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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
pj_wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Charlie Strauss, British writer of science fiction and fantasy. He has won several Locusts and Hugo Awards for best novels and novellas. His biggest series are The Merchant Princes and the Laundry Files. I personally found him through the Laundry Files, a universe where Lovecraft meets crushing British bureaucracy. Mr. Strauss, wonderful to have you today.
charlie:
Thanks very much for inviting me.
pj_wehry:
So just to get us started here, where did you get the idea for the laundry files? This idea of like insane alien monsters coming through other dimensions coupled with an IT guy who is afraid about the reception his expense reports are gonna get. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
charlie:
I'm trying to think myself back into my frame of mind in 1998, which is when I began writing it. I actually have to go back a bit further to 1992, when I began writing a short story, which eventually surfaced, titled A Colder War. It was a Lovecraftian short story, and I began writing it not coincidentally about 18 months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, I'm older than I look. I lived through a chunk of a Cold War, and it was... terrifying time to be a teenager. I think a lot of my generation actually had PTSD from it because we just knew that vast cool intelligences on the far side of the planet might at any moment decide to melt our faces for some of the abstruse ideological disagreement. And it seemed to me that Lovecraft's nightmares had become kind of kitchen cliched for the 1990s, you know, you could get Cthulhu bedroom slippers.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
charlie:
But At the same time, they're a very powerful metaphor for existential cosmic dread. And in A Cold War, I set out to write a kind of sequel to Lovecraft's novella, At the Mountains of Madness, set in an alternate world where the aftermath of the Pabodic expedition described in At the Mountains of Madness was a very deplorable gold rush of various national their archaeologists think Indiana Jones-ish to loot all the tech they can find from the old ones and the elder race, and a crypt containing a sleeping elder god
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
called
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
Cthulhu, this sort of thing. And the Nazis are in it, the Soviet Union is in it, the US government is in it. At the end of the Second World War, the Nazi necromantic tech is divvied up, and we get into situation where, rather than it just being nuclear weapons pointed at each other, there are these vast alien, god-like beings. And the story went very, very, very grim, very, very fast. It keeps being republished in anthologies, but the World
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
War III takes place two-thirds of a way into the story. It's narrated by some of the survivors. Well, they may have survived. very rapidly, but it was far too grim to actually use as a setting. I needed to do something that was also kind of a bleak, farcical comedy, as well as absolutely horrifying. And I'm a fan, going back a very long way, of a particular subgenre of fiction that may not be very familiar in America, but the classic called War British Spy Friller. Now the most famous exponent of that Tinker Taylor, Soldier Spy, and etc. But there are many other authors who worked in that field, notably Len Dayton, who was my first target, author of Billion Dollar Brain, The Epcress
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
File,
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
and several other books that ended up as movies. And the thing about the British spy agencies of that day is they were very low budget, rather bureaucratic, rather bumbling, and extremely drab in their appearance. didn't have big budgets. James Bond is almost a perfect photographic negative of what they were looking for in a recruit. They wanted the exact opposite in every respect. And it occurred to me, if you posit that magic is a branch of mathematics, you get all sorts of interesting fallout, including a magical spin-off agency of GCHCube, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, set up to suppress computational demonology in the A side effect of this is that any computer scientist who accidentally stumbles on the wrong theorems and doesn't get eaten by tentacle monsters may well end up being recruited and shoved in a box to work with the government. My protagonist Bob is very much a fish out of water. He is the incongruous misplaced protagonist. He would be a lot more at home in a 1990 Silicon Valley dot com start-up than in a 1940s British government agency. So this gave me a lot of scope for comedy, because obviously this sort of guy is just not at home in a government bureaucracy, but they have nowhere else to put him. And that sort of gradually grew into a short novel. Butrosity Archive, which gradually had a put at it slouched into publication. It didn't appear with a bang.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
charlie:
It first got serialized in the short lived Scottish science fiction magazine in 2002. Then an American small press publisher decided they quite like it, but could I write a sequel novella to pad it out to book length? This was after my agent had rejected it as too weird and cross genre to sell. She changed her mind after the Hugo win,
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha!
charlie:
without sequel novella. And the Hugo win generated demand for a sequel novel and then... Three books in my editor at ACE, who are now doing the paperbacks, said, Charlie, we've had an order on high from board level. All series of three or more books have to have a series title. I'm going to call this the laundry files. What do you think?
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
I've been embarrassed by that title ever since because she was
pj_wehry:
Ha ha.
charlie:
clearly riffing off Jim Butcher's resident files. She edited Jim as well.
pj_wehry:
Ha! That's funny. I did not know that. That's a great crossover. Yeah. Yeah.
charlie:
Yeah, but anyway, that's how it sort of turned up. And originally it was just one short novel, then yeah, one short novel and the next novella. And then, okay, I'll write a second novel and, you know, I might actually turn this into a trilogy. After nine books in the series, I decided to write a new series set in the same universe, but they marketed it as more laundry files and... The twelfth novel is due out in two months time.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha!
charlie:
And the thirteenth is in the pipeline.
pj_wehry:
You just can't stop.
charlie:
When you are trying to write for a living,
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
you're trying to sell a novel to your editors, and the editors in turn, they're not trying to sell to the general public, they're trying to sell to the marketing department. This is in big publishing, the
pj_wehry:
Yes.
charlie:
Big Five Publishers, not self-published. And the easiest thing you can sell to a marketing person is something just like the last one, only slightly different,
pj_wehry:
Yes.
charlie:
because they know how to sell it. They do what's
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
sold last time. So, it... on a treadmill of doing a series it's very hard to get off it unless the series tanks completely invaders fire you. I've read recently that about 60% of all published novels in the US from major publishers are sequels in an
pj_wehry:
Wow.
charlie:
existing series. And you will also see an awful lot of two-volume trilogies, where there is never a third volume. What happened was the publisher bought the first two books. Book number two only sold 80% as many copies as book number one. They saw the way the trend was going and they cancelled it.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
It's the business of writing at this end. Prince Otto von Bismarck, well-known bleeding heart liberal German politician of the 19th century, the guy who invented social security and estate pension. He opined that any man who is interested in how law and sausages are made should take great pains never to explore either of them. And the same goes for publishing as well. Books.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yes. As soon as you started talking about a quote from Bismarck, it's a legendary and very apropos quote to many things. So maybe disgusting is too strong a word, but maybe it's not. You know, these back end, you know, the actual business of making something. When you're actually writing, what are you looking for in a story? What for you makes is story work.
charlie:
I'm really an ideas guy, although ideas encompasses ideas about character, not just ideas about tech or ideas about society or ideas about science. So I tend to start with a bunch of ideas and let them bounce off each other, like throwing a bunch of pool balls on a pool table and seeing where they end up. And this canning, this usually has to include the characters as well. I wouldn't say I'm primarily a character driven writer, but that's a very large elements of it. I also usually come up with what I think are some cool ideas about settings or MacGuffins that I can write stories around and see what the characters make of them. I have to add a cautionary note at this point. I've been writing for quite a long time. I solved my first short story professionally in 1985 and what I do nowadays writing-wise is very different from what I did 20 years ago or 30 years ago.
pj_wehry:
Hmm. And what's changed?
charlie:
age.
pj_wehry:
That's fair.
charlie:
One aspect of the laundry files is I'm 58 and I've been writing this series since 1998, so 25 years, that's nearly half my life. I
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
am not the same guy I was when I was 30.
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
charlie:
If you think in terms of what you'd have been interested in writing about at half your present age, that would be pretty different to what you're doing now. In a real sense, what I'm doing with series is collaborating with my younger self. And sorry to say this, but grown up Charlie is not necessarily interested in the same things that much younger Charlie was interested in.
pj_wehry:
Of course, I mean, you would hope so, actually. It would actually probably be disappointing
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
if you were interested in the exact same things and you had stayed completely frozen as a person, right? Like that's the point
charlie:
Oh,
pj_wehry:
is
charlie:
yeah.
pj_wehry:
to grow. The End
charlie:
Also, I'm going to I'm fairly lucky in that I'm not a mega bestseller, not in the Brent Brandon Sanderson category, probably not really in the John Scousey League, but I'm earning a comfortable enough living. And I have a big enough following that I don't have to worry too much about being able to sell what I write next. In particular, I don't have to stick to a rigid, well, identify a commercial formula and market the hell out of a formula. I would get awfully bored if I had to write to a formula.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
And, you know, I'm not doing this to make potloads of money. I'm doing it because I'm right. There are better ways to live a living.
pj_wehry:
Yes, that I could, I, as what I've heard for sure. Can you talk a little bit more about your motivation for writing? What was that like? You mentioned writing your first story in 1985 or publish, excuse me, publishing your first story in 1985. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
charlie:
Yeah,
pj_wehry:
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
charlie:
actually,
pj_wehry:
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.
charlie:
I began
pj_wehry:
Right. Right. Right.
charlie:
writing
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
much
pj_wehry:
Right. Right.
charlie:
earlier,
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
probably
pj_wehry:
Right. Right.
charlie:
way
pj_wehry:
Right. Right.
charlie:
too
pj_wehry:
Right. Right.
charlie:
early.
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
I wrote my first novel-shaped object, as I'd call it, because it wasn't a real novel, at age 15. I taught myself to type on a manual typewriter, and when I was about 12, doing Dungeons and Dragon scenarios, and had to upgrade to a new typewriter when the keys began snapping from metal fatigue.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
charlie:
Yeah, so I've been writing in one shape or another for 50 years, but only at a quality that you'd want to read for probably about 25 of those years, maybe 30 of those years, stretching it a bit. motivation. I'm not sure. I've tried to analyze my own motivation for wanting to write and it's ridiculously hard and if I try and analyze it too much suddenly I find I don't want to write and that's actually quite scary.
pj_wehry:
No, let's not do that. Yeah.
charlie:
Thank you. Thank you.
pj_wehry:
That's the I think I mentioned before we jumped on the whole Hemingway thing where he refused to talk about writing at all because he thought it was bad luck. Right. The so, um,
charlie:
Mm.
pj_wehry:
uh, and then you read something like the Paris review, uh, interview
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
with him and it took place over multiple times where they, he, they finally convinced him to do multiple ones because he kept cutting them short. And it seems very, uh, plausible that he actually gave them answers just to mess with them, right?
charlie:
That's the only reasonable thing to do, frankly. I will say that stuff varies from time to time. For example,
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
my current project, when I'm not languishing with the aftermath of the bad cold, I'm working, chewing on a space opera. A space opera I began in 2014. It got delayed a bit because, firstly, my father died.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
To be fair, he was 93. But having a parent die on something kind of drops the wind right out of your sails immediately. I think in my experience, losing a close family relative costs about a year of productivity if you create a writer, you just
pj_wehry:
Mm.
charlie:
get demotivated, depressed, don't want to push on and lose energy. Then two years later, my mother died. I mean, it's not unusual for couples who've been married for 60 or more years to die roughly the same time. But I shelved the project couldn't face it. And I began going back to it just in time, well, just after COVID-19, which is why I'm trying to finish off the second draft of it now, nearly 10 years after it was originally needed.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
charlie:
A total FML moment.
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
Part of the reason it got delayed that much though was because while my mum was dying, she, my father, went past relatively fast, about three
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
months
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
rapid decline and that was it. My mother had a series of strokes a year and a half. And while that was going on, I was trying to engage with actual projects that I knew would definitely sell that my publishers wanted and my headspace was just wrong for writing creatively.
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
And at
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
one point I just basically gave up and told myself okay free creative license to free association do whatever the hell you want with no commercial plan. You know what happens when you do that? You end up with an attack trilogy.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
charlie:
That's where the new management books came from. Dead Lies Dreaming, which was the book I was writing while my mom was dying and then finished during the early lockdown period of COVID. It's a Laundry Universe setting novel, but not about the laundry, that riffs off Peter Pan. Not the Disney Peter Pan everybody's familiar with, but the original play and book by J. M. Barry. very
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
grim dark children's story because Barry was writing in roughly 1900 give or take a few years. It started out as a stage play then got turned into a novel. And he was writing a children's fiction for kids in an era when 20% of all children died before they hit the age of five years.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Thank you.
charlie:
When parents had to have an answer when their four year old asks why baby brother or sister isn't coming home or isn't there anymore? Well you know Peter Pam came from they've gone flying off to have adventures
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
in Neverland this sort of thing yeah but the grim dark stuff is there for the adult reader to see because it's because the stories would be read to the children by their parents who would also be dealing with the same stuff so it's an interesting multi-level book and really quite scary when you get into it which is why I turned it into something Lovecraftian.
pj_wehry:
That's completely fair. Yeah, no. And I hadn't, you know, even as you talk about Neverland, right?
charlie:
Mm.
pj_wehry:
It almost has a lovecraftian feel to it, you know, I could see a Neverland that fits, for instance, in the second book, I think it's the, I mean, no, no, sorry, the first book of the laundry files, when they're on that cold wasteland, right? Like,
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
what the Neverland really like.
charlie:
Well, there's a chunk of that in the new management books, but they rapidly go a bit weird because the first one introduces a protagonist, Imp, who's the leader of the Lost Boys, which is basically a queer, commune, squatting and abandoned mansion in London, under the government of the new management, where Niall Affatep, Lovecraft's trickster god, is the prime minister. dystopian alternate reality, but I began writing in reaction to the Brexit referendum and it turns out people are reading this as a happy, consolatory and place they'd like to live.
pj_wehry:
Oh
charlie:
compared to what we've ended up with. I mean, this century has just been a total bad trip.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
charlie:
But the pitch here is it was a heist novel.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
Impanis Gang have been hired by his sister, who is the icy uptight blonde personal assistant to magical-earned Stavro Blofeld. They've been given a mission of retrieving the only existing concordance of the one true Necronomicon. Because if the Necronomicon is bad news, what could be worse than an actual index to it? And things escalate and I ended up going into book two when our, when our PA, how can I put it, she puts the execute into executive assistant has backstabbed her totally evil boss. I mean, he's the sort of hedge fund billionaire who made his pile by sacrificing his victims and reading their entrails. So he knew what positions to take up for tomorrow's Thank you. Bye. And that book veers off into Mary Poppins, pastiche, crossed with Sweeney Todd. And again, if you've read the original Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers, she's a narcissistic chaos monster,
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha.
charlie:
a bit of a demigodge, and she's actually very, very dangerous to be around. And so, you know, as with the early laundry novels, which rift off particular British spy thriller authors, I started with Len Dayton and then Ian Fleming. What's his name? I can't
pj_wehry:
Well,
charlie:
remember
pj_wehry:
that's
charlie:
the
pj_wehry:
the
charlie:
third.
pj_wehry:
second one for sure. Like, I mean, I
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
was going to ask you about,
charlie:
Oh
pj_wehry:
like,
charlie:
yeah.
pj_wehry:
you mentioned the...
charlie:
The second was the infleming. Definitely.
pj_wehry:
Yes, oh, yeah.
charlie:
Um... The third... I'm drawing a blank on the name of a very famous British spy for the writer of the 70s and 80s, who only briefly took Got Turn into a TV property and no movies of his work were made, and he stopped writing in 1989 and I'm having a senile moment. And the third book, the fourth book was basically the modesty blaze pastiche, Peter Donnell's, Kikas Heron, the movie rights to which are being sat on by Quentin Tarantino, apparently, which should tell you worth doing.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yes.
charlie:
Then I began iterating through different urban fantasy subgenres and it took a life of its own after about book seven.
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
But
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
the new management is back to riffing off other material again. So we have... Peter Pan followed by Mary Poppins with a side order of Sweeney Todd because why not? And the third book, Season of Skulls, which comes out in May, I decided to get really surreal and go for Regency Romance. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Rigiton with shogoths.
pj_wehry:
There. That is really fantastic. That is something to look forward to.
charlie:
Yeah, there's always an A plot and a B plot. So in addition to Peter Pan, Dead Lies Dreaming also had a heist caper embedded in it. And some riffs off Jack the Ripper. Quantum of Nightmares, the A plot was very much Mary Poppins. No, the B plot was Mary Poppins. The A plot was Sweeney Todd plus nefarious goings on in a or maybe magical spectre. And in Season of Skulls we have our type A female executive from the earlier two novels pitched headlong into 1816 and the A plotters she's been incarcerated in The Village. If you're familiar with a British TV series of that name she is
pj_wehry:
Not
charlie:
number
pj_wehry:
familiar.
charlie:
six. The Village is a very picturesque Welsh village on the coast of Wales, impossible to escape from, and the unspecified secret service is imprisoning Spisonet. Our nameless protagonist, number six, has been kidnapped and held there. Well, they demand information. What sort of information? You know exactly what we want to know. You're going to tell us, aren't you? And in this instance, Port Miron didn't actually exist in 1816 in the real world, but in this world it does. It's been built by a time traveller from our era. and is being used by the British War Ministry to incarcerate captured French sorcerers from the Napoleonic Wars.
pj_wehry:
So what does that look like? You're talking about the A plot and B plot. When you sit down to write at kind of a, obviously I'm sure there's the time when you're doing that first draft.
charlie:
Mm.
pj_wehry:
What is the outlining look like? Do you do an outline, that sort of thing?
charlie:
No. Oh, rather, I develop an outline as I
pj_wehry:
Yes.
charlie:
write the first draft,
pj_wehry:
OK.
charlie:
so I always have a guide to where the scenes line up when I'm looking back, so that when it comes time to actually edit it, I can knit everything together again properly. But there's a lot of exploratory writing going on in it. I do usually have, I'm a pancer, but I do usually have a view of several highlight scenes that will navigate me towards the ending. because there's a lot of ellipses to fill in along the way there. The different A-plot and B-plot usually emerge during the writing process and need a bit of redraft to actually bring them into full contrast, but they are there. Interestingly, the next laundry novel after this one, which is already in the cam, it's a question of how and when it comes out rather than if, is originally going to be a novella, so it's
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
all
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
A-plot, there's virtually no B-plot at all. which limits it. It's half the length of the other laundry novels. because, you know, a novella is fundamentally... you could get two or three novellas into a full length novel simply by treating each of them as the A-plot, or the B-plot, or the C-plot, and having them tie up at the end.
pj_wehry:
Right, right. How much do you drop from that exploratory writing? What percentage? Ha
charlie:
as little as I can.
pj_wehry:
ha ha.
charlie:
The first novel I had published, Singularity Sky, was a disaster in commercial work investment terms because I went through several drafts over a period of years and what came out was 118,000 words long and I had 176,000 words left over. you cannot earn a living writing like that. The sequel to it, Iron Sunrise, came out at 140,000 words and I left 50,000 words on the cutting room floor. These days I try to leave less than 10% surplus, significantly less than 10%. I'm not counting line edits where I'm just rephrasing stuff in this, but actual scenes and narrative threads. I'm a bit annoyed with myself over that space opera example, because I actually have an entire plot thread of 15,000 words that I had to yank out of it in the process of a current draft. That may end up as a separate novello, though, because, well, it's one particular minor character who jumped centre stage and shouted, it's all about me, and then proceeded to narrate his biography.
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
charlie:
Which is just basically a different story.
pj_wehry:
Well, and that's where you talk about being character driven, right? That
charlie:
Yeah. Yeah.
pj_wehry:
sometimes characters appear to have a mind of their own.
charlie:
absolutely do. In this case I got mugged by the fact that I needed an adversary in the novel, so I decided to add an adversary and as my friend Ken McLeod put it, the secret weapon in the Sand's fiction writers tool book is history. You can always find an insane larger-than-life figure in history. I mentioned this as a space opera, a widescreen
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
one. I picked a very odd fellow born in the 1880s in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dropped him in as the adversary and then discovered that I had to tone him down to make him even remotely believable in an Ian Banks scale space opera because he was too outrageous. A fellow by the name of Ignats Trebich Lincoln. who Okay, a religious grifter. I mean, if he was alive today, he would absolutely be a right-win American televangelist. Give me all your money. God wants you to be rich. This sort of guy. Trebuchelin can start it out as a Jewish-Yashiva student, converted to Lutheranism, to get away from home, found preaching to converse in Canada in the 1890s, incredibly boring and cold, So converted to the Church of England and headed to England, charmed the Archbishop of Canterbury into giving him a curacy, leveraged this into marrying a German shipping magnate's daughter, and tried to corner the Balkan oil market in 1909. Lost a fortune. But that's not all. He got himself elected to the British Parliament, realised too late that they didn't pay MPs in those days, so quit
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
the
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
next
pj_wehry:
Bye.
charlie:
election. Voluntary services as a spy to MI5 when war broke out, they didn't trust him so they told him to get lost. So he had a snit and volunteered his services to the German Imperial secret police who told him to get lost. They didn't trust him either. So he went to the United States and published a best-selling pot boiler. I was a double agent.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
charlie:
and then things get really really weird. Things get so weird that in 1918 he was briefly the minister of propaganda in a short-lived German fascist government. one that lasted for all of a week, right after the end of the war. He reputedly got Hitler on the last flight out of Berlin. But Hitler never trusted him, which is a very, very good thing indeed for the rest of us. By the 1930s, he'd converted to Buddhism. Well, he'd moved to China along the way, converted to Buddhism, became
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
an abbot, and then declared himself the Dalai Lama and tried to convince the Japanese High Command back his plate when they'd Tibet.
pj_wehry:
That's amazing.
charlie:
And yeah,
pj_wehry:
I can see why
charlie:
this
pj_wehry:
you'd have
charlie:
was
pj_wehry:
to tone him down.
charlie:
absolutely. You put something like that in a space opera and your readers will not believe you.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh man, that's I can't remember what book on writing I read, but it was talking about how in real life you can get away with cornier stuff than in than in fiction. For instance, I believe it's the Hooker Chemical Factory, polluting love canal, which if you wrote that
charlie:
Yeah,
pj_wehry:
into your
charlie:
that's...
pj_wehry:
novel,
charlie:
that's too on the nose. Um,
pj_wehry:
yes, people would not accept that. Um,
charlie:
reality is under no obligation to have a consistent plot thread or make sense or seem reasonable. Reality is generally very unreasonable.
pj_wehry:
Do you find that sentiment seems to resonate a lot with what you write in the laundry files? How do you handle themes in your writing? Is that something you try and sharpen as you rewrite? Or is that something you think about beforehand or afterwards, you finish a work, you look at it and you're like, oh, I seem to be talking about this, I didn't even think about that. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
charlie:
Um, it is usually a bit of an afterthought, but I have to refine and define focus when I'm editing. And very often I won't even recognize it until it's, until the book's written. Um, I may go back and add a couple of sentences just to highlight it and make it look like I plan to save that all along.
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
But no, I don't usually start by looking for big theme to write about, although sometimes I do. Just not every, well, not even a majority of books.
pj_wehry:
Part of me, the reason I'm in the middle of reading the Fuller Memorandum right now, and the opening part of that, and you know, you've dwelt quite a bit on the comedy that you went for in the laundry files, but the opening of the Fuller Memorandum is actually quite sad.
charlie:
Oh yeah, it's
pj_wehry:
Uh,
charlie:
meant to be.
pj_wehry:
yeah, good.
charlie:
It's meant to start with Bob screwing up big time to the point where somebody dies as a result. We get the comedy prat for later when we realise the person who died by accident shouldn't have been there in the first place. It was at a minimum contributory negligence on their part and they were respite.
pj_wehry:
Oh. That, yeah. Right, but you dwell at length with his guilt,
charlie:
Oh yeah.
pj_wehry:
right? Which, I mean, you turn into comedy later, which is really what comedy is, right? That
charlie:
Mm.
pj_wehry:
sense of distance, you know.
charlie:
It's something that we don't see a lot of in spy thrillers or techno thrillers or that genre of it, which is the experiences that the protagonist go through are absolutely traumatizing.
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
Same goes with much urban fantasy, for example, there's so much blood and go offline about most of us would just be basically catatonic and on our way to a met to a psychiatric Institute for long term observation and therapy after 10 pages.
pj_wehry:
Right? Yeah, it's like when you actually do the body count, you start to realize like, I don't know that these are actually like good people. Like, should I actually be rooting for this person? Right?
charlie:
Oh, yeah. There is a theme emerging in the laundry files. Okay, to clarify, the novel after the third new management book, Season of Skulls, is a conventional boy. It's a short novel about Derek, the DM, who shows up in book seven of the laundry, and about the Satanic Dungeons and Dragons Panic of the 1980s, and how the laundry dealt with it. Badly, I should add. But after that, there is one more laundry novel to write, and that is the one I has a working title of Bob Thows Out because I began writing Bob in 1998 and I can't really do that anymore. It needs to be the last book about him. It brings a story arc to a close without ending the universe or ending all the characters of that matter. I mean the new management books are set after the end of the laundry, after this hypothetical last novel. And I do actually have a thematic point in mind here is there's been a snowballing, gathering crisis of magical pollution for out-of-laundry novels, which you could use as a metaphor for anthropogenic climate change, global warming is global magical pollution, magic is becoming easier and more dangerous. And by the end of the series, we cannot say for sure that any of the human protagonists who started the series are still alive, but there are things
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
that remember being there.
pj_wehry:
I think, you know... Why is that distinction important for you? Do you feel like there's a theme there of this idea of us not being ourselves, but remembering ourselves?
charlie:
We have to change to survive. Also, what survives may not even be something that the person going into it would be sympathetic towards. There's a different literature with this sort of metaphor for transformation, but it's often obscured in the shape of the vampire fiction, where you have the protagonist of the vampire looking back on what it was like to be human before they changed. You very, very rarely get a human protagonist looking forwards to becoming a vampire, even though that is a trope that crops up a lot in, fantasy. You have the wannabes who serve the vampires in hope of being turned, but you only almost only ever see them from the outside.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, and you know, we've talked a little bit about trauma here and I kind of a call back to the very beginning when you're talking about you're writing through the Cold War and you're talking about this honestly, a generation traumatized by an obstruce intelligence for intelligence is from across the world for obstruce ideological reasons wanting to melt your face. And wanted to bring some comedy into that with the laundry files. Do you see anything in common with Doctor Strange Love in that? With this
charlie:
Oh,
pj_wehry:
idea
charlie:
absolutely.
pj_wehry:
of...
charlie:
It's
pj_wehry:
Awesome.
charlie:
my favorite movie. I should add. Comedy is a contrast medium.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
You can apply comedy on top of any other genre. You can put comedy on top of SF, you can put comedy on top of space opera or crime, or Lovecraftiana, or romance, or whatever. And it has an effect on the underlying thing, but it doesn't transform it completely. And with horror, good because it gives you a mechanism for contrast. I watched very very little unaware of Hollywood action movies but I didn't see the opening sequence of what was it the Suicide Squad for 2020 movie and that is just grotesquely gory and brutal and absolutely hilarious at the same time because they're using comedy to highlight the brutality of what's going on. There's a point at which the suicide squad are being chucked out of the back of a V-22 Osprey to swim ashore. And there's one of them who appears to be a Jan Ferret. And they're all in the water swimming when the Ferret is in the water and struggling. And one of the controllers back in the office turns to the other and says, oh, I guess he couldn't swim.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye. Thank you.
charlie:
Classic deadpan comedy pratfall that actually revolves around a really horrible grizzly death, but hey. Also, it's a supervillain movie so nobody cares.
pj_wehry:
Right. Right.
charlie:
But that sort of humor plays up a lot in the laundry files. It's incongruity and shock and recognition that works. The laundry files actually gets a bit less humorous as it goes along, because we're dealing with bigger and nastier issues and deepest and bigger stakes. Although I didn't manage to sneak at least one joke about stakeholder management, people mentioning stakeholder management being expected to report to human resources at a committee meeting for vampires.
pj_wehry:
Yes, and that's the incongruity of it. We've talked a little bit at the macro level, at a micro level when you're writing. What is it like before you sit down to write? And what is it like as you're writing and when you finish writing? How do you feel?
charlie:
Um... Before I begin writing a book, I'm usually juggling ideas for it. In fact, I'm usually juggling ideas for the next book but one. The thing I'm actually meant to be writing is incredibly dull and boring because I've been thinking about it for a couple of years and I'm just sort of trudging through it. Meanwhile, I'm lining up all the ideas necessary for the next book so that at least I know where I'm going when I sit down to write it. And suddenly something new and shiny crops up and gets my attention and has to go in a clipping spot because that's going to go in the third book.
pj_wehry:
Yeah.
charlie:
which is why they're all going to be dull and boring when I actually get round to them. The actual writing process tends to be a bit freeform, but I tend to work by going over whatever I wrote yesterday and polishing it, which also reminds me of what I wrote yesterday, about one or two thousand words if I'm making a good pace. Then write some more, then put it down, and the next day go back and rewrite that chunk. So everything has been polished at least once by the time I get to the end of the first This has largely gone out of a window in the past year because I had Covid twice in 2022.
pj_wehry:
Oh.
charlie:
And the brain fog is a real problem, but I'm gradually getting back together again. Hopefully I'll be back in right mode as my wife calls it before too long.
pj_wehry:
I'm sorry to hear that, I didn't realize that.
charlie:
It's a really, really, really hideous bug that is doing this. I mean, the thing about COVID is it's not a nose-frope flutite bug. It's a disease of the epithelial cells that line all your blood vessels. It affects every organ system in the body. It affects all of us a bit differently. And if I was trying to write a horror story about a global pandemic, this is pretty much how I'd write it.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha. Yeah, I didn't even know that brain fog was a symptom until I got covid and I recovered from the feeling tired, but I would just and I actually had a podcast scheduled. I'm like, oh, I'm feeling better and I just kept forgetting words right in the middle of my sentences. If you go back to that episode, I'm just completely like, I'm like, I'm sorry. I have no idea what I was just about to say.
charlie:
Uh, yep, I get the recognition that the worst thing about the brain fog is you don't realize you've got it until afterwards in the rearview
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
mirror. Um, for about three, four weeks after I had COVID, I could not count. Um, I'm on a number of medications. I was counting them into a pill case and I had to go back and count the pills three times before I was certain I had the right number each time. It got better with practice.
pj_wehry:
Yeah, then that's a very important thing to get right.
charlie:
Yep. And you don't realise you've got it until you look back at what you wrote yesterday and think, that's total rubbish. What was I on?
pj_wehry:
Right. Yeah, yeah.
charlie:
And there's no way around it, you've just got to basically wait. I learned the hard way many years ago, but if I try and force the writing past a certain point, for every hour of extra work I do, I generate two hours of fixing mistakes the next day. I've occasionally had fits of hypographia, which is a manic compulsion to write, which is actually quite terrifying. And over some writers who live with it 24 by 7, both Brandon Sanderson and Sean McGuire have copped to it in public. I've only had it a couple of times, but one of the laundry novels, the Annihilation Score, the first draft came out in 18 Days Flat for a 110,000 word novel.
pj_wehry:
Oh.
charlie:
And to get it finished, all I had to do was chop off the last chapter and rewrite that.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
It just basically came out in one giant squirt. And it was actually quite unpleasant, the experience, because I had a point where I realized, no, you're writing too much. So after about six or seven thousand words each day, I would go out to the nearest pub and drink three pints of beer to hit my head, hit my brain with a hammer and make sure that I could sleep. This is no way to earn a living.
pj_wehry:
Yes, yeah. Is there, do you have any idea what occasioned that? Or just...
charlie:
Oh, I know what occasioned that. It was a weird set of circumstances. First, I got invited to be guest of honour at a convention in Western Australia, and you don't fly from Scotland to Western Australia, which is near the antipodes for a weekend and then fly home again. So my wife and I went out there, did some tourism stuff in Perth, then flew home and spent three weeks changing planes in Kuala Lumpur. And when you're doing that sort of thing, I don't write during that kind of trip. I just feel guilty at myself for wasting time of money on the hotel bill. And that was a major vacation that year. So I get home and oops, it's the time of year for the annual tax return. So spend a week or so working on that. Then there was a literary festival in Estonia of all places. And I'm the last, and again, you know, I'm not working while, I'm not writing while I'm doing that. So at this point we're up to six weeks with no writing and I'm beginning to get a bit and frustrated and itchy. And then I came down with Bell's palsy. I woke up one morning and my face was half paralyzed and I was actually quite scared I was having a stroke but then realized I was typing with both hands doing Google searches for stroke symptoms so not a stroke. It's an inflamed cranial nerve, it paralyzes the muscles on one side of your head so I had one eye that wouldn't shut properly and kept watering. And it took me about a month to recover from that with the aid of steroid injections. And so that's another month in which I couldn't even read.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
And what happened after 10 weeks of absolutely not being able to write was I just woke up one morning with my brain spinning redlining sat down and got up to go to bed at I think five in the morning with 12,000 words written on a new book
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
and it didn't let go until it was over. That's the only time that's happened to me the past decade though because it happens less and less often the older you get.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
these days writing is actually quite a bit of an effort. I've discussed this with other writers by the way. When you get a chance to go full time writing, at first it's the best thing ever. You're a kitten and you've just been tossed in a bed of catnip. You just roll around crazily and grab anything you can take. But after about the sixth book of the 10th book After about the sixth or tenth novel, you suddenly realise, unless you're willing to actually do a formula and repeat every last book just with different names, you have to try a bit harder to come up with the ideas.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
charlie:
Being original gets harder and harder and harder. I don't want to be a formula writer always writing the same thing time and again, because if I want to just do the same thing time after time, why don't I get a job on a production line somewhere? But being creative every time has its own demand because you're trying not to do the same thing twice. And so it gets harder to find something new to write. And as you get older, your short-term memory deteriorates. You've got all the symptoms of middle-aged brain. And you get less and less stamina.
pj_wehry:
Hmm. So it takes a pretty significant physical toll when you write.
charlie:
Yeah, it does. It does. Actually, exercising properly while you're writing is essential. So is getting out and socializing with people. And of course, what with COVID being around, exercise tends to go a bit on the back burner because are you going to go down to a gym and socialize with other sweaty people breathing hard? Yeah, it's all a bit problematic.
pj_wehry:
Well, I want to be respectful of your time and there was a kind of for this last segment, if you don't mind. I wanted to ask you why, you know, some of this seems to be just you have this inner compulsion motivation to write. But why do you feel that fiction is important, especially science fiction and fantasy like you write.
charlie:
Fiction in general is important because it gives us a tool for introspection about the human condition in circumstances that have never actually appeared in reality. We can get some of that insight by reading, I guess, factual or historical accounts of stuff. The true crime genre is definitely applicable in some respects. Why we read crime fiction rather than the true crime stuff? only shines a spotlight on existing serial killers for example. It doesn't. tell us what it might look like if there was one working in our neighborhood or one of the new angle. Fiction let's us do what if modeling. There are variant forms. For example, there's what I think Thomas Keneally called faction where you're right, fictionalized historical facts, such as Schindler's Ark, the book Schindler's List was based on all the cruel shore. Here's a novel about the British penal colonies in Australia. But again, those only treat actually existing historical events. And while faction lets you try and get inside the heads of people experiencing these circumstances in a way that an actual sober-sided classical history text can't, because it is merely dealing with documentary evidence, it can't let you deal with stuff that hasn't happened yet. For example, the Handmaid's Tale is... It riffs off various systems of oppression that have been applied to women at various historical times. Everything in it has happened somewhere and at some time. But it was set up specifically to provide a thought experiment on what it would be like if it happened in the United States today.
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
charlie:
Which rubs the readers, the American readers, knows in what it would be like. because suddenly it's not happening to women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, it's happening to you. Much the same with 1984. 1984 was a tour de force in analyzing the pathologies of totalitarianism that Eric Blair, George Orwell had seen and experienced. Orwell was a political radical. He went and fought for the international brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He took a fascist bullet in the throat point. And he also saw what the Soviet side of it was like, because they were involved as well. And he got to see what Stalin's people were doing in Spain. And didn't like that either. But the end of it, he, well, he clearly saw this in clearly inspired his writing of Animal Farm, a metaphor, where at the end of the book, there's no difference between the pigs and the farmers.
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
And in 1984, he was trying to distill the of authoritarian totalitarianism. His Ingsoc party and its political ideology is entirely about power, entirely about dominance. It doesn't care whether it's socialist or fascist, it's just is, it's purely about power. And that's what makes 1984 so powerful. He was distilling the essence of existing experiences into something that was more recognizable. to reality and let's us recognize our own reflection and see them with different stuff highlighted or contrasted so it's more obvious what we're looking at. And as for science fiction, Bear in mind that all these genres are just marketing categories. They are labels we put on books, so the store clerks know the shelf like with like, and it's
pj_wehry:
Right.
charlie:
easy for the readers to find stuff they enjoy. So let's not get too deeply attached to it. A lot of material... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. I'm going to back up a little bit. A lot of books are published as mainstream but have a very sound fictional sensibility to them and a lot of sound fiction really just isn't. I don't have an awful lot of time for Star Wars because it seems to me to be just basically space wizards
pj_wehry:
Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.
charlie:
with magic. I mean why not just write an honest high fantasy set at Star?
pj_wehry:
and just set it in space. Right, like
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
it's...
charlie:
It has been done with some fairly fine space operas that are explicitly fantasy. I think it was Melissa Scott wrote a trilogy starting with Five Twelves of Heaven in which the basic premise is, faster than light interstellar travel is carried out by means of hermetic alchemy. And that is just as plausible as a warp drive.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha And that was Melissa Scott?
charlie:
Yeah.
pj_wehry:
Yes. Right, and I think that goes even that recognition of what science fiction and these different labels are. That goes back to your earlier comment about people who may have grown attached to these labels. Once you start looking at why they are what they are, that's unfortunately you're getting into the disgusting business of making sausages, right?
charlie:
Actually, I will add one thing, an angle I forgot to mention, when I mentioned the sound fictional sensibility, one of the core elements of that is alienation. Alienation from
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
the familiar. We're trying to look at, we're trying to step
pj_wehry:
Thank
charlie:
outside
pj_wehry:
you.
charlie:
our own skin, step outside our own preconceptions and experiences and look at things as if they were anew and afresh.
pj_wehry:
Hmm.
charlie:
And that's as much as anything what I'm about or trying to do.
pj_wehry:
Uh, do you find, uh, is that part of what you're doing, um, with your, uh, in the laundry files, like all the HR stuff and the way that it sets up, uh, against what would be very familiar with people and then have this absolutely terrifying, uh, side to things, uh, from the Lovecraftian side.
charlie:
Yep, there is very much a chunk of that going on. Just by rooting it in the completely mundane, you know, office politics, who's been using photocopier or stealing office supplies, and what does HR have to say to you about your deplorable personal interaction with other employees? And then suddenly, tentacle monster from beyond space-time rips your
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
boss's head off and eats it. It's
pj_wehry:
but
charlie:
the
pj_wehry:
you
charlie:
shock
pj_wehry:
have to
charlie:
of
pj_wehry:
fill
charlie:
alienation.
pj_wehry:
out the right form.
charlie:
Yeah, I don't know if you've got into the later laundry files novels, But I wrote book A. Okay, book seven. Let me back up a little bit. .. When I was writing book 7 I was iterating through urban fantasy genres and decided to tackle elves. I also decided to get rid of a bee in my bonnet, which is a particular trope in fantasy genre fiction, particularly urban fantasy, known as the masquerade, originally aimed after the role-playing game Vampire the Masquerade. The idea is, if you have vampires, werewolves, zombies, and monsters and sorcerers, then you generally have some giant, powerful committee of the supernatural bosses, whose job is to keep the ordinary mundane humans from realising what's going on under the evil. surface to maintain the masquerade of normality because to fail to do that makes it very very difficult to tell the story and it seemed trivially obvious to me that especially the way the laundry files was progressing the masquerade would collapse sooner or later. Book 7, The Nightmare Stacks, involves an elven invasion of West Yorkshire, a fairly large chunk of Midlands England which has several large cities in it. And when I say an elven invasion, to paraphrase Arpyssey Clarke's law, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. The rampaging elven armies seems to bear some uncanny resemblance to today's Russian invasion of Ukraine and a similar death toll. So with that in mind, as something that happens in book seven, Book Eight opens with our protagonist news broadcast about what went wrong because at that point you can't keep it secret anymore. A major city has been landscaped for tens of thousands dead.
pj_wehry:
Mm.
charlie:
So where do we go from there? Now I was writing this in 2015 and was going to go for a bit of pointed political satire at the British government's way of privatising stuff. But by setting up a then outsourcing that particular service to the highest bidder and selling it off and then having some backhand to payoffs. Your classic example of the United States currently is Louis de Joie and the United States Postal Service and the way he's almost seems to have been parachuted in to set it up to fail. Anyway I was writing this and I decided yep Okay, the magical nature of stuff is going to come out on TV, the laundry is going to be set up for privatisation, and of course the highest bidders will be the cultists. And then I'd finished the first draft that just felt a little bit flat when we had an upset, a political upset in the UK, a referendum vote on Brexit that went the wrong way. And I was just a bit fastened to the news
pj_wehry:
Thank you.
charlie:
for the next week as we had three constitutional crises in a week. And I suddenly realised, no, I hadn't got anywhere near over the top enough to depict what was going on. Forget
pj_wehry:
Thank you. Bye.
charlie:
a Lovecraftian cult bidding for the services provided by the Laundry. No, what we're going to do is have an elder god take over the government. And this is how we seek into the later books and the laundry files where Lovecraftian horrors have taken over the country. and it turns out that they're not quite scary enough to keep up with current reality. It's getting really hard to stay ahead.
pj_wehry:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Oh, there's yeah, not that there's much to add to that other than just to enjoy the satire there. I want to be I want to be again respectful of your time. So one, let me just say it's been absolute pleasure having you on today. And if I ask you one more question, audience listening today besides obviously buying your phenomenal books. What is something that you would leave to them to think about when they're reading fiction?
charlie:
Um Sometimes a story is just an entertaining yarn, people tell for amusement value, but it's always worth looking to see what it might have meant to the author when they were writing it. And bear in mind, what we're reading was written some time in the past. Inevitably we're using a time machine to look back in time. See what message they were trying to convey. Quite often the message is no longer relevant anymore. But sometimes they become more important as time goes by. If it's all about alienation and getting better perspectives on the human condition around us The human condition does change over time what I was saying about J.M. Barry writing in an era where 20% of infants died We are hopefully past back and that's not part of our experience anymore But it can tell us an awful lot about the human experience elsewhere and elsewhere And we should we certainly shouldn't write it off and I'm rambling a little bit here but again I'd like to repeat what Ken McLeod said the secret weapon of sound fiction writers is history
pj_wehry:
Mm. You know, I don't think that's rambling at all. I can't think of a better way to summarize what it's been for me, an incredibly enjoyable discussion. Thank you, Mr. Strauss.
charlie:
Thank you very much.