So, Deadline got to break some very cool news.

That news is a many-headed hydra of awesomeness, and consists of three beats: first, QC has partnered with Lionsgate Television for the project; second, Glen Mazzara (The Shield! The Walking Dead! Dark Tower TV show that should’ve been picked up but wasn’t!) is on as showrunner; and third, the book is getting a sequel in 2022!

Obviously, I’m geeked as hell about this — Glen is amazing, honestly, and gets the book and has dug down to its marrow for what the show could look like. Lionsgate is the perfect choice, too, and are committed to the show in a big way, along with QC. And the sequel…

Well, listen, I always said this is a story I’d continue if it felt right, and if sales bore that out. Meaning, okay, yes, I wrote the book to be a contained story, start-to-finish, but it was one that could conceivably have a robust “second chapter” if I found the right angle, the right reason, the right throughline. Sales, as it turned out, were good — the book was a national bestseller, and has outsold everything else I’ve written with the exception of the first couple Star Wars books. Then — literally on the plane ride out to begin my book tour for it last July! — the entire story for the sequel came to me wholesale, and that was when I knew there was something there, and more tale to tell.

(Sidenote, the sequel is tentatively titled Wayward.)

On the TV side of things, the most vital of caveats applies: it doesn’t mean it’s coming to your TV anytime soon. The work now is to shop it around to to find the right network/streaming partner for it to see if they’ll bring Glen and Lionsgate’s vision of the book to light. I’m hopeful, because hot damn, what a team. I knew we were in good hands with QC and this only sweetens the sauce. But it’s by no means a guarantee. Things happen! And the exact future of TV and film production remains unsettled. But hope is on the wind, like a white fungus that will colonize your face and brain!

Uh. Ahem.

Anyway. Them’s the news! News I’ve been sitting on, in part, for almost a year, now.

More news to come, and will share when I can.

Meanwhile, I guess I should write that sequel now, huh?

Don’t forget, you can nab Wanderers if you haven’t read it yet:

Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Amazon, and more.

Al MacBharrais is both blessed and cursed. He is blessed with an extraordinary white moustache, an appreciation for craft cocktails—and a most unique magical talent. He can cast spells with magically enchanted ink and he uses his gifts to protect our world from rogue minions of various pantheons, especially the Fae.

But he is also cursed. Anyone who hears his voice will begin to feel an inexplicable hatred for Al, so he can only communicate through the written word or speech apps. And his apprentices keep dying in peculiar freak accidents. As his personal life crumbles around him, he devotes his life to his work, all the while trying to crack the secret of his curse.

But when his latest apprentice, Gordie, turns up dead in his Glasgow flat, Al discovers evidence that Gordie was living a secret life of crime. Now Al is forced to play detective—while avoiding actual detectives who are wondering why death seems to always follow Al. Investigating his apprentice’s death will take him through Scotland’s magical underworld, and he’ll need the help of a mischievous hobgoblin if he’s to survive.

Glasgow is a remarkable city

Edinburgh and the Highlands get a lot of attention when folks think of visiting Scotland—and for good reason—but Glasgow has layers, like ogres and onions and parfaits. It’s the third-largest city in the UK behind London and Birmingham, but far more affordable. It has universities, plural; a 37-acre Necropolis full of spooky Victorian-era gravesites and mausoleums for all the goth vibes you need; multiple football teams to cheer (and fight) for; an eldritch organ in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum; master distillers of whisky and gin that are the envy of the world; and it used to be that all the New World’s tobacco was shipped to Glasgow first and from there to the rest of the European continent. That was a whole lot of money and cancer. It was quite the industrial hub in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the shipbuilding industry was huge for a long time, but when it collapsed a few decades ago, the city population basically halved from 1.2 million to 600k—part of what makes housing more reasonable there. Now there’s a lot of finance and tech stuff happening in Glasgow, and the city has this wonderful richness of varied architecture and community owing to its long history coexisting alongside modern buildings. Basically it’s a fantastic city in which to set an urban fantasy, because pretty much anything can happen there.

There are thousands of recipes for ink and lots of them are flammable

Accidental fires and property damage were so common in the old days that inkmakers had to do their thing outside city walls on a calm day in case shit went bad. The main culprit behind the ruckus was boiling linseed oil, which smells really terrible, produces toxic vapors, and can explode at any time. Without heating the oil sufficiently beforehand, the ink would dry too slowly, absorb oxygen, and polymerize like rubber. The industrial process now is much safer, but doing it the old-fashioned way is flirting with spontaneously combustible doom.

I learned a lot about the history of inkmaking from Ink by Ted Bishop, which I highly recommend as a good start, and it has an extensive bibliography for further reading. The widespread use of bugs (like cochineal) and squishy ocean creatures for pigments was especially surprising to me. (If you’ve ever eaten food that’s red or worn lipstick, you’ve probably been consuming or smearing uponst thy lips the colorful guts of bugs who like prickly pear cacti.) A tiny fraction of the research I did wound up being used in the book; it was a gigantic lovely rabbit hole that operates as deep background for everything Al does, and some of it that I didn’t use for the first book will likely find a place later in the series.

Public transport is pretty rad

I’ve lived in places without a decent public transport system most all my life, so whenever I’m in a city that has it, I’m easily impressed. Glasgow has a small subway that circles around the city core, but also has a rail and bus system that allows people to get around pretty well without a car—which is what we did as tourists. Most impressively, regular routes get you out of the city to charming wee villages that typically offer an old stone church, a pub, lots of sheep, and a claim that either William Wallace or Rob Roy MacGregor had been there once, which is probably true since it’s not a gigantic country and those dudes got around. The relative ease of getting around both rural and urban areas without owning a vehicle showed me that my protagonist didn’t need a car. Taxis and hitchhiking would pick up the slack whenever public transport and a stretch of the legs couldn’t handle the journey.

Haggis is freaking delicious

For reals. And I love neeps and tatties too. It gets portrayed as this stuff you only eat on a dare, and yeah, I admit I winced the first time I tried it because it had been built up in my head as A Gross Thing You Will Only Try Once, but damn, I liked it. A lot. Had it as often as I could while I was there, because it is not widely available outside of Scotland.

Now, as a counterpoint: I am not a fan of black pudding, because I tried that too and it did unkind things to my palate. Super happy for everyone who likes it, though! You can have mine. I’ll trade you for your haggis. Dang, I really need to find some where I’m at now. I miss it.

The accents are pure brilliant

Most Americans’ familiarity with the Scottish accent comes from Shrek and other entertainment, but spend some time in Scotland and you’ll recognize that there are a wide range of accents throughout the country. The Glaswegian (or Weegie) accent is its own thing, but fifty miles away in Edinburgh you get a completely different sound. Since the Weegie accent and dialect is distinct from other areas of Scotland, I needed an expert reader from Glasgow to take a look at the manuscript ahead of time and make corrections. One word that had to go that people often associate with Scotland: Laddie. I was told that word might get used in the country here and there, but was not really a thing that Weegies say. Also, calling someone a jammy bastard has absolutely nothing to do with jam or even pajamas.

I didn’t try to reproduce everything you hear—that would be a gargantuan task—but I did settle on a few words and phrases to consistently render the way a Weegie might say them to provide the flavor of the language while (hopefully) keeping it easy to read. Of course, you can listen to the audiobook narrated by Luke Daniels and appreciate the accents that way.

***

Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of A Plague of Giants and the New York Times bestselling The Iron Druid Chronicles series.

Kevin Hearne: Website | Instagram | Twitter

Ink & Sigil: Bookshop.org | Indiebound | Amazon | More

In the aftermath of a second American revolution, peace rests on a fragile truce. The old regime has been deposed, but the ex-president has vanished, escaping justice for his crimes. Some believe he is dead. Others fear he is in hiding, gathering forces. As the factions in Washington work to restore order, Donny Kimoe is in court to settle old scores—and pay his own debts come due.

Meanwhile, the rebels Donny once defended are exacting their own kind of justice. In the ruins of New Orleans, they are building a green utopia—and kidnapping their defeated adversaries to pay for it. The newest hostage is the young heiress to a fortune made from plundering the country—and the daughter of one of Donny’s oldest friends. In a desperate gambit to save his own skin, Donny switches sides to defend her before the show trial. If he fails, so will the truce, dragging the country back into violence. But by taking the case, he risks his last chance to expose the atrocities of the dictatorship—and being tried for his own crimes against the revolution.

To save the future, Donny has to gamble his own. The only way out is to find the evidence that will get both sides back to the table, and secure a more lasting peace. To do that, Donny must betray his clients’ secrets. Including one explosive secret hidden in the ruins, the discovery of which could extinguish the last hope for a better tomorrow—or, if Donny plays it right, keep it burning.

Utopia means nowhere, but you can write your way there

There’s a scene early in 1969’s Easy Rider where the protagonists, Wyatt and Billy, visit a commune—the home of a hitchhiker they pick up after their big score. It’s really a series of scenes of life in the commune—young people hanging out, trying to live by their own new rules and be self-sufficient. Free love and free food.  Critics often refer to it as one of the weaker sections of the movie, but I don’t think the movie would really work without it. It’s a vision of utopia that provides a counterbalance to the all-American dystopia the rest of the movie travels through. Its memory is there in the negative space of the abrupt ending. But conventional wisdom would say you couldn’t make a whole movie branching off that scene.

I watched that movie again as I was beginning work on my new novel Failed State, trying to find good examples of fictional utopias in popular entertainment. When I pitched my editor three years ago on the idea of a mash-up of the legal thriller with the dystopian novel—“Better Call Saul meets 1984”—he dug the idea enough to ask for a proposal for two books, set in the same world as 2017’s Tropic of Kansas. The proposal for the first book was fully fleshed out, and became 2019’s dystopian Rule of Capture, whose story of a burned out defense lawyer defending protesters imprisoned for their politics in a country gone mad seems more topical now than I could have imagined. For the second book, I had a plot mapped out, but all I really knew was that I wanted to make it more utopian—to realize in fiction the better world the characters had been fighting and dying for in the previous books.

Dystopia is easy, in the sense that all you really have to do is look around and report on the messed-up things people do to each other and their environment in real life, and putting your characters into those situations creates instant drama.

Utopia is harder. Utopia means nowhere, a setting that’s like the Talking Heads song about Heaven: “a place where nothing ever happens.” The novel is a literary form driven by conflict, and focused on the experience of the individual in society. Writing one about people living in harmony, or one that transcends the idea of the self to focus on community as protagonist, is a challenging undertaking. But science fiction is the literature of the possible. It has unique tools to tackle those sorts of problems. And in a world where the very idea of the future seems to have mostly disappeared, in part because it’s so hard to even get a fix on the present, the idea of imagining a world we would really want to live in seems like a worthy undertaking. It’s something we talk about doing in the field more than we actually do it.

One path is to break out of the constraints of novelistic form. You can write utopia as political theory, as design fiction, or even as a kind of nature writing. But the most common path is to craft a compromised utopia, one that has made different tradeoffs, and is in tension with the world around it, or threats from within. That’s the solution of masterpieces of utopian SF like Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, and of more recent efforts like Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and the Wakanda of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.  Works like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road find a glimmer of utopian possibility in the grimmest dystopia—it’s the place the characters are trying to get to, even if it’s just a religious vision or a wishful mirage, and that tiny kernel of hope is what carries the reader and the characters through the difficult journey. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the characters find their way across the wasteland to the feminist ecotopia they seek, only to learn it has been destroyed by climate change. So they return to the warlord dystopia they came from—the one place that still has clean water—and realize a similar vision through popular uprising.

Utopia is not a place. It’s a decision.

The ending is the beginning

The dramatic inversion that results from that decision can help you rethink narrative norms. Like how many of those stories of survivors roaming the vine-covered ruins of our civilization are not as dystopian as you thought. They are expressions of secret wishes. The resurgence of nature is the return to our nature. And behind the Hobbesian fights that usually drive the stories set in those places is a recognition that they could be the restoration of Eden.

My first published story was a weird little slipstream riff about a gamer who builds a post-apocalyptic diorama of the town where he lives, and then drowns it with a garden hose. In Failed State, I went back to that place—with a real city drowned by climate change, populated by characters who embrace the resulting rewilding. It was a way to solve the fundamental science fictional conundrum that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a real change in the political system. The uncomfortable truth lurking in our post-apocalyptic fictions is that the “end of the world” is the path to real change. And that end is really just the beginning—one that starts with imagining things like, if you could go back to the dawn of the agricultural revolution and get a do-over, how would you structure human society to make it more just, or more ecologically sound? That’s the kind of speculative project SF was made for. No one book can solve those problems, but it can come back with soundings from other paths.   

Peace can be your conflict

As I began working on Failed State, I thought I had an easy way to guarantee the conflict the story needed to work as a novel, by introducing the one character type no utopia ever has—a lawyer.  There are no lawyers in utopia, because a society without conflict doesn’t need them. Or so they want you to believe. The truth is that almost all utopias are founded on codes so strict that they acquire the characteristics of religion, like the one the Lawgiver administers in the original Planet of the Apes movies. Those societies have no lawyers because they permit no disagreements. Introduce a character who challenges the infallibility of the utopian code, and you have all the conflict you need. It’s what Shevek does in LeGuin’s Dispossessed, even though the laws he’s trained in are the laws of physics. But the utopian framing surprised me again—by reminding me that the real purpose of lawyers is not to create conflict, but to solve it. Most lawyer stories are driven by the competitive win-lose binaries of litigation. A utopian legal thriller, I learned, is about brokering peace.

The best happy endings are sad

The endpoint of a utopian story can still be compromised, or non-redemptive. Just because you get the genie in the bottle doesn’t mean it won’t get back out. Classics like The Oresteia and Njal’s Saga tell the story of how societies ruled by blood feuds finally achieve peace by brokering settlements and trapping the spirit of vengeance in a system that resolves disputes without violence. But the struggle never ends—the characters by the end of those stories are just too tired and hurt to fight any more, and finally have acquired the wisdom to realize there’s got to be a better way. Peace is only really appreciated by those who have been through war, and the real secret to writing compelling stories of communities in harmony is to endow your characters with memory of the alternatives.

“We blew it, man”

The original script for Easy Rider had a happy ending. Captain America and the Cowboy ride off to their Florida paradise. The creators realized, one presumes, that was not true to the world of their story. And the ending they shot is a powerful one, an ending that kind of ended the whole idea of the Sixties with a literal bang. But there’s an untraveled third path lurking in there, in the scene where they leave the commune, watching the naive hippies planting seeds in fallow-looking ground and arguing between themselves whether the commune will make it. History argues they won’t—they will run out of resources, start fighting, have one of the founders turn into David Koresh. Failed State would argue they get on the wrong path as soon as they start planting seeds. But it’s interesting to imagine what kind of success could be possible for such an experiment, especially if it were informed by 21st century inclusivity and understanding.

In a world that feels more dystopian by the day, there’s tremendous opportunity for the reinvigoration of the utopian imagination. Not just because we need more hopeful futures to work toward. Solving the problems of craft that impede utopian storytelling can help you write your way to real artistic innovation—even if the perfection you are chasing can never be reached, in fiction or in real life. 

Christopher Brown: Website

Failed State: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | HarperCollins

So, I take it someone on Twitter said something about IP books being soulless.

Or maybe they said it about the writers of those books?

I dunno. Whatever.

Now, as someone who has written at least a little bit of IP, I take exception to that — while also recognizing that the person wasn’t likely trying to make a problematic point, and was not expecting the internet to fall on their head, but that’s Twitter for you. It is a wasteland where nuance goes to die. As I am increasingly wont to say, Twitter is the place where somebody was wrong on the internet. Then someone was mad on the internet. Then you were mad on the internet. Then you were wrong on the internet. And that cycle just kinda goes and goes. It’s like a dunk tank where you’re dunking people and then getting dunked for dunking on people and then as you’re being dunked you still find other people down in the deep to dunk on, until everyone is drowning down in Dunktown.

It’s why I’m making this point here on The Blog, where I can more (exhaustively, wordily, eye-rollingly) make my point instead of having to condense it into an amuse-bouche course of fine points that will somehow go viral and end up being wadded up into a ball of broken glass and fired at my house.

Anyway.

So, while fully recognizing the person may have very well been trying to champion original work instead of “IP” work, I do think it’s worth talking a little bit about IP work.

To clarify, for those not in the know, IP work means Intellectual Property, which is already a bit of a misnomer because all work is intellectual property — it’s just here, the locus of who owns that work is different. When I write my own book, I am the Intellectual Property Owner. When I write for, say, A Big Brand About Spaceship Wizards, I am for sure not the property owner.

Right?

Right.

So, is writing for IP soulless?

Well, first, and obviously, no.

And here is why that is:

Because our souls and our hearts are probably why we’re doing IP work in the first place.

Let’s unpack that.

Is it for the money? Probably not. Sometimes the money is fine but it’s usually in the low-to-middle end of the pool, and it’s also money you can’t capitalize on much — most don’t give you royalties at all, and if they do, they’re more like the ghost of royalties, some fading phantasm, some monetary specter rattling its chains-made-of-coins around your authorial piggy bank. Further, because you are (as discussed) decidedly not the owner, you cannot continue to monetize the work — you can’t sell foreign rights, or game rights, or TV/film, or comics, or whatever other ancillary rights are available to the owner of that property. I mean, that property owner will! But you won’t get a piece of it. Even if something you wrote trickles into those other rights and license extensions, like a game or a film. Some contracts do offer mechanisms for that trickle, but it’s increasingly few-and-far-between, and I’d argue is a bit abusive. In fact, the contracts for such work are often considerably onerous, punishing for the author and heavily favoring The Brand. One contract I signed for a Big Science-Fiction Brand had boilerplate stipulations in there that said they could take your work, chisel your name off of it, not pay you, and still publish that shit anyway. And they don’t negotiate away from that boilerplate. It’s often carved into stone.

Is it for the glory? You might think so, but the glory doesn’t last — that golden glow is quick to fade. Some people even look down on IP authors, as evidenced by the need to defend the work as “not soulless” in the first damn place. (This has changed a lot in the last decade or so, where writing for a Big Brand has come with a little more cachet than it used to.) The Brand doesn’t love you, and most fandoms are diffuse and hard to parse, especially online — they are fans (or “””fans,””” depending) of The Brand, but that doesn’t make them fans of you. And further, it’s quite likely they won’t become fans of you, either. And if the fandom is, ahh, let’s go with vigorous, you might end up at the bottom of a pig chute funneling a great deal of toxic effluence your way just for daring to write in the world in the first place.

Is it for the fun? It can be. But it ain’t a picnic, either. You’re likely going to have to race to meet unreasonable deadlines while simultaneously having to have “meetings” (like the kind you have in an office, ew) about the work, and this can be doubly so if you’re both trying to please a publisher and please a Brand who aren’t in agreement already, and it can be triply confusing when The Brand has a lot of cooks already crammed in its kitchen so now you’re fielding notes from twelve different people, none of whom agree with one another. And again, all on a very tight timeline. (I famously had to write the first draft of my book in my Spaceship Wizard book in 30 days. Say what you will about that book, but I did my damnedest to produce something of love and value in that timeframe.) And the fun also goes back to the former point about being in the crosshairs of the various schisms and sects within fandom — and because it’s your name on the book, they assume you somehow literally overtook the brand and used its as your own personal sandbox. (Or, in their view, litter box.) All while failing to see that nothing goes in those pages without tacit approval from The Gods of The Brand.

Is it for the opportunity? It can be, but that opportunity is dubious. Sure, it might lead to more work, but it also might just lead to more IP work, because sometimes in the creative industries a thing you do too many times can become Your Brand. And that means writing for Brands can become Your Brand. Will you hit list? Maybe, but with most IP, probably not — only a select few really seem to juggle their way up there.

Here you might be saying, well, it’s all downside, but my point is that it’s really not all downside — because the one upside is, you get to write in a space you love. You get to put your heart into a storyworld that has influenced you in some way — you’re giving back to it, you’re owning a little postage-stamp-sized piece of creative real estate in a narrative that fed you. And that’s the reward, which is…

Well, sorta the opposite of soulless.

Is there an argument to be made that the Corporations that own the Big Brands are soulless? I guess, sure. Is there an argument that they’re exploiting writers? Sure, there’s that, too. Publishers can be exploitative all on their own, and then the Big Brands can be exploitative of the publishers (because the publishers don’t own the Brands, remember), which means it’s a trickle down effect of pissing on the writer’s head. But even here it’s worth noting that for all claims of soullessness, most of the people working on these books outside the author are also there for love — they’re fans as much as any of the readers. They care. They give it their all. They put their hearts and certainly their souls into the work, too.

Is there an argument that Your Original Work is better than IP Work? There is an argument for that, though I won’t always necessarily make it it or even agree with it. It’s probably better for you if you own the work in the long-run, but IP work can be a smart, calculated choice. Is there more cultural value to Original Work than IP Work? Maybe in a broad sense, but I certainly don’t think so at the individual book level — I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me to tell me they read my Big Starforce Battle books and it either got them reading again or it was the first book their teenager really got into or it moved them in some fundamental way. (Hell, one couple named their baby after one of the characters. And yes, I did indeed autograph that baby.) So I don’t think there’s much value in a pissing match between Branded Work and Original Work. We put our backs into it either way, and hope to write something of merit regardless.

Is there an argument that you shouldn’t write for a Big Brand if you’re offered the chance? That’s up to you, obviously, and my experiences are mine and mine alone, though I am of a mind that writers in these cases are usually the ones with all the pressure and all the work and too little of the reward — but even that is again an argument not to bag on the writers or their books, because honestly, they’re just doing their best with what they have, and often under really weird circumstances going on behind the scenes. I know some hilarious tales and also horror stories from behind the IP walls where writers have gone through mad bureaucratic dances that would give you spinny whirly puke-up-your-shoes vertigo. You’d hear some of these stories and say, “That shouldn’t be legal,” and haha, it is, because they signed the contract. It isn’t okay, but it’s definitely fine. But if it’s a thing you wanna do, and there’s a chance to do it, go for it.

Is this me saying I’d never write IP again? I’ll never say never, but it’s not on my menu of hopes or dreams, because I really like writing my own stuff, owning my own stuff, and living off it — and it offers a long gravy train of opportunity long after even one book lands on shelves, a gravy train that belongs to someone else if it’s work for a big IP. But maybe if it were from a storyworld I loved, like A:tLA, or Gremlins, or Cabin Boy (aka the Chris Elliotverse).

But again, all this is to say our books are not at all soulless. We put in the work and the love, and we do it because the most tangible reward is the joy of getting to play in the storyworlds we adore. And I’ll say too that despite what you may get online, often going to a convention or comic-con and meeting the readers and fans in person is a truly wondrous thing — they bring love to the table, matching yours with their own, and that’s also why we do it. We do it for the love. Our hearts and our souls are very much present.

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