Let’s be clear: A Messy, Incomprehensible, And Unfathomable Endeavor, would be a very good book title. Also extra points if it’s the title to a book about 2020. BUT I DIGRESS. And now, a guest post from Ferrett Steinmetz that is about code, and stories, and more than that, too. Enjoy!

***

We all know the internet is a burbling cesspool of questionable decisions – but I’m not talking about the anti-vaxxer Qanons fucking with your Facebook feed.

I’m talking about the code that runs your web pages.

The funny thing is, in science fiction, technology usually just works – unlike real life. You never see Captain Picard bellowed “SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT?!?” at a pixelated image of a Klingon as he tries to establish a streaming videoconference, but I bet your Zoom calls have had a couple of whammies. Artoo never freezes in the middle of bickering with Threepio before Luke sighs and reboots him.

Yet our technologies come with a pre-baked level of uncertainty, don’t they? Twitter is up most days, but every few months it’ll mysteriously shit the bed for a few hours… and maybe the app you use to view Twitter will crash, or slow down to the point of uselessness, or just not send that clever bon mot you tossed off on the toilet.

Why is that?

It’s because code, by and large, is a messy, incomprehensible, and unfathomable endeavor.

Trust me, I’m a programmer. And the outside world seems to view us programmers as Scotty the Engineer, who’s so familiar with every Jefferies tube in the Enterprise that he can tell them apart by smell. When your PlayStation 4 bricks, surely there’s some engineer at Sony who understood exactly why the blue light stopped glowing.

But…

Have you seen how much technology there is out there?

You could study your cell phone for thirty years and still not understand it fully. There’s the deep arcana of the operating system, and the delightful physics involved in your touchscreen, and the network protocols that allow it to talk to other web pages, and the SDKs that create the apps, and the API calls those apps use to get data….

And that presumes everything stays still! I told you it’d take thirty years to understand every aspect of your smartphone, but I’ll note that Apple’s made a major upgrade to the iPhone operating system every year. As a programmer, you’re inundated with upgrades, updates, new standards, better software development tools, zero-day security risks.

There’s no way any human could keep up with all of it.

We all want to believe in Scotty, the all-knowing programmer. But lots of programmers are more like stoned wizards, frantically scanning the grimoires of Stack Overflow to find three lines of commands to type in blindly, because they’re C# programmers and this is a DevOps task. When we tell you to reboot your computer, we’re not blowing you off – sometimes rebooting the system does fix things, and we don’t know why. Almost every serious technician I know has encountered a bug that cropped up, then mysteriously went away, for no reason that anyone could explain.

It’s not that programmers are dumb. (Though, let’s be honest, some are.) It’s that getting any non-trivial program to work nowadays involves resting it on multiple layers of unfamiliar technology written by fallible human beings. (Also see: some dumb programmers.) You hope it all works smoothly, but you know there will be glitches. Not every day, maybe not even often, but… enough.

That is the reality of modern technology.

And Automatic Reload is about what happens when that technology is used to kill people.

Now, on some levels, Automatic Reload is pretty well-worn territory – it features a cyborg hero bristling with armed prosthetics, packing multiple redundant targeting systems that can pick off enemies before their slow, slow nervous systems have time to react.

The problem is, his computerized weaponry operates far faster than he could hope to intervene. If he gets into a firefight with another body-hacker, his enemy will be dead – or he will – before he knows it. As it is, the first sign he’s in danger is usually his mechanized limbs flinging him to one side as he yelps in confusion.

So all he can do is program in parameters – frantically trying to explain to his computer, well in advance of combat, what looks like an enemy. And even in Automatic Reload’s near-future world, image-processing is still not necessarily a perfect technique. So the difficulty of defining “Who gets a bullet to the dome” in precise terms, on top of the usual software bugs, gets extremely tricky. 

And if his programming’s not up to snuff, well… He just shot a kid in the face.

Our protagonist – Mat, his name is Mat – has accidentally gotten people killed in the past, and is determined never to do it again, a morality that puts him way ahead of his bodyhacker mercenary friends. They’re generally “We’re in a war zone, anything that gets in our way should be toast.”

Mat is trying to be a hero.

Mat is trying to rescue innocent people on his missions.

My book Automatic Reload is about a lot of things, really. It’s clearly about the ethics of technology. It’s about the unique flavor of PTSD cropping up in drone pilots now, from people who are responsible for the technology that killed people even if they weren’t really there for it.

And, weirdly, it’s a romance. Because on one of his missions, Mat is tasked to deliver a package, and it turns out the package is a genetically engineered killing machine – or, rather, someone who’s about to be brainwashed to become a genetically engineered killing machine. A good Catholic girl named Silvia who suffers from panic attacks, which is not at all a good thing to have when her newly-reformed body can instinctively snap necks.

They both have mental disorders, serious ones, and a large part of Automatic Reload is about how two very differently fucked-up people can come to love and support each other.

(Even if no love can necessarily fix a serious mental illness. But having someone who understands your mushy brain-parts can be a great help.)

Yet for the purposes of this essay, Automatic Reload is about the stress of being a programmer, magnified. Because we’re not Scotty. We’re barely keeping up, constantly inhaling documentation, trying to keep our online shops safe and your data secure. What we need to know expands exponentially every year- and while it’s often a fun challenge, there are days when the site is down and everyone’s all up in your Slack channel asking “WTF MATE FIX IT NOW FIX IT FIX IT” and you’re desperately searching Stack Overflow for some arcane error message to discover the last mention of this esoteric code was DenverCoder9, posting in 2014 in a thread that was never resolved.

Automatic Reload is about what it’s like to be a programmer in the future, which is to say it’s about what it’s like to be a programmer now, which is to say a lot of guesswork and a lot of Googling, but with a lot more guns.

And, hopefully, just enough of a splash of romance to make it all worthwhile.

Ferrett Steinmetz: Website

Automatic Reload: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

And now, a guest post by a friend of the blog, and someone who has crossed the boundaries of spec-fic to write for tie-in projects and his own original work — David Mack.

***

When I embarked upon the writing of my Dark Arts series for Tor Books, it was a labor of love.

By 2014, I had already spent several years contemplating the series’ first novel, The Midnight Front, and shaping it in my imagination. When I was finally able to commit its first story to the page, it felt like a dream made manifest. In 2015, after my agent found Dark Arts a home with a three-book deal at Tor Books, I envisioned a bright future for my literary creation.

Unfortunately, I soon learned that not all dreams come true.

Despite receiving generally good reviews from readers, landing on some prominent “Best of…” lists, and its second volume being nominated for a Dragon Award, the Dark Arts series never found its way onto any of the bestseller lists or received nominations for any of the genre’s major awards. Consequently, I knew before I started writing its third book, The Shadow Commission — out now from Tor Books — that it would be my series’ last.

I had conceived of Dark Arts as being open-ended, with each book moving ahead into a different decade, enabling my characters to get into historical hijinks across the entire latter half of the twentieth century. Less than a year after the release of its first book, however, I was tasked with bringing my saga to an end.

It felt odd. Knowing that there would be no further adventures for these characters after book three made me think differently about its story. I became less interested in building up my characters’ fictional world because I knew I would soon be burning it all down. I felt like I had failed my characters, as if their lives and narratives were coming to bloody ends because I didn’t know how to sell their tales in numbers strong enough to stay alive in the modern marketplace.

Only now, in hindsight, do I see that my disappointments affected the course of this book’s story.

For those who plan to read The Shadow Commission — SPOILERS FOLLOW:

One of the recurring themes of the novel is that its main character, Cade Martin, believes he has failed his apprentices. Not because he didn’t do a good job of teaching them magick, but because he doesn’t adequately prepare them for the true scale of the horror that awaits them, and because when that evil arrives he is unable to save many of their lives.

The key motif of The Shadow Commission is betrayal. It’s about how we betray ourselves, how we betray the trust of those who depend upon us when we succumb to fear, and how the things we say and do might drive others to betray us. It’s also about how we atone for those sins.

By the end of The Shadow Commission, several of the series’ major and recurring characters are slain. I don’t think I would have gone on quite so ruthless a killing spree in the book’s final chapters if I’d had any reason to think the series might continue. But when I saw the final curtain falling, the last glimmer of limelight fading away, I thought it reasonable to want to meet my series’ end with a certain Grand Guignol-style flair.

It’s been nearly eighteen months since I finished writing The Shadow Commission. After I turned in its manuscript, I lost over a year of my life and career to a depression that left me unable to put words on pages. I’m still digging my way out of that pit of despair, struggling to give form to new ideas, new labors of love, as well as working on fresh literary ideas for Star Trek.

In that context, trying to gin up excitement to promote the end of my Dark Arts series feels like a bittersweet obligation, if I’m to be honest. I did my best to craft an exciting book, to take my characters to new places, to change their lives and their respective relationships to their milieu, and to make it feel like a satisfying ending to their saga, while leaving open the door for future tales, just in case a miracle should occur and lead to the series’ revival.

But if penning this trilogy about magic born of Faustian bargains has taught me anything, it’s that there are no miracles — and that everything ends.

So it is that I hurl these words like a fistful of cold earth atop the grave of my Dark Arts series and move on to my next dream, whispering to myself all the while: memento mori.

***

David Mack is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty-six novels of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure. Mack’s writing credits span several media, including television (for episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), short fiction, and comic books. He currently works as a consultant for two animated Star Trek television series, Lower Decks and Prodigy. His new novel The Shadow Commission is available now from Tor Books.

The Shadow Commission: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powell’s

Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

New York Times Bestselling author Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, With or Without You is a Public Library Association Buzz Book and A Publisher’s Weekly Fall Book of Note, and already has a starred Kirkus and Booklist raves that it “Packs an emotional wallop.” About three peoples’ lives that all disrupted when one comes out of a coma with both a personality change and a prodigious new talent, it’s a suspenseful literary look at love, fame and its discontents, who we are, and who we would like to be. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, New York magazine, Modern Love in the New York Times, The Millions, Poets & Writers and more.

***

Writing sometimes makes, rather than heals trauma, before it makes things okay again.

My novels tend to gestate for years before I know enough to write them.  Twenty-four years ago I was in a medical coma myself for 3 weeks, and in the hospital not expected to survive for 3 months, and then home and sick for a year. But they had given me memory blockers so I wouldn’t remember the trauma, so when I did get well, I couldn’t process what I had been through. I had all sorts of PTSD things going on. Certain colors or smells would make me break out into a panic attack, and I was afraid to go to sleep. When I asked my family and friends who had been around, they were so traumatized, they couldn’t speak about any of it without getting really, really upset.

A friend of mine, a shrink, told me to write it out, that the brain doesn’t know the difference, that people in hypnosis will shiver if they are told it is freezing.  So I did, writing this novel Coming Back to Me, about a woman just like me who goes in coma after a child. And it didn’t heal me.

So years passed, and I was still afraid to go to sleep and I began to think that maybe my mistake had been writing about someone like me, that maybe I needed to write about Stella, who unlike me, is aware and remembers EVERYTHING. And unlike me, she wakes with a personality change and brilliant new creative ability. Writing Stella, experiencing what I hadn’t been able to before, healedme in so many ways. When I finished my first coma novel, I was sad. But I wrote With or Without You, I felt this incredible sense of wonder and hope. And yeah, happiness, too, because I was freed of that past and I had come to realize that the mind is more incredible than we can imagine.

Hysteria sometimes is a good omen.

Here I am, with a month to go before my novel is due, and I am sitting in my writing office, pages spread around me, hysterically crying. Nothing seems to be working. The characters I worked so hard on feel flat to me and I want to slap them. The writing seems truncated to me and I don’t know how to fix it. I sob until my husband comes in and as soon as he sees the scene and the pages, the alarm on his face relaxes. He puts one arm around me. “You always do this,” he says gently. He tells me it is the calm before the storm that puts a finish on the work, and guess what, he’s right. He leaves me to it, and I begin to remap out scenes, to reorganize, to ask myself constant questions about what people are doing and why. Oh yeah, it takes me the whole month but at the end, I’m exhausted, and while I remain unsure about whether or not I’ve written a good book (I leave that for my agent and editor to tell me), I at least know that I’ve done absolutely everything I can to get the story to work and for right now, anyway, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.

If I call backstory something else, then I can get it to work.

I’ve always had a huge backstory problem. Give me a character and I tend to want to go back generations. Every editor I’ve had has tried to pull me back from that, but I’ve been stubborn. But this book, my old Algonquin editor had left and I had a new one, Chuck Adams, and the first thing he said was, “We have to work on your backstory issue.” I panicked. A lot.

We did a lot of talking, a lot of rewrites, and finally, frustrated, I cut up all the backstory and spread it on the floor to see what needed to be there and why. And to my astonishment, I realized it wasn’t the backstory that was the problem, it was where I was putting it.

You want to think of your novel as one narrative driving line, but that line can trigger things in the past, and when those things are triggered, they change the character in that present driving line and then it works!

For example, one of my characters, Libby, a doctor and Stella’s best friend, is haunted by her past. She believes she caused her little brother’s death. To get the full impact of that, I was sure we had to live through that day along with young Libby, we had to feel everything she was feeling. But where was I going to put it? I couldn’t just have Libby be talking to Stella and saying, “Oh, by the way, let me tell you the story of what happened to my baby brother,” and then go off for half an hour about it.So then I began to think of triggers. Libby and Stella have a falling out about something major, and unable to cope, Libby goes to see a shrink, and it’s the shrink who tells her she has to go back to her old neighborhood and find out what really happened. We’re still in the present but while Libby is alone and traveling , she tells us about that day, as if it is front story, and happening, so we feel the trauma. Then, when she gets to the place, in the present narrative line, she talks to a few people, and when she discovers new information about that day, she is totally changed.

I don’t have to love my characters but I have to understand them.

In the beginning was Simon, in his forties, a once famous rock and roller with women hurling themselves at him, but now age has come calling. He puts mascara on his gray temples, he works out so he can fit into the same lucky jeans he wore when he was twenty, and he’s so desperate for his new big break that Stella, his longtime partner and very practical nurse, is ready to leave him.

When I showed initial pages to other people, the comments were always the same: Simon’s a jerk. Why doesn’t Stella boot him out? What a big baby. Simon was really the thorniest character I had to write.

Usually I adore my characters from the get-go, but Simon was a tougher nut to crack, mostly because his rock star persona isn’t one I’ve ever liked. So I began to feel it was both my job to come to love him and to make readers love him, too. I dug deeper. What was it that had happened to him in his past to make him this way? What was his “save the cat” moment (you know, when the killer stops his killing to rush into a house and save a kitten?) I began to post photos of hin around my office to feel like I was living with him. I asked him questions: What do you really need?” and then let him just tell me. And I began to realize that he had grown up under parents who didn’t think music—or he—were worthwhile. And then it struck me. Simon just wants to be seen and loved, and all of the music biz was just a barrier to that instead of the gateway he thought it was. And also, he loved Stella. He began to grow up. And by the end of the book, Simon was someone in my life and in my heart.

In writing about fame, I discovered it didn’t mean what I thought it did.

I thought I had made peace with the whole idea of fame and not fame. My first novel made me the flavor of the month and I thought it would always be that way, but it wasn’t. My publisher went out of business! I had a 3-book deal where the major publisher did no promotion and I had no sales. I got another 3-book deal, and it happened again, and making things more difficult for me was the fact that all my writing friends were building real careers, winning prizes, getting known.  When my 9th novel was rejected on contract, I was sure my career was over. Who was going to buy a book from someone with no sales? I cried, and then a friend suggested an editor for me, and to my surprise, she bought that unspecial book. Even more unexpected, it got into 6 printings before it was published and became a New York Times Bestseller its second week. My next novel with Algonquin was also a NYT bestseller, but it didn’t feel the way I thought it would. I still was desperate for more, more, more.

But the unhappier Simon was with his life, the more I realized I had to stop doing what he was doing—checking every place for reviews or news of me, comparing myself nonstop to every other writer on the planet, wondering every second what people thought of me. In writing about Simon, I realized, that his issue was fame was really an identity issues, a wound from childhood that he had to heal if he wanted to have a happier, saner life. And as I wrote that for him, I realized that was my issue, too and I needed to dig deeper into it.

Simon’s not famous. I don’t consider myself famous. But because of With or Without You, we’re both happy, and that makes all the difference to both of us.

Caroline Leavitt: Website

With or Without You: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

Just a li’l head’s up: my computer has fritzed the fuck out. General consensus is, a failure of the logic board (a metaphor for this whole country, if you ask me) — but for our purposes let’s just imagine a robot whose square head is barfing sparks from every orifice, and then it falls into a bed, and then it shits that bed. (Relax, robot shit is just a sudden shotgun clatter of rusty gears. Embarrassing for them, but a mild curiosity for us meatbags.)

So, forgive me if you need something right now — I’m going to be a little slow to see and deal with. (I’m working on my iPad, which actually does surprisingly okay as a computer replacement, especially with Word on it. But it’s not all the way there.)

BUT BUT BUT

Hey, here’s a cool thing —

The cover to YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON, has popped up online at Rizzoli Books, if you care to see it. Having a hard time dropping in the graphic, but you can see the book cover and the description of it here. The words are by me, the art is by the amazing Natalie Metzger — really, my words are a very silly part of this book, but the art? THE ART. The art! I can’t wait you to see the various possums, or the sharks, or the wolf container? Seriously, don’t buy it for my shenanigans. You’re gonna want it for the art.

OKAY THAT’S IT FOR NOW.

More soon, when I’m less technologically hobbled!

Psst. PSST. If you were looking to get hold of a big-ass bison bludgeoner of a book but didn’t want the actual physical book with which to bludgeon bisons*, then I note that the book is available on Kindle today for a mere TWO BUCKS and NINETY-NINE PENNIES, except these are digital pennies, because real pennies are apparently in shortage. But at the very least, it’s an 800 page book, so you’re getting some narrative bang for your electronic buck. Epic sci-fi horror! Warning: may contain pandemic and also I may have accidentally predicted some parts of our future. (Kidding, the stuff I predicted was stuff we all knew was coming, because the call was coming from inside the house this whole damn time, which is why it’s particularly execrable that our “””president””” decided to undercut and undo every protection we had against coming catastrophe.)

Here’s the link.

Though of course if you still want it in print, there’s Indiebound and Bookshop.org.

Or, check it out through your local library.

There is a content warning, and I’ve concealed it behind a ROT13 filter so that those who desire the warning can simply unscramble it by c/p’ing the encrypted text into the window at rot13.com.

Pbagrag jneavat: fhvpvqny vqrngvba, fhvpvqr, gbegher, enpvfz naq ovtbgel, qvfphffvbaf bs zragny urnygu naq zragny vyyarff, tha ivbyrapr, naq n tencuvpny qrfpevcgvba bs Z/Z encr (sbhaq ba cc 434-435 bs gur uneqonpx, ng gur raq bs puncgre 50).

And now, a big bucket of praise for the book, because I am not above bragging.

*how many bisons could a bison bludgeoner bison if a bison bludgeoner could bludgeon bison?

***

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. From the mind of Chuck Wendig comes “a magnum opus . . . a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD AND THE LOCUS

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Polygon

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Praise for Wanderers

“The book’s nearly 800 pages fly effortlessly by and offer both first-class entertainment and a clear-eyed view of the forces dividing contemporary society. As I finished this one, I found myself thinking: Where has this guy been all my life?” — Washington Post

“Wendig takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blended them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels while doing so.” — Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“This career-defining epic deserves its inevitable comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Run Away

“A true tour de force.”—Erin Morgenstern, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus

“A masterpiece with prose as sharp and heartbreaking as Station Eleven.”—Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

“A magnum opus . . . It reminded me of Stephen King’s The Stand—but dare I say, this story is even better.”—James Rollins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Crucible   

“An inventive, fierce, uncompromising, stay-up-way-past-bedtime masterwork.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World 

“An American epic for these times.”—Charles Soule, author of The Oracle Year

“Wanderers is amazing—huge, current, both broad and intensely personal, blending the contemplative apocalypse of Station Eleven with the compulsive readability of the best thrillers.”—Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns series

“A riveting examination of America.”—Scott Sigler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Generations Trilogy

“If you ever wanted to know what America’s soul might look like, here’s its biography.”—Rin Chupeco, author of The Bone Witch

“With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig levels up—and when you consider the high level he was already writing at, that’s saying something.” —John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of The Consuming Fire

“A tsunami of a novel.”—Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of Into the Black Nowhere

“A defining moment in speculative fiction.”—Adam Christopher, author of Empire State and Made to Kill

“Trust me: You’re not ready for this book.”—Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma

“An astounding adventure.”—Fran Wilde, Hugo-, Nebula-, and World Fantasy finalist and award-winning author of the Bone Universe trilogy

“Utterly brilliant and frighteningly plausible.”—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

“Beautiful and harrowing—and timely as hell.”—Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author of The Grand Dark

“A harrowing portrait of an unraveling America . . . terrifyingly prophetic.”—Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and The Pandora Room

“A brilliant, Hollywood-blockbuster of a novel.”—Peter Clines, author of Dead Moon and Paradox Bound

“Approach Wanderers like it’s a primetime television series, along the lines of The Passage [or] Lost. . . . Make Wanderers a summer reading priority; you won’t regret it.”—Book Riot

“Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.” — Kirkus (starred review)

“A powerful story about humanity, technology, and the survival of the world. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand are warranted, as Wendig shatters the boundaries of speculative and literary fiction…” — Library Journal (starred review)

“It’s not easy to write the end of the world. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it.” — Bookpage (starred review)

“Wanderers is OUTSTANDING. Wanderers excites me. You want well-developed characters and complex relationships? Read Wanderers. You want grounded sci-fi that ranks up there with bookstagram faves like #Recursion and #StationEleven? Read Wanderers. You want twists and turns and edge-of-your-seat action? Read Wanderers.” — Jordy’s Book Club

“An imaginative and absorbing work of speculative fiction.” — Booklist