Did someone pay you to write The Zenith Angle (Score 1)

It stands out in your body of work as a steaming pile of used hay. It was written after your "retirement." I am quite pleased that y's theou've continued to write fiction - Zeitgeist would have been a fine last book, but I've enjoyed almost everything you've written since then. Zenith Angle, however, was a true stinker. After my friends and I read it, we would often smoke and speculate that Someone In Government paid you more than your usual per-word rate to come out of retirement to write some recruiting materials. Which were crap. What's the deal, yo?