Editing in Process: The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

American Edition Cover

In my November 11, 2015, blog post I was reading Charles Stross's The Nightmare Stacks, the next volume (#7) in the Laundry Files series, in preparation for actually working on the manuscript. That time has (had) come.

If you are new (seriously?) to the Laundry Files: Officially known as "Q-Division" (at least for now), the Laundry was part of the Strategic Operations Executive (SOE), a World War II British organization responsible for espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe. The Q-Division was a supersecret black group formed to counter Hitler's research and experiments in the occult. At the end of WWII, the SOE was disbanded, but the Q-Division secretly remained intact. The new headquarters was then located above a Chinese Laundry, and thus the nickname. These days, the Laundry's primary objective is to protect the citizens of Her Majesty's Government from incursions from beyond spacetime. But the Laundry must also defend against one who attempts to take over the world (The Jennifer Morgue), the cultlike church who tries to force the Second Coming (The Apocalypse Codex), individuals with V syndrome (The Rhesus Chart), and individuals with superpowers (The Annihilation Score).

Now, as revealed in The Atrocity Archives, the first volume in the series, shortly before the end of the war in Europe, members of the Ahnenerbe-SS used occult measures to open a gateway to a nitrogen-based planet, to which they escaped, to bide their time until they were ready to return to Earth -- and the termination of that return fell upon the Laundry.

In fact, if you look at the graphic above of the American edition of The Nightmare Stacks you'll see a Kettenkrad on the cover -- a German motorized half-track, small enough to be steered like a motorcycle. The Kettenkrad was salvaged from the Ahnenerbe-SS by the Laundry, and rebuilt by Pinky and Brains (readers of the series will recognize this pair of R&D tech geeks from previous volumes), and both Pinky and Brains, and the Kettenkrad, are integral parts of the story in this forthcoming novel, scheduled to be published in June. (And yes, the driver of the Kettenkrad is wearing seventeenth-century cavalry plate, and that is a dragon flying above the building on the cover. But you'll just have to wait for the novel....)

British Edition Cover

Through the first five volumes of the Laundry Files, we've been following agent Bob Howard: officemate, IT geek, and occult mathematician -- and now Eater of Souls. (Volume five, The Apocalypse Codex, being the exception, in which we were also treated to the POVs of external assets Persephone Hazard, aka agent Bashful Incendiary, and Jonathan McTavish, aka agent Johnny Prince.) Volume six was completely from the viewpoint of Dr. Dominique "Mo" O’Brien (aka agent Candid), a professor and combat epistemologist, who just happens to be married to Bob Howard. But this new volume, The Nightmare Stacks, is neither a Bob novel, nor a Mo novel, but rather "a Laundry novel," as the author Charles Stross states in his November 4, 2015, blog post. Rather, the new novel features operative-in-training Alex Schwartz, who was "drafted" by the Laundry "after stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires." (see The Rhesus Chart)

I spent the majority of December working on the manuscript -- and with the start of the new year, my editing was complete, and the marked-up manuscript is now in the hands of the author. I just checked my email, and counted 108 emails (though there could be a few more that I may have simply overlooked) between the two of us as I worked on this project, far fewer than is typical, based on prevous volumes. However, this time, I didn't confer with Charlie on every major content change -- with seven volumes now, I have to hope that I know what I'm doing (!) and will leave the final decisions to the author when he reviews my edits.

You'll want to read the Stross interview on The Nightmare Stacks, courtesy of io9 -- but I suggest you read the version posted on the author's blog: the interview is the same, but it's Charlie's comments and notes, plus the 79 comments at the end (including the author's responses) that are the most revealing about the book.

As I mentioned in my blog post on editing The Annihilation Score, which was published last July, the most difficult task is maintaining consistency from one volume to the next, and with seven volumes of the Laundry Files now, the task certainly isn't getting any easier. In fact, you would be surprised were I to tell you the email discussion Charlie and I had over the Laundry's official name -- Q-Division -- and what that entailed and what it will lead to, most likely in the next novel (volume eight, 2017's The Delirium Brief).

But for the sake of consistency and understanding, let me share a set of words with readers: a geas (plural: geases) is a magical compulsion to obedience. Readers of the Laundry files series will have come upon this word in nearly every volume. However, in The Nightmare Stacks, we encounter a new race, the alfär, or the unseelie, and in their Low Tongue, the word for a magical compulsion to obedience is also geas, but the plural form is geasa. Something to keep in mind when you read the novel...You never know when this kind of trivia may prove useful!

The Nightmare Stacks is forthcoming from Ace in the U.S. and Orbit in the U.K. and is currently available for preorder.

Now Reading: The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

I'm currently reading The Nightmare Stacks, book #7 in the continuing Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. This in preparation for my working on the novel when the actual physical manuscript arrives within the week from Ace Books. 

I'm reading a MOBI edition using the Kindle for Android app on my Nexus 7 tablet (which just got updated to Android Marshmallow 6.0, for those who care). The author sent me the manuscript as a DOCX file, I then saved it as an RTF file; using Calibre Ebook Management software, I then converted the RTF file to a MOBI file -- and then saved the file in the Kindle folder on my tablet. Works for me!

You can read about my work on the previous Laundry Files novel, The Annihilation Score, in my March 26, 2015, blog post. But as to The Nightmare Stacks, you'll probably have to wait until after the New Year, as the project is due back to Ace Books the beginning of January. (Yes, another set of holidays I must work through, sigh....)

The Nightmare Stacks is due to be published by Ace Books, and Orbit Books in the U.K., in early summer, 2016.

But, ahem, I get to read the novel now.

Excerpt Link: The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

The Annihilation Score is the sixth book in Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, which will be released this coming week. In my "Editing in Process" blog post of March 26, I detailed some of my work on The Annihilation Score as well as the previous five books in the series.

The Laundry is a supersecret British intelligence agency that protects and defends Her Majesty's Government, and the people of England, from occult incursions from beyond space-time. In the books, we follow two agents: Bob Howard and Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brien. Up to this point, the Laundry Files stories have all been from Bob's point of view, but The Annihilation Score turns the storytelling on its head, and we now get to experience Mo's pov; her story begins at the end of the events in The Rhesus Chart. Here's a bit of an introduction, courtesy of the author and Tor.com.

Dominique O'Brien—her friends call her Mo—lives a curious double life with her husband, Bob Howard. To the average civilian, they're boring middle-aged civil servants. But within the labyrinthian secret circles of Her Majesty's government, they're operatives working for the nation's occult security service known as the Laundry, charged with defending Britain against dark supernatural forces threatening humanity.

Mo's latest assignment is assisting the police in containing an unusual outbreak: ordinary citizens suddenly imbued with extraordinary abilities of the super-powered kind. Unfortunately these people prefer playing super-pranks instead of super-heroics. The Mayor of London being levitated by a dumpy man in Trafalgar Square would normally be a source of shared amusement for Mo and Bob, but they're currently separated because something's come between them—something evil.

An antique violin, an Erich [Zahn] original, made of human white bone, was designed to produce music capable of slaughtering demons. Mo is the custodian of this unholy instrument. It invades her dreams and yearns for the blood of her colleagues—and her husband. And despite Mo's proficiency as a world class violinist, it cannot be controlled...

In anticipation of the release of The Annihilation Score on July 7, Charles Stross and Tor.com have posted the first two chapters of the novel for your advanced reading pleasure. Chapter One is entitled "Prologue: the Incorrigibles" and Chapter Two is "Morning After." Read the excerpt from The Annihilation Score on Tor.com

Editing in Process: The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

Ace Books US

You still have an opportunity to purchase the ebook edition of The Atrocity Archives for $1.99, though I don't know how long this reduced price will be available. And if you haven't read this first book yet in the Laundry Files series by noted UK author Charles Stross, then you have a lot of reading to catch up on....

Because this July will see the publication of book six in the Laundry Files series: The Annihilation Score, from Ace Books, and also from publisher Orbit in the UK.

I actually began work on this project during the Christmas holiday season and continued working a few weeks into January.[1] But I held off on this blog post until Ace finally released the cover art, as I hoped to feature it as well. Unfortunately, the cover release occurred while I was in the middle of a hard deadline (a new short story collection from Bradley P. Beaulieu, for a future blog post) and thus another few weeks passed, and, well, here we are.

Orbit Books UK

The Annihilation Score (TAS going forward) is, as I have said, the sixth volume in the continuing Laundry Files series. I have been extremely fortunate to have worked now on all six volumes. If you click on this link, you'll be transported to a More Red Ink "Laundry Files" search, which will allow you to scan through the ten or so blog posts I've done with a "Laundry Files" tag. I haven't written about all the volumes but enough to pique your interest, especially if you are new to the world of the supersecret intelligence organization known as the Laundry (the original HQ shared a building with a Chinese Laundry, thus the name), and necromancers Bob Howard and his wife Dominique "Mo" O'Brien.

I would like to especially draw your attention to the first blog post, "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service," posted on December 10, 2009, in which I write about acquiring and editing the first two volumes in the series (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue) for indie publisher Golden Gryphon Press, all of which began in 2002. Beginning with The Fuller Memorandum, Ace picked up the series, as well as reprinting the first two titles as trade paperbacks. Ace then hired me because Charlie and I promised his editor at the time that I would ensure consistency across all three volumes. And, so far, Ace has brought me in for all the titles since. (Keeping fingers crossed his new editor at Ace is sufficiently satisfied to have me work on volume seven, which Charlie is currently in the throes of writing.)

As to keeping the world of the Laundry consistent across all the volumes...trust me, it's getting more difficult as the number of titles increases -- like a juggling act, with all six plates up in the air simultaneously, while my hands quickly turn physical pages or click a mouse to scan through files. While working on TAS I found myself looking up names, organizations, even specific uses of words in previous volumes, going as far back as The Atrocity Archives. When I began work on The Apocalypse Codex (book four), Ace required that I provide a comprehensive style sheet (see blog post "Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style"), which I have continued to do for each consecutive book; previous to that, I have my own editing notes.

Occasionally (albeit rarely) a tweak in the consistency meter is required when reality interferes with Laundry fiction, but other than these rare instances, the Laundry Files universe has remained relatively consistent throughout. It's a task that I take very seriously with each new book. While working on a book, I will email the author with questions, asking for definitions and clarifications, and to work through and refine small details. Often dozens (and dozens) of emails cross the aether (ocean?) between us.

Laundering Reality: Charles Stross's Laundry Files

I'm about three months behind on blog posts, so....

During the latter part of October (that's 2014) I received in the mail my comp copies[1] of The Rhesus Chart, volume 5 in the continuing Laundry Files series by Charles Stross.

Interestingly enough, at about that same time, Charlie published a blog post on his public Diary entitled "The Curse of the Laundry."

In the opening paragraph, the author writes:

There's some kind of bizarre curse hanging over my Laundry Files series. Or maybe it's a deeper underlying problem with writing fiction set in the very near future (or past): I'm not sure which. All I'm sure is that that for the past decade, reality has been out to get me: and I'm fed up.

Here's the first example that Charlie provides in his post:

[in 2001] I'd just finished writing "The Atrocity Archive" and it was being edited for serial publication in issues 7-9 of the Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF....

In Chapter 4 of "The Atrocity Archive" Bob learns from Angleton who the Middle Eastern bad guys who kidnapped Mo, intending to use her sacrifice to open a gateway to somewhere bad, really were ... and when I originally wrote the story, in 1999-2000, they were a relatively obscure bunch of anti-American zealots who'd blown up the USS Stark and an embassy in Africa. I know this may boggle the imagination of younger or more forgetful readers, but Al Quaida and Osama bin Laden had not at that time hijacked any airliners, much less etched themselves into the pages of world history....

So, on the 12th of September 2001, the score stood at Reality 1, Fiction 0. And I hastily did an edit job, replacing ObL and AQ with Yusuf Qaradawi as inspiration behind a hypothetical radical group based in groan Iraq (hey, this was before the invasion, all right?). And lo, part one of "The Atrocity Archive" was published in November 2001, and parts 2 and 3 in March and June of 2002.

I'm not sure if the Laundry Files take place in the recent past or in the very near future, or in an alternate reality -- or all three of those at once! In his "Curse" post, Charlie goes around and around on this given how current events always seem to catch up with -- and overtake -- most of the novels. The "Laundry Curse" came back to haunt Charlie with The Fuller Memorandum, written in 2008; The Apocalypse Code, written in April 2010 and March 2011; and again in the recently published The Rhesus Chart, written between September and December 2012. Of course, not to be left out, the forthcoming The Annihilation Score also gets bit by reality.

You can read all of the events to which Charlie refers -- including his declaration about the reality of the Laundry-verse -- in his post "The Curse of the Laundry." And don't forget to check out the nearly 300 comments!

---------------
Footnotes:

[1] I have been involved as an editor in one form or another with all six volumes of the Laundry Files. I acquired and edited the original hardcover editions of The Atrocity Archives (novel The Atrocity Archive and Hugo Award-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle) and The Jennifer Morgue for Golden Gryphon Press. With volume three in the series, The Fuller Memorandum, Charlie moved to Ace Books -- and I was hired as a freelancer by Ace to line edit and copy edit the novel. Ace obviously was satisfied with my work, because I was called upon to work on the next three volumes. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to work on future Laundry Files volumes as well. And yes, I did mention volume 6, The Annihilation Score, which I just completed work on, and will be published by Ace Books this coming July. But more on this title soon (though Charlie does reveal a major plot point in this novel in the blog post).

[Addendum note 3 February 2015: Since I mentioned my initial involvement in acquiring and editing the first two Laundry Files books, I really should have included a link to my blog post on how these two books came about: "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service"]

Charles Stross's The Rhesus Chart: "Pounce!"

Today -- July 1 -- is the publication date for The Rhesus Chart, the fifth in the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross.

How the first two Laundry Files books came to be published by Golden Gryphon Press I have written about at length in my blog post of December 10, 2009. But suffice to say that when Charlie and I first met, albeit briefly, at the ConJosé WorldCon in 2002, I asked for an original novella, and Charlie offered me a novel that crossed so many genres that his agent, he said, didn't know what to do with it. Fortunately, I did, and the rest, as they say, is Laundry Files history. The Atrocity Archives turned out to be an ideal book for a small press publisher. The first print run of 3,000 hardcovers sold out in about three months, so the book had a second hardcover printing. Not too shabby for a small press that was then publishing six hardcovers per year.

I've been fortunate to have worked on all five Laundry Files novels, even when book 3, The Fuller Memorandum, was acquired and published by Ace Books. I've written about all three Ace Laundry Files novels within this blog, but you may find of special interest (especially if you are a writer) my blog post of exactly two years ago, on The Apocalypse Codex, entitled "Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style."

But back to The Rhesus Chart... How can you go wrong with a novel that opens with the following line:

"Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo, "everybody knows vampires don't exist."

The Rhesus Chart was recently graced with a starred Kirkus review. Let me repeat that: a starred Kirkus review. A review by Kirkus is difficult enough to come by, but a starred review? Now that's a treat. The review was posted online on June 5 and appeared in the June 15 issue of Kirkus Reivews. Here's a taste:

Fast-tracked into management after recent successes, Bob grows suspicious when a whiz-kid team of investment bankers which calls itself the Scrum discovers an algorithm that promises to make its members billions in profits but whose unfortunate side effect...is to turn them into vampires. (The supreme irony of this will be lost on few readers.) An added complication for Bob is that the Scrum's ringleader, Mhari Murphy, is an ex-girlfriend. More peculiar yet, why is everybody in the Laundry convinced that vampires don't exist? Bob's superiors take prompt action—and form a committee. Laundry regulars by now will be familiar with Stross' trademark sardonic, provocative, disturbing, allusion-filled narrative. And, here, with a structure strongly reminiscent of Len Deighton's early spy novels, the tone grows markedly grimmer, with several significant casualties and tragedies, perhaps in preparation for Angleton's [Bob's superior] feared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

Stross at the top of his game—which is to say, few do it better. Pounce!

Courtesy of the author Charles Stross and Ace Books, the entire first chapter of The Rhesus Chart has been posted online for your reading pleasure. If you are unfamiliar with the Laundry Files tales, The Rhesus Chart is actually a good place to start.

The Rhesus Chart Revealed

In my blog post on October 15, at which time I was working on Charles Stross's forthcoming Laundry Files novel The Rhesus Chart, I stated that I had seen the preliminary cover art but was not permitted to post it at the time.

Well, the final cover art has been released -- so, behold, The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross, to be published by Ace Books in July 2014:

You'll note that at the bottom of the front cover, below the book title, the text reads: "Bob Howard, the vampire slayer?" So I won't be spoiling anything if I present here the novel's opening sentence (which the author himself has posted online as well):

"Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo, "everybody knows vampires don't exist."

 

But in Bob Howard's world of Applied Computational Demonology, can we be so sure?...

Editing in Process...Charles Stross

I promised myself -- and readers of this blog -- that I would post updates of my current editing work in process, so....

I'm currently line editing and copy editing the fifth Charles Stross Laundry Files novel (and my fifth volume as well), The Rhesus Chart, to be published next year by Ace Books.

I have seen the preliminary cover art, but since it's not the final cover art, and I'm not permitted to post it here, you'll have to make do with the SOE Department Q coat of arms -- the World War II precursor to the Laundry.

If you're not familiar with Stross's Laundry Files stories, I have written previously on this blog about the events surrounding the acquisition and publication of the first two Laundry Files books, originally published in hardcover by Golden Gryphon Press, and currently available in trade paperback from Ace Books: The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. That blog post, entitled "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service," was posted on December 10, 2009, and can be found here. I also wrote extensively about my work on the previous Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex, as Ace had imposed a new requirement on me: providing a style sheet (which I must provide this time around as well). Posted on January 27, 2012, "Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style" can be found here.

And you can read Stross's latest Laundry Files story, "Equoid," available for your reading pleasure courtesy of Tor.com.

Now, where did I put my warrant card....

Follow-up blog post:

The Rhesus Chart Revealed

Charles Stross and Five Loads of Laundry

I'll begin with a couple references to previous blog posts: the first post details my work on Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex, book four in his Laundry Files series, for Ace Books. The second post excerpts, and links to, a couple reviews of this novel.

In the intervening two months since that second blog post, The Apocalypse Codex has again been reviewed a number of times, and I would like to share with you a brief excerpt from just five of those reviews, in order of their publication. So, if you haven't picked up a copy of TAC as yet, if you're still undecided whether the Laundry Files novels are for you, then please read on; hopefully these reviews will help you decide that this series of books, and The Apocalypse Codex in particular, are a must read (and a must have).

I'll begin with the review by NancyO on oddly weird fiction (subtitled: "the fantasy, sci-fi and other weird books from my reading year"). What's so very cool about this particular review -- especially if you are new to the Laundry Files series -- is that NancyO reviews all four books in the series. So instead of focusing on TAC, I would like to quote from the introduction to her review:

There's something to be said about a guy who can combine HP Lovecraft, various writers of spy fiction, computer geekness and a little of the management nitwitedness of Office Space and come up with a series of consistently good novels that incorporate all of the above.... Along the way he throws pointed barbs at iPhones, cults, Power Point presentations, evangelical Christians, handguns and other sources of irritation -- all of which come off as funny, but only because you realize that some of the things he pokes sarcastic fun at resonate with your own fears, peeves, and annoyances. This guy is Charles Stross, who is the author of four books that comprise The Laundry Files, one of my favorite series of novels ever written. If you'll pardon the expletive, I don't know he manages to keep coming up with this amazing shit -- each book is different, sending the main character Bob Howard, computational demonologist, into perilous adventures as he and the Laundry, the super-secret civil service organization Bob works for, prepare to save humanity from the onslaught of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN -- an apocalypse arriving from the multiverse. The people at the Laundry have developed some very modern and secret technologies that combine the most high-tech electronics with the occult to keep Bob and others like him safe to defend the world -- all based on magic as a form of mathematics. These novels remind me of old-time adventure stories with a hopped-up occult/geek/horror twist that for some reason unknown to myself I just can't seem to get enough of.

I couldn't have asked for a better recap of the Laundry Files series. And as I said, NancyO goes on to review all four books in the series.

This next review of TAC is on mentatjack (subtitled: "sff book reviews and subversive ontology"). MentatJack writes:

Stross likes to play with point of view.... At the start of The Apocalypse Codex, Bob Howard (protagonist) is established formally as an unreliable narrator:

If it happened to me, I'll describe it in the first person... If it happened to someone else I'll describe it in the third person… And if there's something you really need to understand... I'll [use second person.]

Bob tells us that in the prologue and then we're dropped immediately into a 3rd person section.... The super spy, Persephone, gives us a glimpse of what Bob is being trained to be.

Bob's accelerated training is a big part of the British defense against the future and it'll be interesting to see how Stross handles the inevitable "hell on earth" he’s forecasting. He does a great job with his central characters and the bits of insanity they encounter, but there's a distinct fog of war hovering over the rest of the world these stories are set in.

The Apocalypse Codex isn't your typical spy novel, or Lovecratian novel, or geek/hacker novel, or any combination thereof, simply because of the style in which it is written, which is dependent on the point of view of the content at any point in the story: first person, second person, and third person.

Reviewing the Apocalypse

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading Stross' 'Laundry' series for years now and seeing how Britain's brave secret agents fight creatures from extra-dimensional space whilst dealing with the latest round of meetings and Civil Service budget cuts. Having worked in government I find this really funny because it's true (the bureaucracy I mean, not the extra-dimensional creatures...)

—Graeme Flory, Graeme's Fantasy Book Review

Earlier this year, on January 27, I posted a blog update entitled "Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style," in which I wrote about working on the author's newest Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex, for Ace Books. And, specifically, that the publisher required that I provide a Style Sheet along with the edited manuscript.

The Apocalypse Codex will be published this month and the reviews are starting to appear. All very positive, so far....

I opened this blog post above with a quote from Graeme Flory's review on his Fantasy Book Review blog. Here is another snippet from his review:

...Stross appears to be of the mind that he is done explaining all the technical stuff that underpins this setting....We've had a few books for it all to sink in and now it's time for the plot itself to have some room to breathe. It's a great move on Stross' part; his plots are normally brimming over with cool stuff anyway but the extra room allows things to ramp up to another level.

And Graeme concludes his review with:

...there are still some nasty surprises in store to trap unwary characters and make The Apocalypse Codex a book that you simply have to finish. My only regret is that I finished the book too quickly and now I have to wait for ages until the next installment.

I suspect every author would like to read a review of their work end like that!

The second review is from Elias F. Combarro (@odo), whose name you may recognize on this blog. In a blog post on May 9, I linked to Odo's review of my Alien Contact anthology on his Spanish-language blog Sense of Wonder. If Spanish isn't your thing, Odo also now posts all his reviews in English as well. As a follow-up to his review, Odo also interviewed me about a week later. I've included a link to the interview in that previous blog post as well.

But back to The Apocalypse Codex -- Odo writes in his review on Sense of Wonder:

I found The Apocalypse Codex a bit closer to urban fantasy than the previous books in the series, and some parts even reminded me of The Magician King by Lev Grossman and Kraken by China Miéville. The plot is tighter, more interesting and easier to follow than some of the other novels of The Laundry Files.

And the last paragraph of his review ends with a dire warning:

All in all, The Apocalypse Codex is possibly the best novel of The Laundry Files (and my favorite book of 2012 so far, together with Existence by David Brin) and that is a lot to say. Buy it. Read it. You don't know when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN will happen and you'd better be prepared.

Orbit Books, the U.K. publisher of TAC, has kindly made the book's Prologue available online for your reading pleasure. So, if you're not already familiar with The Laundry and Bob Howard, here's your chance for a sneak peak at the new novel.

Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style

Back in December 2010 I wrote a blog post entitled "Writing with Style (Sheets, That Is)," on my need, as an editor/copyeditor, for the author to provide a style sheet. This blog post was the result of a series of comments to a status update that Theodora Goss had posted on her Facebook page. In addition to Dora's and my comments, Robert Vardeman and Paul Witcover shared comments as well. And with their kind permissions, I included the FB comment stream in that blog post on style sheets. Dora then wrote a complementary blog post of her own, from her perspective on the subject in question. So with my post and hers, the reader is treated to the editor's and author's viewpoints regarding a single copyedit in a short story.

I won't overly bore you with repetitions from this blog post, should you choose to read it in its entirety, but as I mentioned in that post, in the nearly fifteen years that I have been in this business, I've only had two authors -- Michael A. Stackpole and Mark Teppo -- provide me with style sheets along with their manuscripts. That's two authors in nearly fifteen years. In fact, just this past September I worked on Michael's Of Limited Loyalty, the second volume in his Queen's Command series published by Night Shade Books, and once again he provided the publisher with an updated style sheet for his book.

The second post I want to reference was published on December 10, 2009, shortly after I finished work on Charles Stross's third Laundry Files novel, The Fuller Memorandum, for Ace Books. Entitled "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service," this rather extensive blog post covered my working relationship with Charlie Stross: how it all came together, including the genesis of The Atrocity Archives, the first Laundry Files volume, and the Hugo Award-winning novella "The Concrete Jungle." (Which, by the way, is still available online -- as a PDF doc or as a web page -- for your reading pleasure.)

As he did in 2009, Charlie again recommended me to Ace Books to proof, line edit, and copyedit his forthcoming (fourth) Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex. I have a distinct advantage over an in-house or other freelance editor because I have worked on the first three books in the series, allowing me to maintain consistency across all the volumes. And Charlie and I work well together: I ask a multitude of questions, and he answers, often with links to reference material; I make content suggestions, and he either accepts, rejects, or modifies said suggestions. Just as it should be, between editor and author. In fact, regarding my work on The Fuller Memorandum, Charlie informed me that upon reviewing the marked up (i.e. change tracked) manuscript from his publisher, he didn't have a single STET on any of my copyedits. No STETs means I done good -- very good. No STETs also takes a lot of stress off both the author and publisher, since there is no back-and-forth dickering necessary over changes: I'll give you those three copyedits for my one STET; this inevitably speeds up the production process, too. (I don't know if I'll be as lucky with the the work I did on the latest volume, which I delivered to Ace Books in December.)

In The Apocalypse Codex, our reluctant hero, Bob Howard, skilled in the techniques of applied computational demonology -- as well as all things IT geekery, plus PowerPoint slide shows and departmental time sheets -- is once again called upon to save the world from a diabolical fanatic who plans to open a portal to call forth a nightmare from the vast reaches of spacetime, at the cost of thousands of lives. Sounds like a typical Laundry Files novel, yes? But there the typical ends. The diabolical fanatic is a reverend; and Bob must team up with a couple of "external assets": Persephone "the Duchess" Hazard (code name: Bashful Incendiary) and Jonathan "Johnny" McTavish (code name: Johnny Prince).

Readercon Recap

As I wrote in a previous blog post, Readercon 21 was the official book launch for my anthology Is Anybody Out There? which I co-edited with Nick Gevers for Daw Books.

When I saw the programming schedule for the convention I became quite apprehensive: the book launch was scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on Friday, July 9. I repeat: a Friday afternoon -- a workday, following a three-day holiday weekend. When I shared my concern earlier that Friday with contributing author Paul Di Filippo, he essentially told me to have faith: he said the Thursday evening panels were well attended and Fridays have historically been well-attended at Readercon as well.

I had flown the JetBlue red-eye direct from San Jose to Boston, leaving at 9:10 p.m. Thursday evening and arriving in Boston around 5:30 a.m. Friday -- a five-and-a-half-hour flight, but the loss of an entire night. By the time I arrived at the Marriott and checked in, it was nearly 7:00 a.m. Shortly after arriving, I made my way to the convention area, and posted flyers that I had printed to advertise the book launch. I taped these to a couple con tabletops, spread them across the tops of three hallway console tables, and placed the remaining flyers in the freebie handouts section. I knew that con attendees would arrive Friday afternoon -- and most likely head straight for the dealers room; I wanted to catch their attention in time for the event.

I arrived at the meeting room for the book launch about fifteen minutes early. A panel was still in session, so at the 1:55 p.m. mark I opened the door and gave the panelists the "time" sign. With me in the hallway were a dozen other people whom I assumed --  hoped! -- were also waiting for the book launch. And if all twelve actually attended the launch, then I would be satisfied.

Well, by the time the event actually started, there were more than fifty people in the audience -- and standing room only. (I did a quick headcount and stopped after fifty, though there were still others in the audience.) What was even more rewarding to me, as the organizer and moderator of this event, was the fact that only one person walked out of the panel (at about the fifteen-minute mark) before it ended.

In addition to me and author Paul Di Filippo, contributing authors Yves Meynard and James Morrow were also present.¹

Is Anybody Out There? -- Revealed

If you're a Star Trek fan, you may recall in the series ST:The Next Generation, in the episode entitled "Relics" (First aired: 12 October 1992), the Enterprise picks up a distress call from a transport vessel that has been missing for 75 years. "As the Enterprise drops out of warp to respond to the signal, the starship is rocked violently by a massive gravitational field. Although initial scans do not find the source of the field, they trace the field to its center and discover a massive spherical structure, 200 million kilometers in diameter (or two-thirds of the Earth's orbit around the Sun). The sphere's dimensions are consistent with those of the (until then) theoretical structure known as a Dyson Sphere."¹ This is the episode in which the Enterprise discovers that a pattern has been locked in the transport vessel's transporter buffer these past 75 years, and after some tinkering by the Enterprise crew, Captain Montgomery "Scotty" Scott materializes on the transporter pad.

The Dyson Sphere is named after noted physicist Freeman Dyson, who originated the idea in 1959. Via @projectblackcat, I found a link to the Discovery Enterprise blog, which features a video of Dyson from the TED Conference -- Technology, Entertainment, Design -- held in Monterey, California, in February 2003. I'll save you the trouble of clicking on over to the DE blog and include the video below. Dyson speaks on searching for life in the outer Solar System; he is a genius, a space geek, even a comedian, as you'll see if you watch the vid, and though he rambles a bit, if you have the time (approximately 20 minutes), it is well worth the investment. More after the vid....

Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service

In 2001, as an acquiring editor for Golden Gryphon Press, I proposed an idea to the publisher: a new line of signed and numbered, limited edition chapbooks. To which, after much discussion, the publisher agreed. I had already been in contact with Alastair Reynolds regarding a short fiction collection (which I ended up editing years later for Night Shade Books; see my lengthy blog post on the Reynolds collection) -- so I asked Al if he would like to submit a novella to launch our new limited edition chapbook series. And, much to my joy, Al agreed. He currently had other commitments, but he said he could begin work on a new novella shortly after the new year (2002). The end result was Turquoise Days which premiered at ConJosé, the 60th World Science Fiction Convention. (I would like to share with you in detail how I met with Al in the lobby of his hotel in San Jose, California, the day before the start of the convention, after which I trucked up boxes of Turquoise Days to his hotel room, where we chatted at length as he signed 500-plus copies of the book. But I won't because this blog post, really, is about Charles Stross and his "Laundry Files.")

Around mid-2002, while Al and I were finalizing the edits and such on his novella, I began seeking out an author for the next title in this chapbook series. Howard Waldrop had already committed to writing a chapbook story -- what became A Better World's in Birth!-- and for those of you who know Howard, you'll understand when I say that it took a year for his story to be completed and published. So, in the interim, I was looking for another author and story. (I wasn't successful, but not for lack of trying; the Waldrop novelette was actually the second published chapbook in the series.)

One of the first authors who came to mind was Charles Stross. I had read quite a few of his stories, particularly "A Colder War" (Spectrum SF #3, August 2000; available online in its entirely on infinity plus¹), and I was hearing a great deal of buzz regarding his forthcoming novel, Singularity Sky², due from Ace Books in 2003. So, I emailed Charlie on August 2, 2002. In addition to introducing myself and Golden Gryphon Press, I promoted the new limited edition chapbook series and asked if he would consider submitting a story. I was aware that Charlie was scheduled to attend ConJosé, so I invited him to drop by the Golden Gryphon booth in the dealers room so that we could actually meet and chat a bit.

Charlie sent a reply that very same day:

"Firstly, I'm up to my eyeballs in work right now. I'm writing a series for Asimov's SF which will turn into a fix-up novel [Accelerando, Ace 2005], I'm working on book #2 of a contract for Ace [Iron Sunrise, 2004], and my agent is hoping to sell a tetralogy [Merchant Princes series] -- only one book of which is written so far! -- in the next couple of months. (Meaning, yet another big fat novel to write.) Therefore I almost certainly won't have time to write an original novella for you before March of next year.... However, if you're willing to settle for slightly-less-than-100%-original.... There's a second possibility, but this one is slightly offbeat. You may have seen my short novel "The Atrocity Archive", which Paul Fraser is currently serialising in Spectrum SF. It's 76,000 words long; he's running it in issues #7 through #9. Book rights to this short novel have not been sold; my agent is focusing on my SF work... [this is] a borderline horror/SF/thriller crossover... If you'd like to look at it I'd be happy to send you a copy and if necessary get [my agent] Caitlin Blasdell to talk to you about rights.... let's meet up and chat about things at ConJose."

It just so happened that I already had issues #1 through #8 of Spectrum SF, but issue #9, containing part three of "The Atrocity Archive," hadn't been published as yet. So, Charlie graciously sent me a file version of the complete novel for my reading pleasure. But what intrigued me even more so about "The Atrocity Archive" -- enough to request the full novel file from Charlie (remember, I hadn't yet read the final part 3) -- was Nick Gevers's review in the August 2002 issue of Locus Magazine. Nick concluded his review with the following paragraph:

"The climactic scenes of The Atrocity Archive -- battles in the snow beneath a galaxy of dying red suns -- form one of the most compelling and intellectually engaging narrative sequences in the SF canon, the logics of demonology and physics in astonishing tandem. Sequels are possible; they surely must come; but for the time being, the priority should simply be to see The Atrocity Archive published in proper book form after the limited availability of its serialization in Spectrum SF."

After reading that first sentence, re: "one of the most compelling and intellectually engaging narrative sequences in the SF canon," there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to be the one to acquire and publish this novel. However, I typically acquired books that were between 90,000 and 120,000 words, and Charlie had told me that "TAA" clocked in at about 76K words. So on August 19 [I know, I'm getting way ahead of myself, as this is after the WorldCon] I emailed Charlie and asked if he would be agreeable to writing an afterword -- I was thinking in terms of a two- or three-page afterword on the genesis of the novel; I also asked Charlie if he could recommend a fellow author to pen an introduction to the book. Charlie suggested Ken MacLeod for the introduction, and he also responded that "An afterword is possible." Fortunately, Ken agreed to contribute an introduction, and Charlie did indeed write an afterword -- a 5,550-word afterword entitled "Inside the Fear Factory," in which he made a case for the thriller novel as horror; he also wrote about British author Len Deighton, famous for his spy thrillers (e.g. The Ipcress File), and the influence behind the writing of "The Atrocity Archive."

But one thing still concerned me: in addition to an introduction and afterword, I felt the book still needed some new fiction; I told Charlie that I believed his hardcore fanbase/readers would have already obtained the three issues of Spectrum SF that contained the serialized "TAA." I wanted to be able to offer these folks something more than just the fine quality of a Golden Gryphon Press hardcover: preferably some new fiction. In his email response on August 19, Charlie made the following suggestion:

"Alternatively, can I interest you in a stand-alone novella about Bob, set not too long after the events of 'The Atrocity Archive'? I was going to write it for Spectrum SF, and would still like a chance to throw it at Paul, but if you insist on some 100% original content my arm can be twisted.³

Background: ...the novella, 'The Concrete Jungle', is a separate part of the story: it falls naturally between novels #1 and #2. It's about basilisks, the mystical significance of the Milton Keynes bicycle path network, Bob's evil scheming line manager, and what the British government is really spending money on in place of ballistic missile defense. 'The Concrete Jungle' is about 25% written, with a design length of 25,000 words, and was basically waiting for me to have an excuse -- and time -- to finish it."

Okay, before I go any further, for those of you not familiar with Charles Stross's Laundry Files, I guess a bit of an introduction is in order. From the dust jacket copy I wrote for The Atrocity Archives (note the plural from of "archives"; more about this in a bit), which was published in 2004:

In the world of "The Atrocity Archive," Alan Turing, the Father of Modern Computer Science, did in fact complete his theorem on "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning." Turing's work paved the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when carried out, had side effects that would leak through the platonic realm of pure mathematics underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there were "listeners" -- and sometimes these listeners could be coerced into opening gates. Small gates through which minds could be transferred and, occasionally, large gates through which objects could be moved.

In 1945, Nazi Germany's Ahnenerbe-SS, in an attempt to escape the Allied onslaught, performed just such a summoning on the souls of more than six million. They opened a gate to an alternate universe through which the SS could move men and matériel. But their summoning brought forth more than the SS had bargained for -- an Evil, patiently waiting for countless eons, now poised to lunch on our galaxy, on our very own Earth.

The protagonist in these novels and stories is Bob Howard (not his real name; and I'll leave you to determine the origin of this alias) -- a geekish demonology hacker extraordinaire -- who works for a supersecret intelligence organization known as "the Laundry," formerly the Q Department in Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE). Whereas the SOE was officially disbanded in 1945, following World War II, the Laundry was secretly maintained and exists to this day. When Bob's not trying to save the world from unearthly horrors, he has time sheets to complete and field liaison meetings to attend. The Laundry Files are a unique mix of the British espionage thriller, Lovecraftian horrors, non-Euclidian mathematics, computer hackerdom, and Dilbert-style office management.