:) This calls for a horny pre-canon fanfic in which Toreth solves some terribly mundane crime on Mars. Maybe they only had like five Justice officers on base and they were all down with flu? Maybe, hmm, mildly defiant  graffiti kept appearing in weird places? Mildly. Mostly things along the lines of “this is the highest I could reach”. He never talks about it, because the culprit was a rogue roomba. A spiritual descendant of Stabby.

I like it!  And with a dry base, it would have to be either sex or solving crime, as Toreth doesn’t do very well with boredom.  Maybe another bored base resident decided to spice things up by playing with some illegal AI programming.  They could probably find a satisfactory way to solve their boredom together. :-)

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to open a delivery before 👀 @mannafrancis

Oh, wow!  I hope you enjoy them all. I’d feel terrible if you got halfway through and decided, nah, these aren’t so good. :-)

I read the series a couple of years ago on the website and I’ve been meaning to buy them ever since haha, they’ve finally got their rightful place on my bookshelf ^^

Thank you very much!  And I hope you’ll enjoy the extra stories.  They’re some of my favourites, especially the B-C point of view ones which were such fun to write.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to open a delivery before 👀 @mannafrancis

Oh, wow!  I hope you enjoy them all. I’d feel terrible if you got halfway through and decided, nah, these aren’t so good. :-)

I don’t usually do this, because I fucked up when I wrote the story and that’s all on me, so explanations after the fact are tacky.  But, be that as it may.  The Founding Fathers Amendment is meant to be a constitutional amendment that was made in the future, relative to our now.  I tried to eyeball a timeline to give it a number, but amendments to the Constitution are really irregularly spaced, so I chickened out and gave it a nickname, like the second amendment is usually referred to as ‘the right to bear arms’.  The nicknames refers to the Amendment supposedly ‘restoring’ what the original founding fathers must ‘really’ have wanted before all that Bill of Rights nonsense.  It’s not supposed to be creating new founding fathers.

Somehow this made sense when I wrote it, and while I side-eyed it a few times in editing I persuaded myself it did actually make my intent clear.  Obviously I was wrong, though.

(The character names are just made up.  I think Grant might have been a moment of Blakes 7 nostalgia, but I don’t really remember)

Does anyone remember when Mind Fuck was originally put online? Right now it says it was last updated 28-10-2007 but that’s when the books came out so it must have been put online (and taken down for a while?) before that but I can’t seem to find any information on that

I don’t know the original date, but @mannafrancis may know, and she tends to answer fans as best she can.

The advantage of never deleting old email is that it’s a decent substitute for my terrible memory.

In November 2002 I posted to a mailing list about the Mannazone going live and also got the first feedback for Administration stories.  I don’t think that I’ve ever taken them down, bar the hosting site itself having occasional problems.

Warrick’s birthday is coming on May 2nd.

Apparently. Family Values: “I suggest we move on the thirtieth of April, if that’s acceptable.” And later “ The movers had been booked for yesterday” and, on the same day, “ Tomorrow for sure, since, as Sara had reminded him again before she left, it was Warrick’s birthday.”

Is there a date for Toreth more precise than “early July”? Sara’s is some time in spring too.

Happy birthday, Warrick!

I’ll thank you on his behalf.  Weirdly, he and I share a birthday.  Wacky coincidence, huh?

(@tehanulilac I don’t know it’s in the series but this is something I actually wrote down and can find.  Toreth’s birthday is the 10th July, and Sara’s in the 2nd April.  Dillian’s in the 3rd August.)

The saying Kel’s referring to is ‘[Person] couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery’, meaning that they’re incompetent.

Pretty sure I got Kier Warrick’s extra as fuck coffee maker for Christmas

Hey, you did!  How’s the coffee from it taste?  Any better than from less entertaining coffee makers?  (Sadly, I can’t drink coffee because it gives me a headache.)

p.s. Happy New Year!

Could it actually be the 22nd century?

In the Administration verse that is :). If the builders of the Parthenon “had been dead for more than two and a half thousand years”. I did this calculation before when first reading this line in Quis Custodiet…, but my Parthenon construction date must have been rubbish. Wikipedia says it’s 432 BCE; plus 2.5 thousand is 2068. Now add the 50 years or so for the last of the actual builders to die of hoary old age, plus some unknown number for “more than”. It still feels like the 21st to me and Toreth’s dates could be off, also the “how old are you” conceresation in Caged sort of vaguely implied to me that they hadn’t gone over a century cusp in their lifetimes… hmm. Right now even this would feel like a spoiler, so I’m saving the question for some time later, but it’s definitely on the list.

Fun fact - for a while my general idea of a date for the start of the series was 2095, purely because I’m an ELO fan.