SFFWorld caught up with SF writer Charles/Charlie Stross. We got chance to talk of Bob Howard, SF and why Charlie dislikes the term ‘genre’.
Hello, Charlie.
We’re speaking as The Annihilation Score, your sixth Laundry Files novel, has recently been published. Can you tell us a little about it? How does this book move on from the events of The Rhesus Chart?
The Rhesus Chart ends on a bit of an interpersonal cliff-hanger for our series protagonist, Bob Howard, and his wife, Dr. Dominique O’Brien, with their relationship bent (if not broken) and Bob moving out of the family home. I thought that rather than continue to follow Bob linearly, it’d be interesting to take a look at things from Mo’s perspective instead. Bob is a famously unreliable narrator, and Mo has a very different perspective of him—not surprising, as they’ve been married for nearly a decade.
In addition, after the first four books in the series I decided to switch from pastiching specific British spy thriller writers to tackling urban fantasy sub-genres. The Rhesus Chart opens with Mo telling her husband, “Don’t be silly, Bob, everyone knows vampires don’t exist!” So it should be fairly obvious from the get-go where things are going. With CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaching all sorts of paranormal phenomena are breaking out, and it’s no surprise that some of the people blessed (or cursed) with unexpected traits are deciding that this means they’re superheroes—or supervillains. In The Annihilation Score, Dr. O’Brien takes a sideways career-move to the Home Office, the British government ministry in charge of prisons and policing, and is parachuted into the hot seat in charge of a very new police force—one charged with bringing the turbulent lycra-clad vigilantes to heel. But as she discovers, the dynamics of a law enforcement agency are very different from those of a national security organization. Also? Appearances can be deceptive, and the greatest threats may come from elsewhere in the civil service …
Poor Bob Howard has been written about for more than ten years now. What was the original inspiration for the series?
Going back to 1999 now … I always had a fondness for the classic British Cold War spy thriller, but the cold war really ended before my writing career was off the starting blocks. I’ve also had an affinity for the tentacular horrors from beyond spacetime of H. P. Lovecraft (although some of the more dubious aspects of his milieux can take a rain check). The Atrocity Archive originally began as an exercise in humorous mash-up fic: take a Len Deighton seedy back-street espionage agency, give it a Lovecraftian task, and parachute a totally incongruous hero into it—in this case, a sandal-wearing slashdot-reading dot-com era geek, who is left grappling with both the shitpile of paperwork his employers expect and require and the extradimensional threats trying to eat his brain.
Then it all sort of snowballed on me over a decade and a half …
The bureaucracy of The Laundry, in terms of the meaningless meetings and the interminable paperwork, makes some of us at SFFWorld cringe with recognition. Was this your experience, as well as Bob’s?
Yes. I’m a full-time fiction writer these days, but before that I worked in a variety of environments, from large government bureaucracies to Californian software multinationals (and also in the crapsack world of small retail establishments and internet startups). It gave me an interesting perspective on the peculiar delusions that management are prone to. How to manage a number of staff and keep them focussed on a job too large for any one person to do is one of the eternal problems of human civilization, from leading a tribal war-band up to running the US Navy; and many of the solutions people come across to various bits of the problem are prone to the same hideous failure modes (and the same pathological personality types).
As a writer, what do you like about the series itself? What is the one thing that you’re most proud about it?
That I’ve been able to keep it going for over sixteen years and a million words without running out of source material? (June sees the publication of Laundry Files book 7, The Nightmare Stacks, and book 8, The Delirium Brief, is provisionally scheduled for June 2017. Worse: I know where book 9 goes, too. I’m working my way along a 12-book arc, and the overall plot shows every sign of needing that many words to complete the story.)
We’re pleased that there’s more in the series to look forward to, but let’s move away from the current book and the series a little.
How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?
I can barely remember; I started trying to write my first novel when I was 14, but I’d been writing stories since I was in single-digit years.
And at what point did you decide to take up writing professionally?
I wanted to be a full-time SF/F writer since I was very young, although it took a while to get there. Actually, with the exception of five years as a consultant and programmer, I’ve been writing full-time for a living since 1990 (if you include some of my prehistory as a technical author and freelance journalist), but I’ve only been focussing exclusively on fiction since 2005.
You have written books filled with Sf, Fantasy and Horror. What is it about these genres that you like?
I don’t like the term “genre”; it implies predictability, generic themes, and narrow constraints. It’s really a marketing term, a label we pin on a certain type of fiction so that the bookstore clerks and librarians know how to shelve it with similar works.
If anything, my work is defined by my aversion to the photorealistic intensity and narrowness of the respectable literary mainstream—that we need to focus on depicting the interior experience in minute and realistic detail, rather than considering other angles on the human condition that we can’t actually experience for ourselves.
If I have any personal foibles it’s that I have a twitchy reflex to try and make my science-fictional work internally consistent and plausible. (That’s why I tend to pigeon-hole the Laundry Files as being my fantasy series.)
What kind of books do you read for pleasure, any favourite authors?
I can’t read stuff that’s too close to whatever I’m working on at any given time, and while I’m writing I don’t have the energy to tackle deeply challenging texts: I tend to read as an escapist alternative to vegging out in front of the TV after a day of writing. So you might be surprised by how much steampunk and urban fantasy I consume.
And what of newer authors? Are there any personal favourites?
In the past year, I’ve read and been incredibly impressed by Seth Dickinson’s “The Traitor” (US: “The Traitor Baru Cormorant”); grim, harrowing, and deeply interesting for his use of secondary world fantasy as a tool for interrogating kyriarchy. I’ve also been impressed by Alyx Dellamonica’s “Child of a Hidden Sea” (and sequel “A Daughter of No Nation”), V. E. Schwab’s “A Darker Shade of Magic”, and Naomi Novik’s “Uprooted”—secondary world/portal fantasies for the most part. SF … I find myself having a knee-jerk reaction against most of what comes to me as highly-recommended or highly popular SF these days; I think this is partly because—for me, these days—magic works better as a metaphor for depicting alienating technology than actual ham-fisted attempts at describing the thing in itself. (And also because so much of the exotic tech in SF is basically warmed-over magic wands.)
How are you finding the e-book revolution? Are you happy with an e-reader these days, or do you still prefer ‘tree-books’?
I exclusively read ebooks these days. For starters, you can’t vary the typeface or size of a printed hunk of paper, and for seconds, I’ve got a bad back and generally find carrying around my to-read pile in the form of electrons much easier on it. To the extent I’m unhappy with the e-book revolution, my unease is down to aspects of it as a business which don’t impinge upon the interests of regular readers.
Would you care to pass on any advice to writers starting out? What was the best advice you were ever given when starting out?
Yes: don’t ask my advice. I sold my first short story in 1986 and my first novel in 2000. Since then we’ve been through an epochal format shift, which is still in progress (the move to e-books), and the shape of the industry has changed. Bluntly, my experiences starting out might as well have happened in the late Jurassic; detailed prescriptions would be dumb. About the only eternally valid advice I can offer is to echo Robert A. Heinlein: write stuff, finish what you start, send it out, and don’t wait for it to come back before you write something else.
Thank you for that! We won’t ask again, we promise. But finally, what’s next?
Coming in June 2016 is The Nightmare Stacks, Laundry Files book 6—this time mostly from the point of view of Alex, the vampire math-nerd from The Rhesus Chart. Then, in 2017, is the long-delayed launch of Empire Games, book 1 of the trilogy of that name (aka book 7 of the Merchant Princes series, this time in a near-future setting). 2017 will also see the publication of The Delirium Brief, Laundry Files book 8, and back to Bob again. Then, who knows? Something new, for sure!
Many thanks for your time, Charlie.
