Pippa Middleton has secured a publishing deal.

The younger sibling of Princess Catherine, famous for being the possibly-sexier sister of the sexy royal, has received a reported £400k advance from Penguin to do a book on hosting parties, and there is brouhaha and fulmination in the word of letters.

All right, lookee. This happens from time to time, and it’s important to recognise a couple of things. First, this is not a statement of confidence in an author’s creative talent or even a moment of nepotism and intrigue. It is a commercial transaction. It could as easily be a deal to endorse perfume made by Chanel, record an album of folks songs with Daniel Radcliffe or design lingerie with Agent Provocateur. If it was a face-cream sponsorship, half a million quid would look a bit minor. Pippa Middleton may or may not write well, but at this point the book is only a gleam in her eye. The deal was done, apparently, on the concept, and the brute fact of it is that Penguin’s imprint believe they will make money on it. This is a good thing. An imprint which makes money then has more money to spend the following year on more conventional book deals. It’s not a point of comparison for anyone writing a book unless their name is also Middleton, or Windsor. The only way in which this is bad is if the book tanks, which could happen, but Penguin presumably reckon they’ll make their money back on the strength of royal appeal in the first instance and in the second the, er, long tail of Middleton admirers who believe subconsciously that if they buy the book for a female friend Pippa herself may explode from its pages wearing nothing but an ostrich feather and a pair of Manolos.

I’ve been on the pointy end of this discussion, because I got a large (albeit inaccurately reported) advance for The Gone-Away World, and there will forever be a special place in my heart for Doug Johntsone for saying, basically, that whatever it had been the book was worth it. In a way, that was a different situation; there was an actual book to argue over, and a writer who proposed to be a writer for the foreseeable future, and so on. Even so, the logic of commerce was in play in pretty much the same way. Free news coverage attends big advances, discussion and brand-awareness and all that jazz, and William Heinemann/Random House believed that in the long run the decision would pay them. Because that is what big companies do, and international publishing houses are big companies.

Much more important:

The wicked souls from @Gollancz asserted on Twitter that the advance was actually for “the first two books in an epic Space Opera sequence”… Which was incredibly exciting and totally mendacious! Exciting because if we had an openly geeky royal cool person, that would actually slightly rock. And mendacious because, so far as we know, we do not!

However, I have seen an early pitch for this non-existent book from a parallel universe, and because confidentiality does not extend across quantum realities, I am permitted to share it with you…

In the deep darkness of the Ataraxis Cleft, the people of the Lace await the coming of the one they call the Harbinger. The Lace have forgotten whether the Harbinger is a sign of doom or exultation, and factions are developing which may ultimately provoke a civil war. The doomsayers are led by Old Prince Sheenan Igan, a battle-hardened warrior with a scathing wit. His son Jelbert is caught between his love for duchess Mellida of Cor, who is a secret believer in the doctrine of joy, a shoe model, and maker of holy pastries, and his filial duty to betray her to his father.

Meanwhile, Mellida’s clone Jacinta – created by the Evil Parliament for reasons even she does not know – is now an agent of the Luminal League, a ninja cult concealed within the priesthood of joy and dedicated to going out into the wider galactic realms to seek the actual truth – a heresy among the Lace. When Jelbert’s patrol ship encounters Jacinta’s stealth rocket and she sneaks aboard his vessel, she realises she has an opportunity to unravel the knot…

And in the blazing corona of the suns beyond the Cleft, something vast is waiting!..

(There. And not a bottom joke in sight. Oops, well, just one then.)

Sadly, it seems we’re going to get a book about entertaining instead.

I don’t have time to tell you stories right now.

I am, however, interested in the whole Moscow/story thing theoretically as well, in the I believe one aspect of fiction is the promulgation of massively compressed statements of your own second-to-second experience, like a vidcap of your what it is to be you. Dmitry Bykov (about whom more anon) suggested that fiction makes us deathless.

The other thing I will say is that drivers in Moscow have a varied understanding of speed limits, lane markings, and what constitutes survival-friendly conduct on the road. It is a vast stew of competing styles, interweaving and producing one great symphony of automotive terror.

Leave your bicycle at home.

So what’s the vodka bit? You’ll have to wait, I’m out of time.

Good to be home, though.