Nope. See response to an earlier (identical) question, with link to essay explaining why.

More Merchant Princes coming in 2015/16 (I'm in the process of writing them right now)! Hope you enjoy them, too.

There's a new Laundry novel coming next July, and hopefully two more (at 12 month intervals after that one). Other Lovecraftiana ... less likely: I've got my own field to plough! (Existential horror that pushes the same buttons, though, is a different matter.)

Deadline happened. The book was so freaking difficult to write that I ran out of time.

Bitcoin is very interesting: it seems to be designed with an ideological subtext in mind — it's a libertarian currency, designed to undermine central banking. It's also inherently deflationary, which is Bad, and prone to being gamed (also bad). While I admire it conceptually, I hope to hell that it fails because if…

Shorter version: "I'll believe it when I see it".

Groan.

If everything was taken off my plate ... I think I'd take a year out to think, very hard, about what to do next.

I am a big fan of both Doug and Pterry, but if you're going to do humour you really have to develop your own variety. In particular, imitation is poison. (Also, humour is much harder than it looks, and the lighter it is, the harder.) What I do with the Laundry Files books is rather different from either Discworld or…

Yeah, we meet up in a pub once every month or so — and we first met on an email list (probably the old EXTROPY-L listserv) in the early 90s. There is indeed some cross-fertilization going on! (Probably not as much as there was between Ken and the late Iain Banks, however.)

Strong "yes" to Scottish Independence, with the caveat that polls are currently running against it.

Um. Actually, it's a long and complex story: here's how Saturn's Children happened. Then, in the fullness of time, they asked me for another space opera — and strongly hinted that it had damn well better be a sequel, because sequels are always easier to sneak past the marketing committee.

Having a grip of the fundamentals gives you the tools with which to assess the news of new developments, and winnow the wheat from the chaff. Also, having done the dot-com death march gives me a certain cynicism about the whole VC/IT/innovation culture. And yes, I was kind of assuming that the spooks were a jump ahead…

I'm very out of the loop on transhumanism. If anything, what I see happening is the mainstreaming of parts of the agenda. Life prolongation, for example, has gone from Aubrey de Grey to Google's Calico initiative; so the viable and/or good bits of the transhumanist agenda are liable to be coopted, to filter out into…

Too much similarity to Christian millennialism, for one thing. Also ... here's the long version. (Sorry, but I'm not up to writing a fresh essay here: hands ache from too much typing today.)

All of the above; also a flourishing of small presses, agencies turning into e-publishers (a multi-agent literary agency has most of the folks an e-publisher needs).

No plans at this time. (On my to-do list is "write the rest of the novel that begins with Palimpsest", which might fit the bill ... but there's no time in my calendar for that project for at least 2 years.)

Collaborations are hard: I'd like to keep that close to my chest for now, because — while I've discussed collaboration with many authors — it's really down to both the parties having free time in their calendar simultaneously. And when they're both successful, that's hard. (It took Cory and I about 4-5 years to find a…

(Shuffles, embarrassedly ...)

Yes, definitely.