I had an email from Jason Lambright, a reader (and now a writer), who had some kind words about Weapons of Choice, which helped get him through his time in some of the dustier parts of the world.

He writes, "I always carried my Sony Ereader in my assault pack along with grenades, flares, extra ammo, etc. It was always with me until it got fragged in the Andarab Valley (adjacent to the Panshir) in Afghanistan. Here is a photo I took in a village by the Konduz river, you can't see it but my assault pack (and my trusty ereader with your books on it) was in the turret with me."

Jason came home (Huzzah!) and set to writing some sci fi (Huzzah x2!)

The novel is called In the Valley and you can hit up the text link or the ad below to grab it. It's old fashioned military sci fi. The Dirty Dozen on the final frontier. I'm going through it now, making some notes to send him. You can just buy it, read it and enjoy it. Then go give him some reviews.

Go on. It's the least you can do.

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who left a review on Cairo. It pushed the book up the popularity ranks, which gave it enough visibility to get into the Hot New Release listing. I'm pondering how to reward y'all.

One of the things about going back into the Axis of Time series is the frustrating delight of contemplating all the technologies I missed. We didn't get fusion stacks. Instead of Posh we got Siri and Alexa. We did get flexipads, but we got them in the form of mobile phones.
Still, I don't see any point in slavishly adhering to the canon. So in Cairo we read a lot of detail about the mil-grade cell phones being used by Harry, Julia and Viv. I'm not sure flexipads are mentioned, and I'm certain that data slates are not. Nobody has complained yet.

So one of the things I'm enjoying as I return to the series is finding stuff that I can sneak in under the retcon radar. This bio-gel refrigerator concept for Electrolux, by Russian designer Yuriy Dmitriev is a great example.

Bio gel technology gets a few mentions throughout the original novels, enough to let me get away with putting something like this in the later books. Of course you can't build something like this with 1950s augmented technology – or at least I don't I think you can – but the nice thing about well-made refrigerators is that they run for years. And this bad boy doesn't even have any moving parts to break down. I can totally see Vice President Kohlhammer having a big green beer fridge just like this in his office. He couldn't keep his Heinekens in there, though. You'd never be able to find them.

Cairo went on sale today. Not that I expect to sell many copies initially, having just given away a couple of thousand freebies. But I do have my schemes and plots and cunning plans.

Initially, the book will only be available on Kindle, specifically in the KDP Select program. This means the Beast of Bezos get’s a grant of exclusivity for three months in return for some promotional juice and a better royalty deal. (Although, to be fair, Amazon’s royalty split is much more generous than any trade publisher).

I figure that having given away so many copies I’m better off parking it in Select for a couple of months until Paris comes out. I can then drop the price from $3.99 to either a buck or even to free. Why do this? Because free downloads count towards a books ‘popularity’ which helps with its visibility on various lists and charts. If you climb those charts you can generate enough momentum to sell a bunch of copies on the downside once you put the price back up again.

I could go into eye watering detail, but I won’t.

I sent out an email asking for reviews to the first 300 subscribers on my mailing list, which basically means to the regular readers of this blog . Again, these help with the arcane business of working the book’s mysterious popularity rating (but not it's sales rank. That is determined only by sales). So if you see this before you get the email, or if the email ends up in your spam trap, feel free to do me the courtesy of a decent reach around.

You'll find it here and on the other end of this Amazon link... (Unless, like me, you have an ad blocker installed. I really must get around to white listing my own site one day.)

I didn’t get much writing done today. I spent most of the day either working on this, writing a quick one-off column for The New Daily, and doing an interview for Channel 9 about Australia Post. Hoping to get back to Paris tomorrow.

One of my favourite scenes in Cairo actually takes place in London, as Harry walks through the city to his meeting at MI6. He’s drinking a cup of coffee, not tea. He passes by and around people lost inside clunky Walkman analogues, and takes note of the early model consumer electronic goods on display outside a couple of shops. He ponders the weather and the cricket and the news of the day, as anyone might, but it was imagining what might happen in consumer technologies that was so enjoyable in that brief section. I had to put away that speculation for the most part when the narrative engine spun up and we moved into the kinetic phase of the story.

One of the things I’m really looking forward to when I return to writing long form novels in this universe is having a chance to slow down and work these things out on the page. Slim Jim Davidson will reappear in the next book and he’s been doing a lot more than building boutique hotels in Cairo. Slim Jim has a street hustler’s eye for the main chance. He grabbed it in Weapons of Choice and never let go. That’s how he comes to feature as a player in Paris. Intrigued by the future career of Elon Musk, he was an early investor in the private space industry. He launches satellites for profit.

He tried to hire Professor Ernst Bremer once, but the German found him an odious character and judged him unlikely to be worthy of trust.

Slim Jim is just one of many in the corporate realm who has profited massively from the Transition. I’m still working out exactly what it is he’s into. It is easy to move Karen Halabi from a job with Hewlett-Packard’s Combat Optics division, into their satellite business. But someone like Slim Jim, he’d be into everything. He couldn’t help himself. This makes him a great character to explore both the technological and social changes wrought by the Transition after the end of hostilities.

I have a few ideas about what sort of investments his hydra headed omniglobal mega corporation might have got itself into. But I am open to suggestions. If he was into TVs, which would be a huge business in the 1950s, what sort of TVs would they be? He might start off with black-and-white, but by 1955 I imagine he’d be well into colour models, and looking to go flatscreen. Perhaps circuitry would not be miniaturised to the point where he could do that yet, but he’d know it was coming and he’d be hiring the best minds he could to make sure he got there first.

So, a Pepsi challenge for both Paris and the longer books which follow.

What would Slim Jim do?

Warren Ellis often writes about the weather in his weekly email, Orbital Operations. This week he riffed on a big storm that blew through southern England a few years back and did a lot of damage, segueing from that to a discussion of technology and the future. He was particularly struck by the way the mobile phone caught sci-fi writers by surprise. I won’t ruin the analogy by attempting to paraphrase:

From this perspective, the Great Storm was the mobile phone. It could be seen in the distance, along with a dozen other swirls of stormy weather, but we had no idea it would hit hard enough to change the shape of the world. It hit hard enough to break science fiction, one of our traditional early-warning stations, and it became interpolated into and interrogated by contemporary and popular fiction without science fiction ever getting to lay a finger on it…

The future is a weatherfront, and attempting to predict single lightning strikes is stupid and wasteful. Understand the future as weather, and yourself as standing on the shore looking out to the horizon. Breathe the air and watch the water. There are dozens of different systems acting on the approach of the future. In order to get a handle on what’s coming, you need to be talking to and working with and keeping an eye on many different fields. Not just “technology.” The future is also always social, and economic, and political, and many other things besides, and those things act on the path of the storm. And, if you’re standing on the shore, you know that there are a lot of storms out there, and any one of them could hit like a hurricane.

I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, or even everything I’ve quoted above. But I do like the elegance of the idea. The future as a chaotic weather system. It’s been much on my mind as I immerse myself back into the Axis of Time story world. When I wrote Weapons of Choice I was projecting two decades into the future. Now the opening scenes of the book are just a couple of years away. There are so many things I would change if I could go back and rewrite the series, and I guess there's no reason I can’t do that. Movie franchises get rebooted all the time, and Charlie Stross has already done something right this with his Merchant Princes series, if I recall correctly.

But I won’t do that. I have enough on my hands wrapping up Paris to start a new series I have tentatively called World War 3.1 in my planning documents. And, of course, I’m also returning to the timeframe of the original series to fill in the gaps. What I hope to pull off is the narrative gymnastic trick of writing two books in one series, separated by a decade. We’ll see how that works out.

For now, however, we have Cairo to discuss. The Beta readers are probably more qualified than anybody to dive in at this point, having poured over the manuscript at a molecular level. But I now throw the comment threads open to anybody who wants to join in.

We can make this a general discussion, with spoilers, and open up more specific threads later in the week.

SPOILERS BELOW.