In this week’s episode, I celebrate finishing the 14th and final book of the SILENT ORDER series by looking back at the writing of the series over the last six years.
This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:
GHOSTSTORM
The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing entertainment as we proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it’s time to get a new audiobook!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Coupon of the Week
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 167 of the Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 8th, 2023, and today we’re taking a look back at writing the Silent Order series and a retrospective of the last six years.
First, let’s start off with Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Storm as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Storm for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTORM. That’s GHOSTSTORM and you can find the link and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through September the 29th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing entertainment as you proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it’s time to get a new audiobook.
00:00:50 Writing Updates
What have I been working on? Brand new-wise, as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done and it is published and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip. So the series is complete and the last book is now available and it’s selling briskly. And thank you all for that.
Now that that is done and my Summer of Finishing Things is finally finished with Dragon Skull and Silent Order being finished, I have started on the Ghost Armor series and the first book will be Ghost in the Serpent. And I am 10,000 words into it as this recording. And if all goes well, I’m hoping that will be out sometime in October and the audiobook of it before the end of the year. Starting a new series like this involves a fair bit of world building, and there’s one good trick to know if you’ve picked a good name for a fantasy character. You Google it and you get 0 results. I do always Google character names before I commit to them. Sometimes you accidentally pick the name of someone who’s been some sort of notorious criminal or controversial political figure, so it’s best to avoid that, which I have to admit is less of a problem with fantasy names. However, when inventing fantasy names, you do occasionally stumble on a name that means another language, something like “very impolite term for women who sells carnal favors to the lowest echelons of society.” And you definitely don’t want your character named after that, so it is always wise to Google.
In audiobook news, the recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians. I expect we will start proofing chapters soon and I am looking forward to sharing that with all of you once it’s done.
We have one reader question this week from Wilson, who says: When are you coming back to the Third Soul series? Also Sevenfold Sword Online is calling you, lol.
In answer to that… How to phrase this? I’m not saying no to doing more than Third Soul, but I don’t have anything planned at the moment. I wrote The Third Soul, what would become The Third Soul now, 14 years ago, back in 2009? And so if I was to do it today, I would want to do many things differently. So if I did do something in The Third Soul, it’ll probably be a slightly improved version of the setting with new characters, which, as I said, I’m not saying no to, but I don’t have any current plans to do so.
I am working on the Sevenfold Sword Online book. I’m on Chapter 2 of…actually, I don’t know how many chapters it will be, but probably in the upper teens. But I am about 5,000 words into it. And I think that will probably be the either last book I published in 2023 or the first book I published in 2024, we’ll see how the rest of this year goes.
00:03:40 Silent Order Retrospective
Now, on to this week’s main topic, a retrospective back on the Silent Order series, which seems suitable because as I said earlier, my Summer of Finishing Things has finished. The Silent Order of science fiction series is finally complete after 14 books, 769,000 words and six years. In fact, September 2023 marks the six year anniversary of when I published the first five books in the series.
Like I did with Dragonskull, the other series I finished in summer 2023, I thought I would take a look back at the end of The Silent Order series in the Internet’s favorite favored format, a numbered article and or podcast episode. Minor spoilers follow for The Silent Order series, but no major ones.
00:04:22 #1 The Protagonist
When I started thinking about The Silent Order way back in 2016, I had just read the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming for the first time. I decided that I wanted to write about a spy, but in space. I also wanted to write a character who is essentially the opposite of James Bond, so the name was a play on that from James Bond to Jack March. The inspiration was that bond stays in place, but march is moving forward.
Unfortunately though, I didn’t realize it until the books were published and people started pointing it out to me, this meant that Jack March had the same initials as I do, which led to occasional accusations of him being an author avatar. This was definitely not what I had in mind. If anything, the closest match to my personality in any of my books would be The Sculptor from Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince, a curmudgeonly technician prone to occasional ranting. I did make March a contrast from James Bond, at least the literary version. Bond is gregarious, charming, drinks way too much, and has a different girl of the week. Well, every weekend, sometimes every day.
March is grim, taciturn, very professional, and gets annoyed at the thought of a girl of the week. His fight against The Final Consciousness is personal in a way that various nemeses in the books rarely were. I believe Ian Fleming originally intended to make the Soviets the overarching big bad of the Bond books, but after tensions eased marginally between the West and the Soviets in the 60s, he switched to different villains and eventually settled on Specter and Blofeld.
00:05:56 #2 The Setting
Specifically, Calaskar. March works for The Silent Order, part of the intelligence agency of the Interstellar Kingdom of Calaskar, which has seven core systems and several hundred minor colonies of varying sizes around the solar systems it claims. Calaskar is more culturally conservative than its neighbors, especially Rustaril and Raetia. But not terribly repressive. An American from the 1950s would find it rather relaxed, while an American from 2023 would probably find it stifling and conformist. It was a thought experiment on my part. How would a technologically advanced, yet relatively stable society look in the distant future? Of course, Calaskar isn’t always stable. Where Rustaril and Raetia used to be part of the Kingdom but broke away and went in very different directions. It helped that March was born inside the empire of The Final Consciousness and so able to look at Calaskaran in society with a critical eye. He does think it tends toward the conformist and the parochial, but it doesn’t have the brutality of the labor camps of The Final Consciousness, the social decay of Rustaril, or the vast gap between rich and poor of Raetia and the Falcon Republic.
00:07:08 #3 The Final Consciousness
The Final Consciousness, also known half mockingly as The Machinists, is the overarching villain of the series. They’re basically space communists combined with some of the crazier transhumanist ideas. The initial inspiration was the first few original James Bond books, where the Soviets and SMERSH were the chief adversaries. Further inspiration for the final consciousness came from college professors and crazy tech million. Years, sometimes college professors and academics will propose the most appalling things, like we need to reduce the Earth’s population to 1 billion people, or everyone should be housed in giant cities and not allowed to leave, or children should be taken from their parents at birth to be raised in impartial institutions. The academics are always super unclear about how to do that and glide over little details like, how exactly the population will be reduced from 9 billion to one or how will they be encouraged to move into giant cities.
These various tech billionaires also provided additional inspiration for The Final Consciousness. If you will forgive something of a generalization, it seems that if you become a billionaire in America, there’s a non trivial chance you’re going to turn into a transhumanist weirdo, like you’ll want to put computer chips in people’s brains, or you’ll spend all your time worrying about the singularity and artificial intelligence. Or you’ll spend 18 hours a day exercising and taking experimental treatments and claim to have the body of a teenager when you’re 43, when to the unprejudiced eye, you actually look like a very fit 42 year old.
The Final Consciousness is what you would get if all these people had unlimited resources to put their very bad ideas into practice. What they ended up with was a tyrannical hive mind ruling over an essentially enslaved population. The hive mind, believing itself to be the final stage of human consciousness and evolution, was driven to expand and destroy all the obsolete societies around it. That did not match the self perceived perfection of The Final Consciousness. Since Machinists tried and failed to militarily conquer Calaskar they turned instead to infiltration and subversion, which touches off the plot of The Silent Order series. Of course, the hive mind was built on the technology of the Great Elder Ones, an extinct alien race, who turned out to be not so extinct after all.
00:09:16 #4 The Great Elder Ones
In a lot of science fiction, you have sort of elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror working their way in, and that’s where The Great Elder Ones came from. I had the original idea of The Great Elder Ones way back in the late 2000s, long before I discovered self-publishing. I was thinking about a fantasy series in a world that had an early modern level of technology. The study would have a communist revolution which would create the inevitable dictatorship and secret police state that always seems to follow communist revolutions, but the twist would be that the secret police organization was actually a cult worshipping a dark power, and they plan to use the mass loss of life associated with revolution to fuel a summoning spell to bring their dark power back to the world. I abandoned that ideas as unworkable and unlikely to sell, but I returned in the relationship between The Great Elder Ones and The Final Consciousness. Of course, Silent Order is science fiction, not fantasy, so it was cast in science fiction terms. The Final Consciousness used the surviving technology of The Great Elder Ones to build their hive mind, but that made them vulnerable to manipulation and control from The Great Elder Ones. The Great Elder Ones have been locked outside this universe by their ancient enemies, but plan to use The Final Consciousness is pawns to allow them to return and destroy the universe like they originally intended.
00:10:32 #5. The First Five Books
I originally started writing Silent Order: Iron Hand on New Year’s Eve in 2016. My original plan was to actually write the first four books, and once they were done, release them once a week until they were all out. I ended up writing a fifth book because of a news article I read. Originally I planned to go straight from Silent Order: Axiom End to Silent Order: Fire Hand. However, I read an article in mid 2016 arguing that an iPad made for better productivity tool than a Linux desktop. I found this implausible. In the seven years since then, the iPad has become better as a productivity tool, and since you can get a keyboard case and cast it to a bigger screen, but it’s still really expensive and it’s a lot easier to hook up an ergonomic keyboard and a big ‘ol monitor to a Linux System than to an iPad. It’s substantially cheaper too. So to make a point, I wrote, edited and published Silent Order: Eclipse Hand entirely on Ubuntu Linux. Back then I still wrote about technology and Linux on a regular basis, so it fit neatly into my workflow. I also designed the cover entirely on GIMP on Ubuntu. More on that soon.
All five books were ready to go in September 2017, and then I published the first one at the end of September, and the rest in October of that year. The initial plan was to put them in Kindle Unlimited since science fiction was very popular in Kindle Unlimited at that point. However, this disappointed enough people that I abandoned the initial plan and switched to wide distribution, which means books were on in addition to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords. This series had a good start and I thought that it would be an open-ended series with a new adventure of the week with every boo. More soon or why this didn’t quite work out.
However, moving the books out of KU proved a wise decision. For all of 2023, as of this recording, only 49.1% of Silent Order’s total revenue came from Amazon, the rest came from the other retailers. If that was a parliamentary democracy, they could make a coalition against Amazon if they wanted. There’s no way KU page reads could have made-up that difference, especially since the Kindle Unlimited payment rate per page is quite a bit lower than it was in 2017.
012:55 #6: History
I set the Silent Order books a long, long way into the future. Like roughly 100,000 years from now. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s always a little painful when you read older science fiction, you come across a sentence like mankind had its first hyperspace flight in 1996, or the protagonists have a problem but need to conserve computer power because they only have so many data space/data tapes. The phenomenon of one’s futuristic science fiction becoming dated is called zeerust, and something I wanted to avoid if possible in Silent Order.
Second, having the series take place 100,000 years into the future left a lot of wiggle room in the setting’s back story. It meant that things could be lost, forgotten, or distorted for most of the series. No one is entirely sure exactly where Earth was, because the information has been lost after 100,000 years of human expansion into space. Obviously that kind of thing can be useful for plotting. In the Silent Order back story, there were five United Terran Empires that ruled over mankind for thousands of years at a time, but they all collapsed for various reasons. It also meant there could be lost technology plots as all the Terran empires had technological expertise that was lost when they collapsed… genetic engineering and high level AI and so forth.
Third, it let me disconnect Silent Order from a lot of contemporary disputes here in the early 21st century. One of the tricky parts of writing near future science fiction is that it’s easy to have the books take a stance on the immediate crises of the day, which can annoy a lot of readers. Having the books set so far into the future means that from the perspective of characters, years the various concerns of the 2020s seen as academic and as dusty as, for example, the Investiture Controversy or the dispute between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines seems to us today. So to someone in Jack March’s time, the 2020 election and all its upheaval, or the coronavirus pandemic would be as distant and academic as the Investiture Controversy is to us today.
00:14:55 #7 Technology
One complaint about the books was that Jack March regularly used a gun, a chemically propelled kinetic firearm, or that he often used a handheld computer he called the phone. Like, why didn’t he always use a laser pistol or a particle gun, or have some sort of hyper advanced neural implant that functioned as a phone? Isn’t this science fiction, for heaven’s sake? Of course, that’s a bit like asking why in 2023 you’re still using a knife to cut your bread when instead you can use a high end laser cutter. The answer, of course, is that the knife is cheap and reliable and fulfills this technological niche so perfectly that even though there are more advanced alternatives available, it would be costly and pointless to use them. I think chemically propelled firearms fulfill that niche as well.
People forget this, but firearms have been around for over 800 years. King Edward the Third used cannons in the opening battles of the 100 Years War, which started in 1337 A.D., quite a long time ago. Obviously firearms have been refined and improved considerably since that time, but the basic principle remains the same: metal tube, metal projectile, chemical propellant. Even in Jack March’s time, a chemically propelled firearm offers many advantages. It doesn’t require electricity and can be built without computer parts, meaning the weapon is immune to an EMP effect. Additionally, it is much less fragile than a more advanced weapon. The AK47 could famously still fire even after being dragged through a stream or left in the dirt for a while. Granted, it may not be terribly accurate, but it could still fire. With 100,000 years’ worth of small improvements in material science, You couldn’t 3D print a working firearm in your basement. It wouldn’t even be made of metal and therefore much harder to detect.
When March uses a phone obviously it would be more advanced than anything available today, but the word phone is a convenient shorthand to refer to personal data, mobile computing and communication device, and I settled on that instead of using a more science fiction-esque word like data pad or personal terminal. I didn’t want to call it a communicator because that brings Star Trek to mind. Besides, one the cardinal rules of writing is to never use a long word when a shorter one will suffice.
00:17:02 #8 The Covers
If I remember right, I ended up redoing the covers for the Silent Order series five times in total. The first set used a combination of a stock photo spaceship and a stock photo planet along with the custom font I paid for. After a while I had stock photos of people holding weapons against space background, but that really didn’t work, so I switched down for a new set of stock photos of spaceships and planets. I was bumping up against the limits of what I could do with stock photos and GIMP. The difficulty of stock photos is their limitations. What you see is what you get. Ask anyone who’s done any design work of any kind, and you’ll probably get stories of searches for stock photos that turned up many pictures that almost good enough, but not quite. Then the COVID hysteria came around and I used some of the free time that generated to take a Photoshop course.
I managed to produce a fourth set of covers, ones that used human figures and looked quite a bit better than the previous set of covers. However, shortly after that I saw Penny Arcade cartoon that has solidified my opinion on science fiction cover. They needed planets and they needed spaceships, and they needed to be in proximity. I redid the covers one more time. Suddenly, on five years after the final look of the series, which featured a spaceship, a planet, and in close proximity planets and spaceships was indeed the way to go. The series has had its best sales with the final set of covers.
00:18:29 #9 False Ending
Despite my best efforts, Silent Order never sold as well as my fantasy books, and after eight books I wanted to do something else. Originally, as I mentioned, I planned for the series to be open-ended and ongoing. However, in the years since I’ve learned that in fantasy and science fiction, especially indie fantasy and science fiction, that really doesn’t work. Like if you’re John Sanford or Jeffrey Deaver, Jonathan Kellerman, JD Robb, or CJ Box, you can write books where your protagonists essentially has an adventure of the week or year, given traditional publishing schedules, without an overarching plot to the series. However, that’s a different genre than fantasy and science fiction. And in traditional publishing, it’s basically a different business model. I think because of certain well-known authors in fantasy literature who haven’t finished their series, readers in the indie fantasy and science fiction space expect completed series with an overarching plot that gets resolved and quite a few of them refused to read an unfinished series at all. So I decided to wrap things up with Book Nine, which was Silent Order: Ark Hand in 2018 and give the series an ending with Jack March settling down on Calaskar. I intended to stop there and did stop there for three years. But people kept asking when I was going to write more in the series and I did feel I left too much unfinished with the Pulse and the Great Elder Ones.
So in 2021, I decided to pick it up again, thinking it would take one or two more books to wrap up the series with a further ending. It turned out to be 5 more books for 14 total. I thought it was going to be 15. But after I finished #13, I thought 14 and 15 would be better combined as a single book, which is how we got Pulse Hand.
00:20:00 #10. Thanks, Chat GPT
It only took six years to write the series, which isn’t all that long, but technology has changed quite a bit during that six years and insane AI was a feature of the books dating all the way back to Silent Order: Wraith Hand, which I wrote back in 2017.
I first introduced the character of Thunderbolt, another insane AI when I wrote Silent Order: Royal Hand in 2021. Though she wouldn’t appear in the books until Thunder Hand in 2023, between the writing of Royal Hand and Thunder Hand, ChatGPT, Mid Journey, Bing Chat, and all the other generative AI tools entered the mainstream. This was a tremendous boon to me. Not because I used them for the writing. My overall opinion of generative AI remains that it’s bad. And if it’s not meaning the strict legal definition of plagiarism, then it’s at least sitting on the same couch as plagiarism, but because of all the tales of AI meltdowns that made it into the mainstream press, like when Microsoft rolled out Bing Chat AI and it famously would go on unhinged rants, threatening people, dissolve into incoherent logical loops, and insist that factually incorrect information was the truth and threatened anyone who doubted it, and otherwise have all kinds of glitches that range from hilarious to deeply disturbing. I read those articles with great amusement and delight and based Thunderbolt’s personality off them.
Of course, Thunderbolt has rail guns and their own automated fleet of space warships, so when she has breakdowns, it’s a little more concerning. So nearly seven years after I had first had the idea, the Silent Order series has come to its conclusion, its proper conclusion this time. I do hope that you found the ending satisfying.
00:21:26 Conclusion
I’d also like to thank Silent Order readers for the enthusiasm for the series in ‘22 and 2023. After I settled on the final cover design, it sold better than it ever has, but still doesn’t sell nearly as well as my various fantasy books. That was one of the reasons I was going to stop after Book 9, but the sheer enthusiasm people had for the books and the nagging sense that it wasn’t quite finished led me to write 5 more.
So thank you all for reading and for coming along with Jack March on this long, long journey. And if you’ve never heard of Silent Order or if you’re one of those people who only reads completed series, the first book is free on all the ebook platforms, so why not check it out? You get Silent Order: Iron Hand for free at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Book, Scribd, and Smashwords. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
