vivdunstan

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/09/interim-update.html

So, in the past month I've been stabbed in the right eye, successfully, at the local ophthalmology hospital.

Cataract surgery is interesting: bright lights, mask over the rest of your face, powerful local anaesthesia, constant flow of irrigation— they practically operate underwater. Afterwards there's a four week course of eye drops (corticosteroids for inflammation, and a two week course of an NSAID for any residual ache). I'm now long-sighted in my right eye, which is quite an experience, and it's recovered. And my colour vision in the right eye is notably improved, enough that my preferred screen brightness level for my left eye is painful to the right.

Drawbacks: firstly, my right eye has extensive peripheral retinopathy—I was half-blind in it before I developed the cataracts—and secondly, the op altered my prescription significantly enough that I can't read with it. I need to wait a month after I've had the second eye operation before I can go back to my regular ophthalmologist to be checked out and get a new set of prescription glasses. As I spent about 60 hours a week either reading or writing, I've been spending a lot of time with my right eye screwed shut (eye patches are uncomfortable). And I'm pretty sure my writing/reading is going to be a dumpster fire for about six weeks after the second eye is operated on. (New specs take a couple of weeks to come through from the factory.) I'll try cheap reading glasses in the mean time but I'm not optimistic: I am incapable of absorbing text through my ears (audiobooks and podcasts simply don't work for me—I zone out within seconds) and I can't write fiction using speech-to-text either (the cadences of speech are inimical to prose, even before we get into my more-extensive-than-normal vocabulary or use of confusing-to-robots neologisms).

In the meantime ...

I finished the first draft of Starter Pack at 116,500 words: it's with my agent. It is not finished and it is not sold—it definitely needs edits before it goes to any editors—but at least it is A Thing, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My next job (after some tedious business admin) is to pick up Ghost Engine and finish that, too: I've got about 20,000 words to go. If I'm not interrupted by surgery, it'll be done by the end of the year, but surgery will probably add a couple of months of delays. Then that, too, goes back to my agent—then hopefully to the UK editor who has been waiting patiently for it for a decade now, and then to find a US publisher. I must confess to some trepidation: for the first time in about two decades I am out of contract (except for the UK edition of GE) and the two big-ass series are finished—after The Regicide Report comes out next January 27th there's nothing on the horizon except for these two books set in an entirely new setting which is drastically different to anything I've done before. Essentially I've invested about 2-3 years' work on a huge gamble: and I won't even know if it's paid off before early 2027.

It's not a totally stupid gamble, though. I began Ghost Engine in 2015, when everyone was assuring me that space opera was going to be the next big thing: and space opera is still the next big thing, insofar as there's going to be a huge and ongoing market for raw escapism that lets people switch off from the world-as-it-is for a few hours. The Laundry Files was in trouble: who needs to escape into a grimdark alternate present where our politics has been taken over by Lovecraftian horrors now?

Indeed, you may have noticed a lack of blog entries talking about the future this year. It's because the future's so grim I need a floodlight to pick out any signs of hope. There is a truism that with authoritarians and fascists, every accusation they make is a confession—either a confession of something they've done, or of something they want to do. (They can't comprehend the possibility that not everybody shares their outlook and desires, to they attribute their own motivations to their opponents.) Well, for many decades now the far right have been foaming about a vast "international communist conspiracy", and what seems to be surfacing this decade is actually a vast international far-right conspiracy: from Trump and MAGA in the USA to Farage and Reform in the UK, to Orban's Fidesz in Hungary, to Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey and Modi's Hindutva nationalists in India and Xi's increasingly authoritarian clamp-down in China, all the fascist insects have emerged from the woodwork at the same time. It's global.

I can discern some faint outlines in the darkness. Fascism is a reaction to uncertainty and downward spiraling living standards, especially among the middle classes. Over the past few decades globalisation of trade has concentrated wealth in a very small number of immensely rich hands, and the middle classes are being squeezed hard. At the same time, the hyper-rich feel themselves to be embattled and besieged. Those of them who own social media networks and newspapers and TV and radio channels are increasingly turning them into strident far-right propaganda networks, because historically fascist regimes have relied on an alliance of rich industrialists combined with the angry poor, who can be aimed at an identifiable enemy.

A big threat to the hyper-rich currently is the end of Moore's Law. Continuous improvements in semiconductor performance began to taper off after 2002 or thereabouts, and are now almost over. The tech sector is no longer actually producing significantly improved products each year: instead, it's trying to produce significantly improved revenue by parasitizing its consumers. ("Enshittification" as Cory Doctorow named it: I prefer to call the broader picture "crapitalism".) This means that it's really hard to invest for a guaranteed return on investment these days.

To make matters worse, we're entering an energy cost deflation cycle. Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they're still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere. It turns out that many agricultural crops benefit from shade: ground-dwellers coexist happily with PV panels on overhead stands, and farm animals also like to be able to get out of the sun. (This isn't the case for maize and beef, but consider root vegetables, brassicae, and sheep ...)

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they've been overtaken by renewables. (Some oil is still going to be needed for a very long time—for plastics and the chemical industries—but it's a fraction of that which is burned for power, heating, and transport.)

We can see the same dynamic in miniature in the other current investment bubble, "AI data centres". It's not AI (it is, at best, deep learning) and it's being hyped and sold for utterly inappropriate purposes. This is in service to propping up the share prices of NVidia (the GPU manufacturer), OpenAI and Anthropic (neither of whom have a clear path to eventual profitability: they're the tech bubble du jour—call it dot-com 3.0) and also propping up the commercial real estate market and ongoing demand for fossil fuels. COVID19 and work from home trashed demand for large office space: data centres offer to replace this. AI data centres are also hugely energy-inefficient, which keeps those old fossil fuel plants burning.

So there's a perfect storm coming, and the people with the money are running scared, and to deal with it they're pushing bizarre, counter-reality policies: imposing tariffs on imported electric cars and solar panels, promoting conspiracy theories, selling the public on the idea that true artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and promoting hate (because it's a great distraction).

I think there might be a better future past all of this, but I don't think I'll be around to see it: it's at least a decade away (possibly 5-7 decades if we're collectively very unlucky). In the meantime our countries are being overrun by vicious xenophobes who hate everyone who doesn't conform to their desire for industrial feudalism.

Obviously pushing back against the fascists is important. Equally obviously, you can't push back if you're dead. I'm over 60 and not in great health so I'm going to leave the protests to the young: instead, I'm going to focus on personal survival and telling hopeful stories.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/09/interim-update.html