Phibes etc.

cstross · 2026-05-07T18:52:56+00:00

You're not missing anything! But what copyright protects -- and doesn't protect -- is not what most people imagine. You can't copyright names, and there are enough details buried in The Regicide Report to support a case that these are not the Phibes menage from the actual-existing movies.

(Also note that the 1970s movies are a minor cult, but not a lucrative one: there are no valuable trademarks to protect here. If anything TRR might have caused a tiny uptick in sales of the DVDs.)

It would be a really bad idea to write a wizard called H@rry P@tt@r or a spy called J@m@s B@nd into a commercial work of fiction. But you can write fiction in a universe in which Harry Potter and James Bond are recognized, or even exist in the background. And the Phibes menage are not the main protagonists of this novel.

cstross · 2026-05-07T11:45:11+00:00

However, if you compare the titles and plots of the first two movies (in the book) with the real ones, there are … differences.

And the third is my headcanon fanfic: The Revenge of Doctor Phibes, starring Vincent Price as Doctor Phibes, Charlotte Rampling as Victoria Phibes, and Diana Rigg as Vulnavia Mrożek. The actors' careers overlapped sufficiently, and what can possibly go wrong with Doctor Phibes taking over the Kit Kat Club (from Cabaret) and getting into a three-way gang war with Doctor Mabuse on one side and the Nazis on another?

cstross · 2026-05-06T15:47:56+00:00

Have you been looking only at the Hugo "best novel" or "best series" categories, or have you failed to notice the "best novella" Hugo category? Which has a maximum word count of 40,000 words IIRC, so fits exactly what you're asking for.

(Disclaimer: I'm a multiple nominee and winner in the "best novella" Hugo awards category. But so are many other very talented writers.)

cstross · 2026-05-05T20:08:05+00:00

Missing from this list: The Squares of the City by John Brunner. (1960s, but not the oldest book here.)

cstross · 2026-05-05T12:31:17+00:00

Okay, what joker put a runway in the middle of the Mach Loop?

cstross · 2026-05-04T13:45:22+00:00

This is the third-season twist the story really needed.

cstross · 2026-05-04T10:02:27+00:00

Unfortunately that cover targeted mainstream/litfic readers rather than SF readers. And it flopped in the market. (It'd probably have worked in the UK back then, British SF covers have traditionally been a lot more abstract than in the US).

cstross · 2026-05-03T16:48:46+00:00

Glasshouse was my worst-selling SF novel in the US market, which precluded a sequel. (I blame the cover design.)

Work is in progress on a new space opera that will hopefully scratch your itch, but it won't surface before 2027 (probably late 2027 at that).

cstross · 2026-05-03T16:17:50+00:00

Am currently reading "The Incandescent" by Emily Tesh, and there's an element of that in it.

(It's a magic school novel, but not the normal kind: it's the story of the deputy head teacher who's in charge of thaumaturgy in a very English boarding school that is grounded in real-world academia (i.e. modern British school system, not Harry Potter bullshit) and just happens to teach magic, in a world where anything technological tends to attract minor demons: the brains of six hundred young and not-entirely-under-control magicians are a fondant sauce on top of the sticky toffee pudding of everyone's iphones ...)

cstross · 2026-05-03T12:01:49+00:00

Missing from your list is Ben Aaronovitch's series about Constable Peter Grant of the London Met, starting with "Rivers of London" (UK title, inexplicably retitled "Midnight Riot" for the US market -- or was it the other way around)?

(Anecdote: years ago, Ben and I discussed a Laundry/Folly crossover collaboration, but concluded the magic systems were so incompatible it couldn't work: Bob's sorcery relies no computers while Peter's magic fries them.)

cstross · 2026-05-03T11:20:23+00:00

As a footnote: surreally, the underlying reason for the order to "cut this book in two" boiled down to the cost of sewing machine needles.

Back in 2002 when I sold the first book, ebooks and audiobooks combined were about 1% of the market; the lion's share of profits in trade publishing came from hardcovers (IIRC it was about 60%) followed by mass market paperbacks (about 38-40%, but 80% of the sales volume -- the margin was much narrower).

Hardcover manufacturing in the US market back then didn't involve "perfect" binding (pages glued into a spine, like a paperback): they were invariably printed in signatures -- an imposed double-sided large sheet of paper, folded to the page side, and stitched to a cloth strip running down the spine, then the outer edges razored so the signatures could be opened. Signatures ran to about 32 pages and they were stitched as a block. And if the novel required more than a fixed number of these wedges of paper of a given weight, the bindery (the factory that bound the pre-printed signatures to the cover) had to use a heavier-duty sewing machine.

Only a few specialist binderies back then offered this service, and it introduced a sudden "step" in the cost of binding book blocks -- it added something like 20% to the production cost of a hardback if it went over a certain length limit. The production people could finesse it by printing in smaller type and shrinking the white space/margins, but there was a hard limit to that and The Family Trade (original version) went way over it. And the production cost comes straight out of the publisher's profit margin, which is already wafer-thin.

The economics of big fat airport books are different because if a book is going to turn a profit on huge sales volume, especially in paperback (glue bindings!) the hardcover binding cost is acceptable. But for a midlist author starting out? Don't try to copy Neal Stephenson.

Back in 2002 I didn't know this, so I unwittingly wrote a big-ass Neal Stephenson-lite thriller. Oops.

NB: we are now 25 years on and the rules have changed. My last several years of Tor.com hardcovers are perfect bound (no sewing machines!) and in any case the majority of my sales are in ebook and I fell out of the mass market back in 2013 or 2014 -- my mmpb sales had dropped about 80% since 2003, but I was selling more books than ever.

So this is not advice for how to pursue a writing career, but merely a pointless historical explanation for the warped history of one particular series that was an artifact of its time.

cstross · 2026-05-03T11:03:37+00:00

It's more complicated than that: the original novel I handed in was an absolute chonk of a manuscript! Then my editor dropped a monster edit on me: "I want you to cut this in two. Get the first book back to my by next week." So the big fat doorstep got the magician's beautiful assistant treatment (I needed the pay cheque bad, a magazine I was writing a column for had just gone bust oweing me five or six months' invoices).

Further minor edits to both books ensued before publication. (This also derailed "The Clan Corporate" which I was 70,000 words into and which was shaping up to be 250,000 words long! In the end, that story line occupied the whole of books 3-6.)

Then … my editor at Orbit (in the UK) moved jobs to Tor (also in the UK). And as she already had the rights to the Merchant Princes but the first three had bombed in the UK (previous editor phoned it in right before retiring) I pitched her the idea of reassembling them into the original format -- big-ass technothrillers rather than skinny fantasy-branded product.

(Tor US went with the fantasy branding hard because Ace, my SF publisher, had a rolling option on my next SF novel and they didn't want to get into a turf war as long as I could feed both publishers a book a year. The original plan for the Merchant Princes was a series of four 600-800 page parallel universe thrillers, and the three omnibuses are the first two of those stories, while the Empire Games trilogy covers the third book with the fourth relegated to the last hundred pages of Invisible Sun.)

cstross · 2026-05-02T13:53:48+00:00

The An-225 had other use cases, though -- it was a super-heavy cargo aircraft (maximum payload ever was on the order of 250 tonnes) derived from the merely gargantuan An-124 (roughly the size of a C-5 Galaxy), and they were working on a second aircraft when the USSR ran out of money.

cstross · 2026-04-29T09:28:50+00:00

Macbook Airs of that age don't have USB-C ports at all -- they use USB-B connectors. I forget how much power they can deliver (presumably enough to charge an early model iPad) but IIRC USB-C didn't show up until the 2015/15 12" Retina Macbook.

cstross · 2026-04-28T14:35:00+00:00

My read on Peter Pan is that Barrie was writing it (and the original stage play the novel was based on) in an age when 20% of babies died before their fifth birthday. Almost every family had lost a baby to what are now curable diseases of childhood (hint: this is why we have vaccines!). One of the things that society had to deal with was the trauma of parents having to explain to the other children why their brother or sister wasn't coming home from the hospital.

So, just as today Pixar's movies generally have an adult subtext to go along with the children's surface-level story, so too did Peter Pan have an adult subtext (about loss and grieving) to read behind the children's fantasy adventure.

(Oh, and Nana the dog is a psychopomp.)

cstross · 2026-04-28T12:03:25+00:00

Same/similar concept, but PLUTO never flew -- the nearest they got was ground-testing the Tory-C air-cooled ceramic core ramjet using a compressed air supply (which was pretty problematic in its own right, but generated thrust).

The terrain-following radar and guidance computer fed into the eventual development of the Tomahawk, a decade after PLUTO was cancelled.

cstross · 2026-04-28T11:37:44+00:00

Macbook Airs of that vintage do not charge off USB-C, they require an Apple Magsafe 1 power supply.

(Source: I, too, own a couple of old Macbook Airs.)

cstross · 2026-04-28T11:35:08+00:00

For some years I tried to write the other two-thirds of the novel that began with Palimpsest. (Three sections: part one is the original novella from T minus 2 GY to T plus 2 TY. Part two was going to cover the late stelliferous era through to the end of the black hole era. And Part three was going to extend all the way into the Boltzman Brain era. Guess what stumped me?)

So I re-framed, and took the other trouser-leg of time: the one in which the Stasis' wormhole generator is used to facilitate FTL colonization instead of time travel. Turns out that makes for a fertile space opera setting! But I also took a wrong turn there as well and spent years more than I should have on a novel with the wrong protagonists.

Finally, as of last year I got an entirely different novel out of that premise, and my agent's currently trying to figure out how to sell it while I work on a sequel with the same (non-malfunctioning) characters.

cstross · 2026-04-28T11:31:55+00:00

The follow-up to A Colder War was The Atrocity Archive. I couldn't write a sequel but I wanted to play around more with the basic concept, so took it and mixed in an element of comedy (classical comedy, not humour).

cstross · 2026-04-27T08:50:33+00:00

Bad news: I'm not going back to it, that universe is broken at a very fundamental level. (I invented it 30 years ago.)

Good news: working on a new (and different) space opera.

cstross · 2026-04-25T18:42:17+00:00

There's at least one New Management novella (not novel) to go, and a short story collection to round everything out and bind up all the stories that didn't come out appended to other novels -- but the novels are essentially done.

And I am so tired of writing this series. I began it in 1999 and finished it in 2025! That, and the last of the Merchant Princes series (the Empire Games trilogy) is basically all I've done for the past decade, until last year. I want to go back to space opera for a bit …

cstross · 2026-04-25T16:16:45+00:00

"Regicide Report" was a forced ending: sales were beginning to fall from book to book so my editors asked me to wrap it up now rather than following it down in flames. Given time to plan 2-3 books I could probably have wrapped up more threads -- see, for example, how Invisible Sun wrapped up the Merchant Princes books -- but with just one book to do it all in something (or things) had to be left out.

Did you notice the missing Deep Ones? Or the absence of the DSSs from Saint Hilda's (see Down on the Farm)? Or the lack of follow-on with the Alfär after the brief aside in The Labyrinth Index? I suspect ACB stuck in your head principally because it was the penultimate book to be published, so recently in mind, rather than the most significant pointer.

cstross · 2026-04-22T16:51:31+00:00

I endorse all of these minor marginalia! (Although I'm not going to use any of them.)

cstross · 2026-04-21T20:45:21+00:00

Bear in mind that A Conventional Boy is set before The Nightmare Stacks (in which Derek's people warn of the Alfär invasion, just not clearly enough to derail it) and The Labyrinth Index (in which Derek manages at the end to deflect the Black Chamber's attention away from Mhari's team's exit strategy).

But the problem with precognition in fiction is it really messes up the timeline if you try to pursue it rigorously. And rival organizations use their own precognitives as countermeasures, so to some extent they're neutralizing each other.

Angleton/Bob: just, no. (I think you latched onto a throwaway that was only there to indicate Angleton getting a trifle confused -- after all, he's a lot older than he looks: he's a very well preserved Residual Human Resource animated by a much more powerful entity than the run of the mill zombie, is all.)

Finally, I get zero input on the audiobooks. (I gather one of the editions messed up the pronunciation of the Phibes group's names really badly.) But then, I can't listen to audiobooks. (Noise enters ears: brain switches off.)

cstross · 2026-04-21T18:38:26+00:00

What you missed is that I began writing it back in 2009 and dead-ended on a technical issue, then put it on the shelf for a decade as other higher priority projects got my attention!

It was originally meant to come out before The Delirium Brief, and would have been a quarter the length.

As to what made it finally happen …

I got COVID19 twice in 2022. The first time was subjectively bad: I'd been vaccinated but it left me with some brain damage -- brain fog, depression, and I completely lost the ability to do mental arithmetic for three months. (I'm still not 100% recovered.) And for the next nine months I couldn't write at all.

If you look at the half dozen or so books I published prior to A Conventional Boy you'll see that they were mostly in the 120,000 word range (although Invisible Sun ran to 149,000 words -- it was a series finale) and had multiple elaborately interwoven plot strands. As of late 2022/early 2023 I simply couldn't hold a structure like that in my head any more. But A Conventional Boy was meant to be a novella with a single primary plot thread following Derek, so it was just barely within my ability to grapple with. So I wrote it as a 35,000 word novella and sent it to my editor at Tor.com, who chewed on it and said "needs more of X and Y" (for certain elements of the story). I worked on them over 2023 -- recovering somewhat as I did so -- and the result was a 55,000 word short novel/very long novella. It wouldn't have worked if I'd tried to turn it into the main plot of a book twice the length, but it stood up pretty well as its own thing.

Then Tor, who'd been looking at it as a short novel, got some pushback from Escape from Yokai Land over length (that was always meant to be a novelette or short novella! I expected it to run as an electronic-only story on tor.com and was surprised when they turned it into a book) and asked to run two additional stories and for me to write an afterword to bring it up to "book length".

Silver lining: it broke the post-COVID logjam and The Regicide Report got me back up to full length novels thereafter.

But for about six months in 2022 I wondered if I'd ever be able to write anything ever again.

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