in place. Yeah, okay.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And then you cut it up and moved it around.

[Charles Stross]

No, I did not cut it up and move it around. I wrote it as it appears.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Oh, you wrote it as it appeared. Oh, okay.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah. Which it does in my head in that I was able to do that because you've actually got four different instars or reincarnation periods in their lives. It would be a simple two person alternating viewpoint novel if not for the fact that you've got four different reincarnations of each of them and then told out of sequence.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So what was your method for keeping track of it? All and keeping it straight.

[Charles Stross]

Search and replace a lot. Oh yeah, I'm a pantser, which is odd. It was actually getting back.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

That seems like a difficult novel to have pants. So this novel was pants. This is a quote, quite intricate clockwork thing you have going there.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And yet you did it all in sort of a gut organic way rather.

[Charles Stross]

The only points where I didn't do the intercutting organically, what you've seen is a second draft. The first draft was done organically. The second draft. Well, my agent came back and said I'd like to make a few additions to it. Can we have more of Jum and Tabitha doing all the crimes together? So I came up with two major capers for them to do. The first of them is the early one when they've just arrived in the permanence and are trying to steal the title of nobility and John gets locked up. And that's a homage to the Freppany opera by Brecht. And the second one, which I saw

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

with Raul Julia back in the 80s, way back when he was doing well,

[Charles Stross]

the second major sequence that I slid in later is the one where Jum and Tabitha are robbing the country house party basically is Bridgerton with Gus. The aristocrats hunting a fox and of course a stainless steel rat and Angelina are robbing the place.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you open the book with two quotes, one an actual quote and one a purported quote. One you have a purported Talleyrand quote and then you have my favorite quote from the Great Gatsby, the one. And I won't recite the whole thing. People can look it up or I can say it after we're done having a conversation about Tom and Daisy being careless people, which had me wondering about the meaning and importance of the Great Gatsby great American novel to Brits. So what is the relationship over here? Or do you just like that quote? Or did.

[Charles Stross]

I've read the book. I'm, I think relatively unusual in having read it. It's not part of the British literary canal.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I didn't think of it resonating in the uk, but it's not unheard of.

[Charles Stross]

I mean, he's fairly famous, let's put it that way. Didn't Fitzgerald win a Nobel Prize for literature? Am I misremembering?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I think you're misremembering. I don't believe he did. I mean Steinbeck. Yes, right.

[Charles Stross]

Okay. Yeah. So anyway, it seemed like a very appropriate quote for the whole attitude of the aristocracy of a permanence, but also for John, Tabitha. It describes them in a nutshell. And I have a number of theories about Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat. And you know, and they are. It's a classic series, but it shows its age quite badly. And I think he made one major mistake in the very first novella. He had Jim get captured by the Galactic FBI and turned into an agent. And this was a mistake. It's Hays Code era mistake. Crime must not pay. But firstly, once he has Slippery Jim captured by the FBI, that's pretty much the worst outcome for him. And at this point, it defuses a lot of the jeopardy implicit in the situation of following a crime lord. Yeah, and then he had Angelina captured and then conditioned out of being a psychopathic killer. No, it seems to me that it works a lot better if Jim and Angelina stay unregenerate, unrepentant criminals. Completely unrepentant. But they're bound together by their own internal dynamic and their sympathetic protagonists simply because their victims are much, much worse as people.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

I'm wondering if any of that came about because when he wrote the first book, it was a one off for him. Do you have any knowledge of that?

[Charles Stross]

Was this.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

If it was just going to be a one off and we weren't going to revisit the characters, I can certainly see that.

[Charles Stross]

I can certainly see that being the case. And it was surprisingly successful and he had to turn it into a short novel and then sequels. It's a gravy train. This is how the Laundry Files got started. I never asked Harry about this though, and we can't ask him now because he passed in 2012.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you did meet him?

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, a couple of times. He was a regular at Octacon, the main Irish convention of the early noughties. So yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Yes, I was lucky enough. When did I meet him? I met him in various Nebula Awards events.

[Scott Edelman]

He came to the States for that.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And one of the things about Harry Harrison, I found that as much as you said the new book is inspired by Harry Harrison, I was seeing some Cordwainer Smith in there as well. It felt. It felt about the post humanist.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah, I've never really gotten on with Cordwainer Smith's writing style, but yeah, there's a bit of a. It's a far future where humanity is speciated and we've had two thirds of a million years of genetic engineering and crispr and we. One of the things in the background of Ghost Engine, the earlier novel, but is going to be recycled in the sequel to Starter Pack is references to dwarves and Elves. We have short stocky humans adjusted for high gravity worlds and somewhat taller fin etiolate ones with other traits for other situations. We also have some rather more despicable stuff, which is. Aristocracies have tried to genetically engineer slave races. The aristocratic caste is always outnumbered with slaves, so they usually go extinct, leaving the slaves to carry on. And the commonest way of enforcing obedience is to make it a religious thing to increase their vulnerability to religion. We know there's an area of the brain which when stimulated by transcranial magnetic stimulation, gives us a sense of religious imminence. And you can plausibly engineer a servant species that feels that sense of being in the presence of God when they see their lords and masters. Yeah, and if you then have a universe where everybody believes in the holy singularity to come and we're all going to be uploaded to mind upload heaven when somebody finally invents a way of doing it that makes them very vulnerable to religious grifters. One of the things I was going to do with Ghost Engine was take a pickaxe to pedestrian ideology. Transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism. It's an acronym soup and was coined by Emil Torres and Timnit Gebru, the former AI ethics advisor at Google who got fired for trying to warn them about the ethics of AI. Basically they viewed as a syncretistic religion around transhumanism. You can see Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and quite a lot of Attack bros. I mean, Sam Altman believe in this shit as a religion. And what would it be like if there's an awful lot of religions out there in the far future which are modeled on the same pattern and it doesn't work. It's just a matter of faith.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And this will be coming in the third book in the series or this is coming in the rest of the series. Yeah. So what is it like living with that in your head and not writing it?

[Charles Stross]

I am writing it.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, you said you were pausing at 20,000 words until the book is actually locked down.

[Charles Stross]

Well, no, I'm pausing it until I hear back from my agent. Yes, because I've sent her the first three chapters and proposal for book two. But you know, there's no point writing a sequel until there's something concrete on the table for the first book. But I expect that sooner rather than later. If she is confident she can sell book one, I might as well start writing book two at that point. For real.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So all you're waiting for Is the confidence of the agent, not an actual signed contract. Okay. Because I just imagine having a story balled up inside of you and not writing it could be a painful thing. I know what's happening next. And what am I doing with my days? Not putting it on paper.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah. But I've got a very good feeling about book two as well. It starts with Jom and Tabitha getting away from a permanence they've returned from whence they set out 960 years earlier in different bodies. They're not total idiots. They knew there was a huge risk of them losing their memory or sense of identity. So before they set off, they took a memory backup of themselves and hid it. And the place they hid it. I've mentioned far future. The dead outnumber the living. There are graveyard worlds, worlds which are dedicated solely to mausolea for the dead. They picked one particular very dead world, went there, found a tomb that had been robbed. Spectacularly robbed. Not an imperial tomb, but the Emperor's Second Accountant's tomb. And it obviously, you know, everything worth removing had been removed. Then they went in there, dug a hiding place inside one of the pit traps and stashed their memories there. Yep. And they'd come back to this world 960 years later to discover, to their horror, the world has been settled by a cult of archaeologists. Not only has the planet been settled, they built their capital city on top of a former Valley of the Kings. The tomb that they hid their memories in is in the basement of a museum under glass as an exhibit. And the museum is currently running an interactive feature, a cosplay contest who can portray the Trickster King and the Murder Queen most accurately. Valuable prizes. So they have to enter a cosplay competition as themselves in order to case the joint before they can rob it.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Now, when I think of how long I'm going to have to wait to actually read this. Knowing how slowly publishing takes meaning, I have been given the great privilege of reading that first book and a piece of the second one. And the way publishing works, contracts get signed, it could be a couple of years before anyone else gets to read it. So I would be impatient for that.

[Charles Stross]

I have no plans for anything beyond books at this time, but.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So we're not going to get 25 years from now to talk about the 30 books you've written in this series going through then? The way we deal with the laundry files?

[Charles Stross]

I would hope so, but who knows?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, I mean, it implies I'll be

[Charles Stross]

around in 25 years time.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, not you, but the next creature into which your memory has been implanted. And that you. Yeah, Persona and I will be having this conversation. Thank you.

[Charles Stross]

You should try some of this.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

What is it? Which you.

[Charles Stross]

This is tofu dessert. Sweet tofu dessert with soya.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So try and get everything there.

[Charles Stross]

Yep, yep.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Thank you. Very nice.

[Charles Stross]

It's their speciality. It's why we came here.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So you are intending this to be something ongoing, not a duology or a trilogy?

[Charles Stross]

I don't know.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

You can see yourself. The universe is comfortable enough and elastic enough.

[Charles Stross]

I set out in 2014 to design a big space opera universe I could go back to, and there's at least two stories in it so far. The problem is the structure of publishing. You expect sales to diminish between consecutive books in a series. In fact, if a series is a massive runaway success, if the sales of each book match the sales of a book before it, never mind increasing. I was lucky enough to get there in the Merchant Princess and In the Laundry, but I've had other series that died after two books because sales were dropping. Notably Glass House never got far enough to spawn a sequel because it was my worst selling SF title. I think they mismarketed it. Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood. Well, I left ASY in the States and the UK sales of Neptune's Brood were dismal. They were down a long way from Saturn's Children and Halting State and Rule 34 worked okay, but it was just too difficult to write anything that close to the present. So we will see where it goes. If they don't want to take more in the same series as starter pack and sequel, I can still use the same universe, just with different characters at a guess. And don't call it a series. I set out to write something I could work like Ian Banks culture where the books are individually standalone. The unusual point of what I'm doing currently is that book two is a sequel, which may be a bad idea.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Now, have you learned anything from your dislike of the Laundry Files or inability to come up with something better than the Laundry Files for a title? What do you think this series, if it becomes a series, would be called? Are you coming up with something to forestall one putting on you by editorial fiat?

[Charles Stross]

If it's protagonist based, the best I can come up with would be the Trickster King and the Murder Queen, which kind of describes him in a nutshell. Jon's approach to a confrontation is to charm his way out of it and then run a con on his opponent. Tabitha's response is a bit more direct than violence. I mean, the way she deals with crooked police in the sequences in Starter Pack should be indicative.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So are you getting any work done this weekend, or do you take your weekends and convention time off that you're saying this is a writing free zone and I'm not?

[Charles Stross]

It's mostly a writing free zone, but I make notes if ideas occur to me. And some ideas did occur to me while I was here, which I made notes on, but it's note making that can happen anywhere.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

How are cons for you generally? Are you exhausted by them or invigorated and energized by them?

[Charles Stross]

Usually invigorated and energized by them, but I don't have the stamina these days, and I haven't been doing as many of them as I used to because I'm not the new hotness anymore. So I don't get invited to be a guest of honor very often, and most of the cons who would have me as a guest of honor have already had me. You never get invited back twice. You never get invited back in 10 years, within 10 years of a previous time. Also, to some extent, it's an attempt to maintain connections. This one has been a bit odd. Programming is a bit shambolic. I think what I've seen of it so far, there's stuff missing. There are no table talks. They lost a room they were planning on using for author readings. So there aren't many author readings. Otherwise I'd be giving one for people not being invited onto panels they should be on. I've actually seen worse Easter Cons for that than the past. I mean, there was a legendarily bad Easter con in Glasgow around 2000, 2001. It was a Highlander themed con for no obvious reason and as an idea of how bad the programming was. I was in a bar with Ken MacLeod and Ian Banks chatting about fiction in a bar. Andrew Wilson was there as well. You probably don't know Andrew, but he's edited some anthologies, written short stories, and he's one of Ian's literary executors. Right, so you have those three just doing. Chatting about the state of SF in a bar at a convention, for fuck's sake. Find a stage, move them in there and give them microphones. Why are these people not on the program at all?

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Oh, they weren't at all.

[Charles Stross]

Yep, neither was I. Although that's more understandable.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Well, the thing about a convention, whether it's a good convention or a bad convention, I think you or I could Have a good time, whether the convention is well run or not, because we know enough people, we can find some and we can have that conversation in the bar. The problem with any convention that is not being run well is the person for whom it's the first convention who goes in and doesn't find what they're looking for and might not come back. So that's the danger of that. Once you've been in a while, I could pretty much have fun anywhere.

[Charles Stross]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So it's.

[Charles Stross]

It took a few years of going to conventions where I found myself at conventions and not having moments of feeling profound isolation. At least moments of it.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Yeah. At the beginning. Until you say, oh, I can walk into the bar and see someone that I can go over and say hello to. I have some family here.

[Charles Stross]

Then there was a period between, I guess, about 2007, 2015, when I was at peak visibility.

[Scott Edelman]

Thank you.

[Charles Stross]

When I could not wander around the main hall of a worldcon or an Easter Con without being waylaid regularly by people at random. That was a bit trying. That's too much fame.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

The only time that happened to me is there was a period in the mid to late 90s. I was editing a magazine called Science Fiction Age, and I guess everyone wanted to sell me a story, so my wife thought it was hilarious. The difference between the years before that and those years, I was at a reader con, trying to cross a room and not getting more than a few feet without someone wanting to talk to me.

[Charles Stross]

Well, it's subsided now, thankfully. But, yeah, fame is weird, and I'm not sure I like it.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

So, speaking of conventions, we've had our dessert, we finished the food, we paid the check, we're heading back to the con. What are you doing this weekend? What would people have heard you pontificate about had you been here? What programming did they give you?

[Charles Stross]

I've got. I haven't actually had any programming yet. I have free panels on Sunday and Monday.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

On what topics will you be? Did they match with your personality?

[Charles Stross]

One of them is, I think, on bureaucracy and sf. Another is on space opera. I'm trying to remember angles on it, and I can't remember what the third is. I'll look it up when I get back.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

And how many Easter Cons have you been to?

[Charles Stross]

My first was in 1983, so I've been going to Easter Cons very long term, but not every year by quite a long way. Probably about one in three. One in two.

[Interviewer (likely Scott Edelman continuing)]

Okay, well, let us go back there and have fun with friends and colleagues and readers and so on. So well, thanks for sneaking away from the convention to this lovely place you've

[Charles Stross]

been thanks for thanks for the meal.

[Scott Edelman]

And that was lunch with Charles Stross during the UK National Convention Easter Con. As for the Great Gatsby quote about Tom and Daisy, I promised I'd share with you. It goes like they were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they'd made. As for Nobel Prizes, no, F. Scott Fitzgerald did not win one, but John Steinbeck did in 1962. So I'm glad we got that right. If, after breaking bread with Charles and me, you'd like to find out more about him, check him out on Bluesky as C Stross that's C S T R O S s or at his site, which is antipope.org charlie blog static and that's a n t I p o p e dot org C-H-A dash r l I e B L O G S T A T I C. You can also track down my daily babblings, primarily on Blue sky, but also on Mastodon, where I go by Scott Edelman. And you can find out more about the stories I published and the magazines I've edited [e-mail] and if there's anything you want to share with me, give me a [e-mail] and as for all those Scott Edelmans, they're spelled S C O T T E D E L M A N if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you'll take a moment to rate or review Eating the Fantastic at Apple Podcast and like it on Facebook, because that will help bring the podcast to the attention of a wider audience. If my meal with Charles has you hungering to sit in for more of my conversations with creators of the Fantastic, there are many ways to make sure you never miss an episode. You can head over to Apple Podcasts, search for Eating the Fantastic, and subscribe. Or you can search on the terms Podlink and Eating the Fantastic in your browser, and that'll take you to a site with several dozen possible places to download the show, one of which I hope will be your preferred method. Or you can use the RSS feed, which you'll [e-mail] that's also where you'll be able to check out a photo of Charles, as well as the food we shared at Cafe Soya if you'd like to help keep new episodes of Eating the Fantastic showing up every other Friday, I hope you join the supporters who cover some of the cost of the show. The books I buy to keep up with my guests work, the equipment, the bandwidth, the transportation of guests to and from cons and restaurants, the cloud processing software which kills most of the ambient noise which should obscure our conversation and of course, as always, that food which helps relax my guests and creates, as I said at the start, an intimacy you're not going to get out of a studio recorded podcast. The easiest way to help out is to toss a couple of bucks in the tip jar at PayPal, me eatingthefantastic or if you feel like buying me a cup of coffee, head over to coffee.comianthefantastic where the coffee is ko fi. But if you'd like to feel even more connected with what I'm doing here, you could chip in with a small recurring monthly donation [e-mail] ethantastic where there are perks involved depending on your level of support. A big thank you once again to [e-mail], composer of this episode's theme music. Coming up next on the podcast, you'll be able to head out for dinner with John Jarrold, who's run the John Jarrold literary agency since 2004 and has also run three science fiction and fantasy imprints in the UK going back to 1988, so he knows plenty about the way the science fiction and fantasy sausage is made. Until then, may all your meals and those conversations which go with them be fantastic.