What I've been up to

It has been a little while since I’ve posted anything here, and that is because I’ve been busy on a few fronts. Here’s what I’ve been up to in the middle part of 2025.

D

Over the summer I delivered the manuscript for D, which is the second book in the Bomb Light series and the sequel to Polostan. Last week I chatted about it with my editor, Jen Brehl. We’re in agreement about some revisions that I’ll be incorporating into a new draft over coming weeks. The book will be published probably in September 2026.

This one’s somewhat longer than Polostan, which was the shortest book I’ve written in a while. It picks up in 1934, where Polostan left off (admittedly with something of a cliffhanger) and covers events up through the middle of 1940. The title is a reference to deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that was sometimes given the chemical symbol of D even though it isn’t an element per se. When you combine it with oxygen you get heavy water, which, because of its neutron-slowing properties, was a strategic material during the early years of what became the bomb project.

Fictional and historical accounts of the development of nuclear energy tend to focus on the Manhattan Project. As such they give short shrift to equally fascinating and important happenings during the 1930s and early 1940's. Part of what I’m doing with the Bomb Light project is to shift the focus back a few years and tell stories (a mix of real events and fiction, similar to what I did in the Baroque Cycle) from that era.

In the meantime, HarperCollins has released the trade paperback edition of Polostan with a great new cover design.

Not to be outdone, Subterranean Press has got a preorder page up for its gorgeous limited edition of same:

Artefact

A few months ago I gave a talk in New Zealand about the future of AI. Later I organized some of those thoughts into a Substack post here. It included the following quasi-serious proposal: if we take at face value the proposition that big AIs might be d…