SILENT ORDER question and answer

SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE had a very successful Bookbub feature at the end of May, and was briefly the #2 free ebook on Amazon US and the #1 free ebook on Amazon UK.

Thanks, everyone!

So that resulted in a lot of new eyes on the series, which inspired many reader questions! Let’s have some answers below.

First, some basic facts about the series. I published the first five books in September/October 2017. It ended up at fourteen books, and I published the fourteenth and final book in September of 2023. All the books are available on all ebook platforms. There are also six tie-in short stories.

Now, on to the most common questions from the last seven years of SILENT ORDER!

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1.) Why do they still use kinetic chemically-propelled firearms 100,000 years in the future?

Not to be flippant, but why wouldn’t they?

People forget that firearms technology has been used for military applications, at least in the West, for nearly seven hundred years. Cannons were used in the Hundred Years’ War. Firearms technology has been refined and improved considerably since then, and no doubt it will continue to receive refinements and improvements in the future.

Additionally, chemically-propelled firearms would offer many advantages over more advanced weaponry like lasers, railguns, or particle weapons. Especially for handheld weaponry. A chemically propelled firearm doesn’t require electricity or a power source, and can’t be disabled by an EMP. It’s also more durable and rugged than a more advanced weapon, which would almost certainly require delicate electronic components. In fact, some models of firearm can famously be exposed to harsh conditions and continue to function, and there’s no way you could do the same thing with a laser.

Some devices just the apex of their technological niche. Like, despite all the advanced weaponry available in the 21st century, soldiers still carry combat knives, because in a situation where you need a knife, nothing else will suit. I suspect chemically-propelled firearms dominate their niche in the same way.

2.) Why isn’t the technology in SILENT ORDER as advanced as I think it should be?

Well, they do have faster than light travel, artificial gravity, inertial absorption, anti-gravity lifts, shields, plasma weaponry, and ion thrusters. You can’t exactly order any of that stuff off Amazon today. Medical technology is rather more advanced as well – the average human lifespan on Calaskar and other “developed” worlds is around 160 years due to advances in genetic engineering and better understanding of mitochondrial DNA, and cloned replacement limbs and organs are common medical procedures. When a replacement limb can’t be cloned, installing a cybernetic one is typically a one-day medical procedure.

In the backstory, there were five very large Terran Empires that rose and collapsed before the start of the series, which is about a hundred thousand years into the future. Those Terran Empires each tended to have more advanced technology in certain areas than is common at the start of the series – one was a lot better at genetic engineering, another built super-advanced sentient AI, and so forth. When the empire fell or disintegrated into smaller successor states, there was some technical backsliding, and the more advanced technology was lost.

3.) Jack March has the same initials as Jonathan Moeller. Was that deliberate?

No. One of the original inspirations for the series was the James Bond books (more on that below), so I chose a name that was the opposite of James Bond. After all, “march” is kind of the opposite of “bond”, in the sense of movement versus stasis. In the books, James Bond was always a sort of self-destructive alcoholic who gets somewhat worse as the series goes along, and he doesn’t have much character development. By contrast, I wanted March to have more character change and growth.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that gave Jack March the same initials as me until three or four years into writing the series. The obvious is only obvious in hindsight, alas. Occasionally people say March is an authorial self-insert, but he’s not. If he were, he’d be a cranky middle-aged former IT worker who doesn’t like to go out much.

4.) Why doesn’t March sleep with any of the beautiful women he meets in the first four books?

Because he didn’t want to. Like I said, he’s sort of the opposite of James Bond, and doesn’t like unprofessionalism on the job. Also, by the time the series starts, he’s old enough that casual liaisons no longer interest him, and ultimately he would really rather be on his own. It isn’t until he meets a woman who truly understands him that this changes, and the woman understands him because she hates the Final Consciousness just as much as he does.

5.) Why do the characters still use phones?

Well, they’re not “cellular telephones” in the sense that we think of them. They’re more like personal handheld communication and computing devices that are significantly more powerful than anything available today.

That said, words sometimes long, long outlast their original purpose. I mean, the word “mile” originally came from the Latin language, and it described the distance a Roman soldier could cover with a thousand steps. There is no longer a Roman Empire or Roman legionaries, but the term remains. There’s a good chance the word “phone” would outlive our current civilization and continue to refer to a telecommunications device, just as “mile” still refers to a unit of distance even though it doesn’t have anything to do with marching soldiers. Additionally, “phone” is the simplest word available, and using a term like “mobile datapad” or “handheld computer” just seems a bit try-hard.

I used the metric system for distance in the series because the majority of Earth’s population uses it today, so I assume it will eventually win out over time.

6.) Why does March work for a repressive government like Calaskar?

Whether or not Calaskar is repressive depends on one’s perspective. I expect someone from 1850s America(or 1950s America) would find the Calaskaran rather liberal and shockingly egalitarian, but someone from 2024 America would find it repressive.

That said, I think Calaskar is better described as “conformist.” If you don’t criticize the King or the official doctrines of the Royal Calaskaran Church, you can say pretty much anything you want. And Calaskar doesn’t have anything like the social problems of 21st century USA, though that is partly because dissidents are eventually encouraged to leave. Some of Calaskar’s neighbors, like Rustaril and the Falcon Republic, were originally Calaskaran worlds that split off due to ideological differences – Rustaril opted for a form of socialism that led to stagnation and decline, while the Falcon Republic is more capitalistic and libertarian and very unstable, albeit with a cloned army that steps in when things get out of hand. Calaskar claims that its government combines the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, though opinions differ among the characters on whether or not that is actually the case.

However, the series is mostly written from the perspective of March, and he doesn’t much care about everything we just discussed in the previous paragraph. He primarily works for the Silent Order, which is a Calaskaran intelligence agency that answers only to its own leaders and the King. The ultimate mission of the Silent Order is to monitor the elite and upper classes of Calaskaran society, whether political, business, or entertainment elites. If they start acting in a destructive way that will harm Calaskaran civilization, the Silent Order either discredits them, sabotages their careers, or arranges an “accident,” depending on how severe the particular elite’s crimes are. Obviously, many people would have moral qualms about arranging the fatal extrajudicial “accident” of a corrupt government or judicial official. Since March’s own homeworld of Calixtus was betrayed to the Final Consciousness by its elites, he has no problem doing this kind of work.

From March’s perspective, Calaskar opposes the Final Consciousness and has been the primary rival to the Final Consciousness for some time, which is good enough for him. The fact that life on Calaskar is vastly better than anywhere ruled by the Final Consciousness just reinforces his decision.

7.) Was this series inspired by the computer game Starfield?

I admit I LOLed at this question. I started writing SILENT ORDER on New Year’s Eve in 2016, and the final book in the series came out in early September 2023. In fact, if I remember right, Starfield came out like two or three days after I published the final SILENT ORDER book. So I can confidently say that the series wasn’t inspired by Starfield in any way.

That said, I would say that the video games which did help shape my thinking about the books were Wing Commander: Privateer, TIE Fighter, and Master of Orion 1+2.

All from the 1990s, so I suppose I’m dating myself.

8.) What actually did inspire the series?

The video games I mentioned above, for one.

Also the original James Bond books. When I started thinking about a SF series, I decided I wanted to do a spy thriller but IN SPACE! The Final Consciousness was sort of cybernetic space totalitarians. James Bond originally went up against SMERSH and then SPECTRE, but March went up against the covert agents of the Final Consciousness.

There are also Lovecraftian themes in the books, as it is gradually revealed that the Final Consciousness is in fact controlled by cosmic horrors from another universe.

ChatGPT also inspired some of the later books. I had established way back in SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND that a true AI always goes homicidally insane, so when I actually did have to write an AI supercomputer character for one of the later books, I based its behavior on some of ChatGPT’s and Bing Chat’s more hilarious public meltdowns. Though if I had waited a little longer and based it on Google’s AI, the AI supercomputer character could have suggested that the protagonists add glue to their pizza cheese or perhaps eat several small rocks a day for the minerals. The day I wrote this paragraph (June 10th, 2024) Apple announced they were adding a bunch of AI stuff to both the iPad and iPhone, and no doubt more AI errors will soon reach meme status on the Internet.

(Needless to say, my opinion of generative AI in general is quite low.)

9.) Have the covers for the series changed? They look different on Goodreads.

Not only did the covers change, they’ve changed a lot!

The covers went through five different iterations. At first I did them myself in GIMP, and I tried a couple different variations. During Covid I took a Photoshop class, which I admit levelled up my cover design skills significantly, so I tried some character-based covers, but they never had the results I was hoping to see in terms of sales.

In 2022, I saw a Penny Arcade comic that made a joke about how SF readers want to see book covers that show spaceships and planets in close proximity, and while this was a joke, I realized it was nonetheless true. So I redid the covers to their current look that feature spaceships in close proximity to planets, and the series has sold the best overall with the new set of covers.

So, science fiction writers, take heed – the readers want to see planets and spaceships in close proximity on their covers. 🙂

10.) Why aren’t there audiobooks for the series?

In all honesty, it would be just too expensive. At a rough, back-of-the-hand calculation, it would take about $30,000 USD to bring the entire series into audio, and it would take years to see that money back. Plus, I think the series would end up at about 85 hours long, and that’s like two full work weeks just to proof listen to the audio. So, to sum up, it would cost too much, and I don’t want to take on another project of that scale at this time.

11.) What is your favorite book in the series?

SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND for reasons unrelated to the plot. I read an article in 2017 saying that the iPad was a better productivity computer than a Linux desktop, and I thought that was just nonsense for a variety of reasons. So I wrote, edited, and did the entire cover on a Ubuntu Linux desktop just to prove a point.

I do less now with Linux than I did back in 2017, but given how bad Windows 11 has gotten with all the AI stuff, I might go back to writing on a Linux desktop.

And I do like the plot of ECLIPSE HAND as well – it was something that has been knocking around in my head for a while, so I was glad I was able to finally write it down.

12.) Weren’t there originally only supposed to be nine books in the series? Why are there fourteen?

Yes, I planned to stop at nine, because the SILENT ORDER books never sold quite as well as I had hoped. However, there were enough dangling plot threads (specifically the mystery around the Pulse weapon of the Final Consciousness) that I was persuaded to continue and bring the series to a more epic ending than it had in book 9. I started working on book 10 in late 2019, but then Covid happened and derailed things for a while. But at the end of 2021 I was able to pick it up again, and in 2023 I decided it would be my “summer of finishing things” and I pushed on to the final book in the series.

Hopefully it was a suitably epic ending!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who read through to the end of the series and encouraged me to continue with it.  The years 2020-2023 were frustrating ones for a variety of reasons (and I’m sure everyone reading this had their own frustrations in those years), and one of the ways I tried to reduce those frustrations was to put SILENT ORDER to the side for a while. But I am glad I persevered and continued on with the series, even if it took me a while.

Now that it is finished, I can look back on it with a sense of pride for all the hard work that went into it, but mostly with gratitude for all the readers who read the books and enjoyed them.

-JM