There is something slightly terrifying about finally writing this post.
Over the years, I’ve written and published several books, but they have all been non-fiction. I know that world reasonably well now. You have a subject, you research it, you decide what you want to say and then you spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to say it clearly.
Fiction, I have discovered, is an entirely different beast.
For several years now, quietly in the background of everything else Kirsten and I have been doing, I’ve been writing a novel.
It’s called Latency.
And, barring some catastrophic failure of nerve between now and then, I’m planning to publish it in September. That feels quite strange to write.
Latency has been years in the making. It has been written, rewritten, dismantled, reimagine, reconstructed, expanded, cut and occasionally stared at for prolonged periods while I wondered what on earth I had got myself into.
It has also become considerably larger than I originally intended. The finished book will run to more than 500 pages (which is better than the 700+ pages it was a few months ago). Apparently, for my first attempt at a novel, I decided starting small would be unnecessarily sensible.
But I wanted to write the sort of science fiction I enjoy reading.
Latency is a speculative mystery set in 2047.
One of the things I became slightly obsessed with while writing it was making that world believable. Twenty years into the future is actually a surprisingly difficult place to write about. It is close enough that the world should still be recognisable, but far enough away that pretending nothing significant has changed simply doesn’t work. So I have spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about what happens between here and there.
How will cities evolve? What happens to transport? How do we generate and consume energy? What happens to communications? How do governments and international institutions adapt? Which technologies disappear? Which ones become completely mundane? And, perhaps more interestingly, which apparently obsolete things stubbornly refuse to die?
I didn’t want 2047 to look like somebody had demolished 2026 and built a science-fiction film set on top of it because real societies don’t evolve like that.
The old remains underneath the new. Victorian infrastructure survives beneath modern cities. Buildings outlive the technologies they were designed around. Institutions retain procedures long after anyone remembers why they were introduced. People adapt astonishingly quickly to things that would have seemed extraordinary twenty years earlier.
That accumulated history became an important part of Latency.
But the world-building is ultimately the stage rather than the story.
At the heart of the novel is a mystery, and I’m deliberately going to be frustratingly vague about it. I want people to encounter Latency knowing as little as possible about what is actually coming. There are multiple characters, different locations and an international canvas, but the pleasure, I hope, comes from gradually understanding why you’re being shown what you’re being shown.
I’ve therefore got absolutely no intention of explaining the clever bits before you’ve read them.
What I can say is that I’ve tried to make it intelligent without making it inaccessible. There are big ideas in it, but there are also very human ones. Friendship, ambition, grief, loyalty, institutional absurdity, power and the strange ability we all have to accept almost anything once it becomes part of everyday life.
And after years of working on it, I’m now in the final edit.
This is probably the most painstaking part of the whole process. I’m going through the manuscript chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, tightening dialogue, removing things that don’t earn their place, improving the world-building and making sure that a very large collection of moving parts actually moves as one.
It is exhausting.
I’m also loving it.
There is something deeply satisfying about reaching the stage where the book in my head and the book on the page are finally beginning to look like the same thing.
The plan is to release Latency in September.
The Kindle edition is already available for pre-order and I’m also planning a paperback edition through Amazon. At more than 500 pages, the paperback is going to be a fairly substantial object. It may also double as a defensive weapon or emergency doorstop, but I still want a physical edition for people who prefer an actual book in their hands.
I’ve also built a dedicated website for Latency. You can find it at: readlatency.com
If the book sounds like something you might enjoy, please sign up for the newsletter there. I’ll use it to share publication news, occasional glimpses into the world of Latency and updates as September approaches. I don’t intend to bombard anyone with emails.
For me, this is quite a departure.
Most people who know my work know me from renewable energy, heat pumps, publishing, podcasts and the various other projects I’ve somehow accumulated over the years. Writing fiction has used a completely different part of my brain, and I’ve had to learn an enormous amount along the way.
There have also been plenty of moments when I’ve wondered whether anyone other than me will actually want to read the bloody thing.
I suppose we’re about to find out.
What I do know is that I’ve given Latency everything I can. It has occupied an extraordinary amount of my thinking for several years, often when I was supposed to be thinking about something else. Characters have changed. Entire sections have disappeared. New ideas have forced me backwards through hundreds of pages to alter something seemingly insignificant. And the world itself has gradually become somewhere I know almost as well as places I’ve actually visited.
Now I want other people to enter it.
September suddenly feels very close.
Latency is nearly here.