BooksOfTheMoon

Rule 34 (Halting State, #2)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 3 stars

DI Liz Kavanaugh is head of the Rule 34 squad, a sort of punishment for something that went wrong several years ago. It’s up to her and hers to police internet porn in an independent Scotland. Anwar Hussein was a small-time Internet fraudster who’s spent time behind bars and is trying to go straight, for the sake of his family. The Toymaker is wondering who’s killing all the folk he’s trying to recruit to his large scale organised crime Operation.

Like its predecessor, Halting State this book is told entirely in the second person, a technique that I’ve never been very fond of, but there are solid reasons for that in this book, as Stross sets out in the crib sheet for the book on his blog (note: obviously spoilers at that link!). And I got used to it as well; I think it feels most icky when we’re in the head of the gangster, the Toymaker, who’s creepy as all hell.

For me, this book is at its strongest when it’s doing the police procedural thing, with lots of cool future-tech extrapolated from the early 21st century. At times, though, the pace of new ideas being thrown at you gets a little overwhelming (it feels a bit like Cory Doctorow at times) when the ideas outpace the story. Mostly, though, Stross keeps a handle on that and the book is certainly thought-provoking, not least in its ideas on different kinds of AI.

Book details

ISBN: 9781841497730
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2011

Neptune’s Brood

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

Set in the same universe as, but thousands of years after Saturn’s Children, this book sees historian of banking Krina download into a distant star system on an academic pilgrimage, only to find that she’s being stalked by someone who wants to kill her and the cousin that she’s here to see has disappeared. Chased across a solar system, she has to unravel a mystery that leads back to something lost millennia ago.

I must say that I struggled with some of the economics here, but there was enough action going on that I could cope with it. After a few pages of pontification on the nature of debt and kinds of money, Krina is kind enough to get kidnapped or something blows up to distract you. That’s not to say that it’s difficult or unreadable – some of the ideas are very interesting, and I like that Stross has obviously give a lot of thought to how an interstellar economy, without FTL, would work. The explanation of slow money made sense as I was reading it, but as soon as I tried to explain it to someone else, it just decohered in my head.

On the other hand, bat-pirates (sorry, privateers), a Church dedicated to looking after and spreading the Fragile (ie us old fashioned squishy humans, who died out before Saturn’s Children and which this book suggests have been revived multiple times in the intervening time), a mermaid kingdom and those aren’t even the most mental ideas in the book! Krina is a fun character, someone who would really be working on a spreadsheet but who gets caught up in huge adventures after rumours get out about what she and some of siblings have been working on for fun for decades.

So come for the intrigue and stay for the interstellar economics (and bat-pirates! Did I mention the bat-pirates?).

Book details

ISBN: 9780356501000
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2013

The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

The Laundry Files rumble on and volume 7 is narrated by Alex the vampire PHANG, who first made an appearance in The Rhesus Chart. Here, Alex is sent to Leeds, along with his friend and mentor Pete the Vicar, to scout for a future northern headquarters for the Laundry. What he doesn’t know, is that the city has already been infiltrated by the vanguard of an invasion from another reality and that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN isn’t the only threat in that spectrum.

Well blimey! I swear that every Laundry book will be the last one that I read (I’m really rather squeamish and horror isn’t my preferred genre. The Laundry got its tentacles into me when it was still masquerading as humorous urban fantasy), and yet every one has enough in it to make me want to read the next. And blimey, what a punch this one made. The last third or so of the book is a full scale running battle, told from multiple viewpoints, as the invading force tries to attack the Laundry headquarters at Quarry House in Leeds, Alex off on his own, probably suicidal, side track and a disastrous decision to trigger MAGINOT BLUE STARS in an urban area.

It really felt like the invaders had the upper hand a lot of the time, so every time the human defenders got a score in (by accident or not), it was a punch in the air moment. Stross is really good at these battles (partly because he’s a military hardware buff in real life, so he knows his Starstreak from his ASRAAM. But also partly because he splits up the viewpoints, giving us multiple viewpoints on to the action, juggling the threads very well.

Back at a human scale, it was nice to see Pinky and Brains back, and getting more screen time this time – Pinky even going out into the field. And the romance between Alex and Cassie is very sweet and awkwardly believable (the scene with meeting the parents in particular was made of cringe). It was a way to keep the focus human even as Leeds is crumbling around them.

So yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and Alex is a great new character, although I do miss Bob and his very informal narrative tone (he’s back next year’s The Delirium Brief, though). Oh, and it’s slightly hilarious to see just how much awe that he and Mo now inspire in the likes of Alex. He regards Bob (sorry, Mr Howard), the way that Bob regarded Angleton. So I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how the Eater of Souls 2.0 copes, after tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime, with being grilled by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

Book details

ISBN: 9780356505343
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2016

The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files, #2)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

Software billionaire Ellis Billington is trying to acquire a Soviet Cold War relic and use it to raise a Cthuloid horror from the deeps and Laundry syadmin and sometime agent Bob Howard is all that’s standing in his way. This time Bob is paired with an beautiful agent from the Black Chamber – the American equivalent of his agency – and finds himself playing baccarat in the Caribbean with a pistol under his tuxedo jacket instead of his trusty smartphone and the oddest desire for a martini.

I really enjoyed the second in Charles Stross’s ‘Laundry’ novels. Bob Howard is an engaging protagonist and you feel for him all the way through as everyone around him seems to know more than he does and he stumbles from one apparent disaster to the next trying to figure out what he’s supposed to be doing and then doing it. And it’s certainly nice to see a systems admin type geek getting the front and centre role!

This seems to be Stross’s love-letter to the spy genre, with lots of Bond references and high-tech gadgets thrown in, all with a Lovecraftian undercurrent and some neat twists. Not to mention with the addition of a suite of hacking tools in a USB stick hidden in his bow-tie and a keyboard in his cummerbund. Although Stross left the software world behind as the dot-com bubble burst, his knowledge of the subject is up-to-date enough and fond enough to pass muster.

The bonus short story at the end takes us away from the high-flying spy world and back to the back-biting inter-departmental rivalries within the Laundry (sometimes literally) for a humorous story of an all too real experience with an MMORPG. The afterword in which Stross analyses and pays tribute to Bond and the spy genre is the icing on the cake.

Book details

ISBN: 9781841495705
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2006

The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files, #6)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

The sixth volume of Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series is the first not to be told from Bob Howard’s point of view, instead being narrated by his wife, Dr Mo O’Brien as she is tasked with establishing and leading the Home Office’s new superhero team while dealing with the Pale Violin that she has carried for some years and also trying to do something about her disintegrating marriage to Bob.

There’s a lot of interesting complexity in this book, particularly set as far into the series as it is. After reading it, I had a shot at the spoiler thread about it on Charlie’s blog (a ‘shot’ at it because it’s nearly 600 comments long!) which definitely helped contextualise it a bit.

One thing that I get out of it is that I don’t necessarily think I like Mo. And I really like that. The fact that Stross told a good first person story and didn’t make the narrator that likeable is the mark of a good storyteller. And coming with five books’ worth of background helps as well. Until now we’ve only seen Mo from Bob’s point of view, and, as Stross points out again and again, Bob is a highly unreliable narrator. But specifically this is the woman he’s still in love with and has been married to for a decade so when we see her from his point of view, she’s on a pedestal. From her own point of view, she’s, er, less so. And this is hardly the best time to getting into her head, as the stress of trying to contain the Pale Violin (which she names Lecter) and everything she’s had to do as Agent CANDID is finally getting too much for her. Just when she has to effectively build a new Home Office department from scratch and deal with the politics of that, not to mention separation from her husband, an attractive new male colleague and working with her husband’s exes.

So an awful lot in there, and I look forward to seeing more from her and Bob, although that could be a while yet, as the next book in the series is to be narrated by Alex (the vampire from The Rhesus Chart) and it’s only the one after that which will once again star Bob.

Mind you, I came to these books for the geek humour and spy thriller vibe, with a bit of Lovecraftian stuff going on in the background. That’s obviously a bit of a false-flag. The series is very clearly tending towards horror with a bit of humour thrown in. As CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN intensifies, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep on reading.

Book details

ISBN: 9780356505312
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2015

The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

Imagine a world where Lovecraftian nasties are real and the only thing standing between us and having our brains eaten is a top-secret government department ridden with bureaucratic in-fighting and politics. Reassured? Me neither. Welcome to the world of the Laundry, a secret British agency assigned to clean up incursions from other realities, in which Bob Howard is a lowly techy, who got some field duty and more than he bargained for.

Stross mingles up to the minute modern technology with the supernatural effortlessly in this fun novel (well, it’s more two novellas featuring the same protagonist). He manages to showcase the horror all around us, and the thin thread that our sanity hangs by, along with the mundanity of the bureaucracy that Bob has to fight (the Laundry is ISO 9001 certified and he takes a grim pleasure in describing the various forms that have to be filled out in triplicate). Even Milton Keynes takes on a sinister tone in the second story!

Casual discussions of basilisks, medusas and incantations sit side by side with the Internet, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and flatshares (you think you have odd flatmates, Bob comes home one day to find one of his flatmates trying to scramble an egg without breaking the shell). It’s an odd combination, all told in the first person, but it works remarkably well.

Book details

ISBN: 9781841495699
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2004

The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

“Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as vampires!” That is the recurring refrain of this book. Of course there are vampires, and Bob Howard has to deal with a nest that has emerged in a leading investment bank in the City, on top of struggling with his marriage, dealing with management cargo-cult of Google and a slightly psychotic ex-girlfriend.

Goodness me, this was certainly a bit of a challenging book. I enjoyed the light-touch humour and tongue-in-cheek Lovecraft of the early the Laundry novels, but they have certainly been growing grim of late. This one lulls you into a false sense of security and then whams you in the last few chapters, leaving you bruised, yet also desperate for the next one, given what happened at the climax of this one.

There’s still lots to like here, with Pete, the vicar who Bob drafts in for some research in the The Apocalypse Codex, becoming more of a player, as well as Alex, the vampire banker who kicks off the whole affair but is probably one of the more sympathetic characters in the book.

But, I do have to wonder if it’s time to give up on the Laundry. Horror has never been my favourite genre and these days, as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN draws ever closer, Bob’s memoirs are definitely more horrific than humorous.

Book details

ISBN: 9780356502533
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2014

Glasshouse

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

Robin comes out of memory surgery, not really knowing who he is any more. But something he quickly discovers is that someone or something is after him, wanting him dead, permanently. So he jumps at the opportunity to take refuge in a long-term experiment, where he would be isolated from the outside world. But the experiment isn’t what it seems, and soon Robin is fighting not only for his life, but for his very essence.

I enjoyed this far-future story, where Humanity, or post-Humanity, rather, has the ubiquitous ability to edit their physical forms and their memories at will. There are a lot of ideas here, starting with the idea of a censorship virus that affects the teleportation gates that bind human civilisation together: this virus edits the memory of whoever passes through it, so thoroughly that nobody now remembers what it was trying to suppress. This led to the Censorship Wars, which were won, but at the cost of fracturing the civilisation into isolated ‘polities’ and removing the authorisation and authentication protocols that form the basis of identity in post-Human space.

Within the glasshouse itself, we are shown the terror of really not being in control. The glasshouse is a panopticon, where the experiementers have total control over your body; but the story is tinged with the dark humour of the inmates trying to understand what it’s like to live in what the experimenters think may be something like the mid to late twentieth century. Also here is the attempts to hide things in the panopticon and even to ferment revolution.

Stross is good at thinking through the implications of a technology and following that through to conclusions that are unexpected and, at times, terrifying. Not always the easiest read, but definitely worthwhile.

Book details

ISBN: 9781841493930
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2006

Palimpsest

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

I enjoyed this novella that covers some of the more intricate nature of time travel. The Stasis is an organisation that has access to time travel and uses it to shape human history, preserving the human race, and reseeding it on Earth after it goes extinct, as it inevitably does.

Our protagonist is Pierce, someone plucked out of time in the early 21st century after he fulfils the initiation of killing his own grandfather and we follow him as he progresses through his training to a full agent of the Stasis, his loves and lives (yes, lives: time travel, remember). The palimpsest of the title refers to time being overwritten and the creation of unhistories as it is done, something that becomes important later.

The scope of the ideas in this short novella are amazing, as two competing futures are described, each spanning deep time, and the kinds of mega-scale engineering required for both is quite brain-popping and jaw-droppingly impressive. It takes some concentration to keep on top of the timey-wimey stuff but it’s totally worth it.

Book details

ISBN: 9781596064218
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Year of publication: 2009

The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

By Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars

There’s an American preacher reaching up to Number 10 and getting much deeper than he should. The Laundry are worried, so they send (the long-suffering) Bob Howard to investigate. Well, they send some other people and send Bob to keep an eye on them. I guess he’s finding out who watches the watchers.

We find out more about the Laundry in the fourth book in Stross’s series, and there are revelations about Bob including fallout from the last book (The Fuller Memorandum) and a bit of a jaw-dropping ending (not to mention the worrying sight of an Auditor smiling).

This book wasn’t nearly as dark as its predecessor. It had some disturbing images (maternity/spinal injury unit, I’m looking at you!), but nothing along the lines of what happens in the previous volume. I’m very glad of that, although I still think that as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN approaches, I may find the books harder to read (post-apocalyptic fiction isn’t really something I like).

This book did continue a trend started in the Fuller Memorandum of it not all being told in the first person. Stross (and Bob) acknowledge that it’s sometimes useful to be able to tell things from other points of view, and this is acknowledged at the outset of this volume of ‘Bob’s memoires’. Following the end of this book, I think this is something we’ll probably see more of this to come, as Bob leaves the everyman sphere that made him such a great narrator as part of his rise up the management tree.

Cameos from Pinky and Brains are present and correct, and this book’s gadget is a bit of a doozy (even if I don’t think it gets nearly enough use).

So still spy-fi-ish, but as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN looms and the loonies and cultists (sorry, tautology) come out to play, the books are getting steadily darker in tone. Still very enjoyable, if not as much fun as they have been.

Book details

ISBN: 9780356500980
Publisher: Orbit
Year of publication: 2012

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