In Ninefox Gambit, I introduced the Shuos faction, who are the sneaky strategists and spymasters. In that book, they spend a lot of time on stereotypical cloak-and-dagger missions. In Raven Stratagem, the sequel, however, I wanted to go in a different direction.

Part of the reason was that one of the three main viewpoint characters in Raven Stratagem is the Shuos hexarch, Mikodez. And Mikodez is that deadliest of things: a bureaucrat. I wanted him as a POV character partly because, as the single hexarchate character with the highest security clearance, he’d be able to give the kind of context that poor Cheris lacked all through Ninefox Gambit.

The other reason was that I had two reasons to respect bureaucrats. One is personal, while the other has to do with a TV series that Marie Brennan introduced me to, The Sandbaggers. I’ll tell you about the latter first.

The Sandbaggers was a British spy series set in the Cold War created by Ian Mackintosh. One of the other spy series I’m familiar with is the much more recent Burn Notice. The two shows are pretty much diametrically opposed. Burn Notice features fast slick action, gadgets, and so many car explosions in Miami that I am honestly convinced that the FBI would have cordoned off the city as an internal war zone. The Sandbaggers, on the other hand, generally relies on cerebral dialogue and conflicts of loyalty for its drama, has very little overt action (it would probably be a nightmare to make a fanvid out of), and exudes a chilling air of realism. One of the mysteries of The Sandbaggers is that Mackintosh may have had a background in intelligence – certainly I would not be surprised if this were true – and the show ends on a cliffhanger because he vanished under mysterious circumstances. In any case, a lot of the maneuvering in The Sandbaggers is political maneuvering, not just between different spy agencies, but within Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service itself.

The Shuos aren’t particularly realistic as spies (among other things, their Chronic Backstabbing Disorder should have rendered them nonfunctional and/or irrelevant in short order). I was writing space opera and I wasn’t fussed with details considering that, in any sane world, the hexarchate should have self-immolated centuries ago. Still, I admired the attentiveness to bureaucracy in The Sandbaggers and wanted a little of that flavor for myself.

The other reason I respect bureaucracies is that one of my summer jobs involved working for one, albeit in a much less frightening setting than a Cold War spy agency! When I was in college, I worked summers at the Cornell Engineering Registrar. (Thank you, Federal Work-Study! It was a great job.) There I got some fascinating glimpses into the internal workings of a college bureaucracy. I helped schedule incoming freshmen, handled some data entry, and pulled up records for the actual adult administrators who ran the place. I even had the power to change grades, which I swear I didn’t use for evil (although I did have to sign an NDA). Basically, one of the routine things that happened during the summers was that grade change forms would come in for students who were completing work for Incompletes that needed to be changed to actual grades, and as part of my job I would put those grade changes through.

How does this relate to spies, you might ask? Well, at the highest level I presume Shuos Mikodez and his advisors aren’t dealing with grade change forms. They probably have minions for that stuff. But I imagine running an interstellar spy agency would require massive amounts of bureaucracy. And I tried to reflect this in some of how I portrayed Mikodez’s daily life, for which I’m pretty sure he’s not thanking me!

Raven Stratagem is released in June in the US and the UK by Solaris