Monumental

Hi there! Paul here, author of Blood on the Motorway, The Sunset Chronicles, and Darkness Come Alive.

I wouldn't normally feel the need to reintroduce myself at the beginning of a newsletter, but this is the first post from a new newsletter service form me, so you might not necessarily recognise the email address, at first. But I'll come back to that.

Monument, the third episode of season five of The Sunset Chronicles is out now, ready and waiting for your e-reader.

The journey home was never going to be easy. For the crew of the Minos, the question is whether they should make it at all.

In rural Nigeria, Oban's world is upended by a loss he wasn't prepared for — and a photograph that suggests the Minos is closer than anyone is being allowed to know. As Sunset's forces tighten their grip and figures from a violent past arrive with uncomfortable truths, Oban finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy that reaches further than he ever imagined.

Jules thought she understood the shape of the enemy. She was wrong. What she finds hidden in a single video file is not just evidence of a crime, but the answer to a question the whole world has been asking, only she has no idea how to make anyone listen.

In the cold silence between worlds, Judd travels toward a moon and a truth he can feel but not yet name, surrounded by minds that move like a single, quiet tide.

In Season Five of The Sunset Chronicles, secrets hidden in the black of space and the depths of the Earth are finally coming to light—and the truth may be more lethal than the darkness.

Okay, so there's a new look to this newsletter. I thought I'd explain my reasoning a little.

I’ve been thinking about the internet a lot recently. I think a lot of us are in the same boat, endlessly considering this thing that has consumed us all whole, prodding the edges of the sac that binds us, while we try not to drink the increasingly toxic amniotic fluid we're swimming in. We're a global cabal of smokers, each of us desperately chasing that nicotine fix of our first time, that first drag. We can’t even recall how it made us cough up our lungs, so Christ knows what it’s doing to us now.

For me, it was Livejournal. Then Myspace. Then Facebook, and finally Twitter. That period, right up to, say, 2016, is what I think of now as the halcyon days of the internet for me, personally. Back when it seemed to offer us so much hope, such a sense of community. Of possibility.

Fast forward a scant ten years, and where do we find ourselves? A technofascist new global order is gunning people down in the streets. At the same time, billionaires extract the last drops of profit from a dying Earth, and generative AI tells us all that there is no value in any human creation. To quote a film made three years before I was even born: ‘I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.’

For a little while now, I’ve been wondering how to step back from all of this, not on some grand scale, not as some revolution, but just me. My own private revolution. I’ve scoured Reddit boards on de-googling, cut my subscriptions to some of the most evil corporations (but sadly not all), and just generally ruminated on what the future might look like if we were all to do the same.

When it came to social media, my behaviour had already changed quite significantly from those glory days of early Twitter. I was never a major player, nor a power user, but I was part of a few separate communities, linked to music and writing and politics, and just generally connecting with interesting people. But around the same time as the world started to turn to shit, when that Orange Fascist first came down that escalator with a shit-eating grin on his nauseating face, I changed the way I presented myself online. I became a Self-Published Author, and suddenly I wasn’t going onto Twitter or Facebook or Instagram just to talk shit about bands or David Cameron fucking a pig... no, now I was trying to SELL BOOKS.

I never really fully rationalised that disconnect, and found myself increasingly stepping back from regular posting. At the same time, I was maturing, my opinions were becoming more nuanced, and faced with an increasingly violent discourse about, well, everything, I found myself with less and less to say, because to say anything was to invite rancour down on your house. And nobody likes rancour in their house.

Then, it all went to shit, and we all ended up, well, here.

Last year, I deleted both my Facebook and Instagram accounts because of both the continued enshittification of those platforms and the fact that they were clearly both ushering in a new golden (orange) age of fascism. Oh, and when I found out that Meta had stolen all my books as part of its AI training model. Like all the others. Then this year, I set up new accounts, because I am hopelessly addicted to them, and there are some FB groups I missed, and I like following bands on The Gram. But I've mainly been able to kick that habit now, opening them only occasionally to find there's nothing there of interest.

I left Twitter long before that, when Musk came in and flooded the zone with shit. I joined Bluesky and a few Discord servers, and I wondered how long it might be before I was fleeing those, too.

Then there's the problem of being an indie author in any ethical way. You'll currently only find my eBooks available on Amazon, a company I utterly despise, and my newsletter was previously available through Substack, aka the Internet's most profitable Nazi Bar.

Now, this really isn’t much of a surprise; I already left Substack once because of the whole Nazi thing, but I begrudgingly went back because the alternatives were not quite up to snuff (or were prohibitively expensive for a writing newsletter that steadfastly refuses to generate any income). It had always been in my mind to leave, once I found a suitable alternative.

The Sunset Chronicles is one way that I've found over the last few years of working through my thoughts on all this. Over the last half a decade or more of writing, I've tried to imagine what the logical endpoint of these shifting sands might be, which I guess is the job of any science fiction writer, especially one who plays in the odd little world of dystopian science fiction.

It was at the heart of my first series, Blood on the Motorway, too, and it's going to be at the heart of anything I write, because, unlike Andy Weir, apparently, I don't think it's possible to make art that isn't political. Everything's fucking political, as the song goes.

Then, a few months back, I read this blog post:

It has had a fairly profound effect on me.

Now, I'm not going to go into depth about the hows and the whys of why it's had a profound effect on me, because I actually have a whole blog for that now!

This newsletter is part of a wider ecosystem I'm building for my online presence, and my publishing. A garden, if you like. It's built on the AT Protocol, which is the same thing Bluesky is built on. That means you can actually just follow it on Bluesky, or stay with email, or through any other Atmosphere app. It's entirely up to you.

Anyway, that's why your newsletter looks a little different.

Now, go buy the new episode of Sunset Chronicles!

Until next time, happy reading

Paul