'The Jennifer Morgue' told me that I had a structural model for novels in this setting. 'The Atrocity Archive' was written as a stand-alone, until 'The Concrete Jungle' happened and proved that I had a protagonist. Several things were clearly happening in the series story arc that was beginning to emerge. It's still a classic of cold war espionage pulp. (The first novel and movie about his master ferret, Quiller, was titled 'The Quiller Memorandum'. So was Adam Hall (aka Elleston Trevor), although the title of 'The Fuller Memorandum' reflected an early stab in his direction. For reasons I'm not going to repeat, John le Carre was off the menu. Could I do it? More importantly, where was I going to get the skeleton? The first three Laundry Files novels were all homages to British spy thriller authors-Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Anthony Price. Pushing out a fourth in 2010-12 felt almost premature-going from a 3-5 yearly tempo up to a biannual one. I wrote the first three Laundry novels in 1999-2000, 2005, and 2008. I may consider one aspect of their business practices to be wrong-headed, but in other respects they win big.) Digression over.) And because of the general softness of the market, we decided to play it safe for the time being. ( If you've ever wondered why I stick with Orbit-which is a division of Hachette-despite their obsession with DRM, this is your answer. (The only dissident corporation being Hachette, who imposed a hiring and pay freeze but declared that even though times were grim right now, they intended to ride it out and keep their valuable editorial teams intact. But in 2009 publishing was still reeling from the events of November 2008 and Black Thursday, in which the New York publishing trade collectively shat itself over the economic outlook and quarterly figures and fired 10% of their staff.

Sequels are an easy sell because your editor can simply look up the sales figures, take them to Marketing, and say 'more of the same'. (I'll explain why this didn't happen in the forthcoming Miscellanea crib sheet.) What we offered was: a new Laundry Files novel, a new space opera (nominally a sequel to 'Saturn's Children', to be titled 'Neptune's Brood'), and a third Edinburgh near-future novel, which was to be 'The Lambda Functionary'. Commerce, first: having handed in 'Rule 34' at last, my agent and I went back to negotiate a new three book deal with Ace (for North American rights) and, simultaneously, Orbit (for UK/commonwealth rights).

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross