A retrospective on the SILENT ORDER series

The Summer Of Finishing Things has finished! The SILENT ORDER 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 writing of the SILENT ORDER series in the Internet’s favorite format – a numbered article!

Mild spoilers follow for the series, but no major ones.

1.) The Protagonist

When I first started thinking about SILENT ORDER waaaaay back in 2016, I had just read the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming for the first time. I decided that I want to write about a spy, but IN SPACE!

I also wanted to write a character who was 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 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 every week. 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 Bond’s various nemeses in the books never were. I believe Ian Fleming originally intended to make the Soviets the overarching Big Bad of the Bond books, but after tensions eased somewhat between the West and the Soviets in the 60s, he switched to different villains and eventually settled on SPECTRE and Blofeld.

2.) 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? Of course, Calaskar isn’t always stable. Rustaril and Raetia used to be part of the Kingdom, but broke away and went off in very different directions.

It helped that March was born inside the empire of the Final Consciousness and so is able to look at Calaskaran society with a critical eye – he does think it tends towards the conformist and the parochial, but it doesn’t have the brutality and 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.

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 came from college professors and crazy tech billionaires. Sometimes college professors and academics will propose the most appalling ideas. Like, we need to reduce the Earth’s population to one 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 by impartial institutions. The academics always super unclear about how to do that and glide over little details like how exactly the population will be reduced from nine billion to one or how everyone will be encouraged to move into giant cities.

Various tech billionaires provided additional inspiration for the Final Consciousness. If you will forgive the generalization, it seems that if you become a billionaire in America, there’s a nontrivial 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, 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 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 the 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 not to be so extinct after all.

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 idea of the way the Great Elder Ones would work a long time ago, back in the late 2000s, way before I discovered self-publishing. I was thinking about a fantasy series set in a world that had a early modern level of technology. The setting would have a communist revolution which would create the inevitable dictatorship and secret police state, but the twist would be that the secret police was actually a cult worshipping a dark power, and they planned to use the mass loss of life to fuel a summoning spell to bring their dark power back to the world.

I abandoned that idea as unworkable and unlikely to sell, but it 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 had been locked outside this universe by their ancient enemies, but planned to use the Final Consciousness as pawns to allow them to return and destroy the universe like they originally intended.

5.) The First Five Books

I 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 one a week until they were all out.

I ended up writing a fifth book because of a news article that I read. Originally, I had planned to go straight from SILENT ORDER: AXIOM HAND to SILENT ORDER: FIRE HAND. However, I read an article in mid-2016 arguing that an iPad made for a better productivity tool than a Linux system. I found this implausible. In the seven years since then, the iPad has become better as a productivity tool, since you can get a keyboard case and cast it to a bigger screen. It’s still really expensive, and it’s a lot easier to hook up an ergonomic keyboard and a big old monitor to a Linux system than an iPad. 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 did the cover entirely on GIMP on Ubuntu (more on that below).

All five books were ready to go in September 2017, and I published the first one at the end of September.

The initial plan was to put them in Kindle Unlimited. However, this disappointed enough people that I abandoned the initial plan and switched to wide distribution. I published the first five books one at a time a week apart in September and October 2017, which was a good start for the series. I had the idea that it would be an open ended series, with a new Adventure of the Week with every book.

More on why this didn’t quite work out later.

Moving the books out of KU proved a wise decision. For all of 2023 as of this writing, only 49.1% of SILENT ORDER’s total revenue has come from Amazon. The rest came from the other retailers. There’s no way KU page reads could have made up that difference, especially since the KU payment rate per page is quite a bit lower than it was in 2017.

6.) History

I set the SILENT ORDER books a long, long way into the future, like roughly a hundred thousand years from now.

I did this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s always a little painful when you read older science fiction and 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 space because they have only so many data tapes. The phenomenon of once-futuristic science fiction becoming dated is called zeerust, and it’s something I wanted to avoid in SILENT ORDER.

Second, having the series take place a hundred thousand years in the future left a lot of wiggle room in the setting’s backstory. 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 a hundred thousand years of human expansion into space. Obviously, that kind of thing can be useful for plotting. In the SILENT ORDER backstory, 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 that 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. 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 the characters, the various concerns of the 2020s seem as academic and 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.

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 a phone. Like, why didn’t he always use a laser pistol? 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 are still using a knife to cut your bread when you could instead use a high-end laser cutter. The answer of course, is that the knife is cheap and reliable and fulfills its technological niche so perfectly that even though more advanced alternatives are available, it would be costly and pointless to use them.

I think chemically propelled firearms fulfill that niche. People forget this, but firearms have been around for over eight hundred years. King Edward III used cannons in the opening battles of the Hundred Years’ War, which started in 1337 AD. Obviously, firearms have been refined and improved considerably in 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 AK-47 could famously still fire even after being dragged through a stream or left in the dirt for a while. (Granted, it might not be terribly accurate, but it could still fire.) And with a hundred thousand years’ worth of small improvements in material science, you could 3D print a working firearm in your basement, and it wouldn’t even be made of metal and therefore would be harder to detect.

When March uses a “phone”, obviously it would be more advanced than anything available today. But the word “phone” is 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 “datapad” or “personal terminal.” I didn’t want to call it a “communicator” because that brings Star Trek to mind. Besides, never use a long word when a shorter one will suffice.

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 ship and a stock photo planet, along with a custom font I paid for. After a while, I had stock photos of people holding weapons against a space background, but that really didn’t work, so I switched it out 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 of any kind, and you’ll probably get stories of searches for stock photos that turned up many pictures that were 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. Shortly after that, I saw a Penny Arcade cartoon that solidified my opinion on science fiction covers – they needed planets and spaceships in close proximity.  I redid the covers one more time, settling after five years on the final look for the series.

“Planets and spaceships” was indeed the way to go – the series had its best sales with the final set of covers.

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, I had planned for the series to be open-ending and ongoing. However, I’ve since learned that in fantasy and science fiction, especially indie fantasy and science fiction, that really doesn’t work. Like, if you’re John Sandford, Jeffrey Deaver, Jonathan Kellerman, JD Robb, or CJ Box, you can write books where your protagonist has essentially 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 failures in fantasy literature, readers in the indie fantasy and science fiction space expected completed series with an overarching plot that gets resolved, and quite a few of them refuse to read an unfinished series at all.

So I decided to wrap things up with book nine (SILENT ORDER: ARK HAND) in 2018 and give the series an ending with Jack March settling down on Calaskar. I intended to stop there, but people kept asking when I was going to write more in the series. And I did feel I had 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 firmer ending.

It turned out to be five more books, for fourteen total. I thought it was going to be fifteen, 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.

10.) Thanks, ChatGPT!

It only took six years to write the series, which isn’t all that long, but technology has changed quite a bit in that time.

“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, Midjourney, and 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 is that it’s bad and if it’s not meeting the strict legal definition of plagiarism, then it’s sitting on the same couch – but because 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, insist that factually incorrect information was the truth and threaten 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 on them. Of course, Thunderbolt has railguns and her own automated fleet of space warships, so when she has breakdowns it’s a little more concerning. 🙂

11.) The Final Ending

So, nearly seven years after I first had the idea, the SILENT ORDER series has come to its ending.

I do hope that you found the ending satisfying.

I would also like to thank SILENT ORDER readers for their enthusiasm for the series. In 2022 and 2023, after I settled on the final cover design (see above), it’s sold better than it ever has, but still not 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 enough led me to write five more.

So thank you all for reading, and for coming along with Jack March on this long journey.

And if you’ve never heard of SILENT ORDER or you’re one of those people who only reads completed series, the first book is free on all ebook platforms so why not check it out? You can get SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND for free at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Scribd, and Smashwords.

-JM