I'm having an increasingly love hate relationship with this series. The early books in the series had enthralling build ups but very weak endings. StrI'm having an increasingly love hate relationship with this series. The early books in the series had enthralling build ups but very weak endings. Stross seems to have overcome his problems building interesting exciting finales, but the books themselves are getting more and more boring in the lead up.
And I'm really beginning to loath Bob as a narrator. It's getting to the point where I'd be ok with Bob being eaten by some tentacle cosmic horror if I could just get his overly self-aware, self-important, not as funny as he thinks he is, hipster meme dropping self to just shut up. Really, as an exercise in realistic creation of a semi-autistic English IT nerd, I have to admit it's pretty convincing, but Bob is turning into one of those pathetic nerds that irritates even other nerds. Sadly, I'm more and more convinced that the reason Bob's characterization is convincing, is Bob is just Charles himself.
Backing up a bit, my first encounter with Charles was through the 1981 edition of the Fiend Folio, which was unique in being largely the creation of the UK branch of nerds rather than the Wisconsin clan. One problem with this novel is if that if you don't understand what I just said, you won't understand the novel either. On some level as a geek I like that Stross doesn't bother to explain himself to the reader, but if he's going to do that he should go full bore and stop putting full summaries of the setting and recaps of past events every 20 pages. But even more so, I'd just rather he stop trying to prove he's a real geek and just get on with the story telling. Seriously, at this point adding oblique references to Numenera and the hundreds of other geek bits of the moment is doing nothing to make this a better story. It's all wink, wink, nudge, nudge and let's see how many geek bonus XP we can earn if we reference some obscure element of the first episode of the original Star Trek, etc.
But any way, in Fiend Folio Charles came up with the idea of the Slaad. Now the truth is, that the Slaad were a mix of genius and epic fail. They were genius enough to survive as beloved reoccurring content for a particular sort of geek, and epic fail enough that everyone that has looked at them seriously has said to themselves, "This is (almost) totally wrong." It's not that they weren't cool enough, it's just that back in those days if something was supposed to be an embodiment of Chaos, no one really thought very hard about what that meant and the resulting creatures aren't really actually very good at embodying chaos as a concept. Instead, they are a couple of good ideas married to a couple of bad ideas that basically makes them a kind of demon-lite. Mechanically, they served a very important role in D&D in that they were one of the few monsters that had actually been written to realistically provide a challenge to high level PCs. Conceptually they may have been light weight demons, but mechanically they were foes++. As a game token, they worked really well. As reification of some idea to toy with in your intellectual space, they just didn't - solid crunchy play things on one level and half-baked never refined ideas on the other.
That's largely what the Laundry stores have always been, except that at least back in the day - as he was with the Slaad - Stross was a content provider. In these latest works, Stross seems less like a content provider and more like a content aggregator that is half Google web crawler and half 'Will it Blend?'. Every paragraph dumps 50 meme references so that I really think it would be possible to reconstruct Stross's browser history in detail by pulling apart the novel, right down to which essays on The Guardian he read, which reddit threads he browsed, and on which days he visited DailyKos or DU to figure out what his colleagues across the pond were reading.
The result of this is that Bob is the only believable character in the series, and only because Bob is Charles. When Charles tries to give a voice to any other character in the series, it just completely falls flat. Now, as a DM I've encountered this sort of problem before. In my experience, 80% of RPers are only able to RP themselves. But in a session of D&D or WEG Star Wars or Delta Green, it really doesn't matter if the player can only be themselves, because its kind of cool to get answers to the question, "What would my friend do if he found himself in a burning building being overrun by 5th dimensional star vampires?" or "If my friend was secret agent, how would he handle a plot by occult shape changers to take over the government?" But it's a bit annoying in a novel, particularly a novel with such an increasingly one dimensional Marty Stu as Bob is becoming.
A bit of a spoiler here, but on page 1 of the book I guessed that Stross was going to kill off Mo. I'd seen it coming for a couple of books now. Mo is just getting in the way of Bob's increasingly sexy geek mojo. For the last three or four books, Bob would have been getting it on with a whole host of sexy eager girl super spies, if it wasn't for that whiny weepy ball and chain he has to go back to and which is a continual drag on his libido and sense of cool. It's clearly what Charles wanted to do, even as he had his alter self scrupulously adhering faithfully to his marriage vows.
Although everything in the story went pretty much exactly how I expected in every plot point, I guessed wrong about Mo', and I haven't decided for myself whether I think my guessing wrong is the best thing about the story because it means Howard/Stross has chosen the best angels of his nature, or whether I find it lazy cowardice as an author because Howard/Stross can now keep having his cake and eating it to.
Lastly, the story is no longer in the least bit scary. Stross still has never once excelled in terms of fear that moment Howard is racing across an alien landscape in order to close a door before something too big to imagine eats his whole universe way back in the first book. I hesitate to even classify this thin soup of totally scareless scenes as horror, except that by convention stories about vampires are in the horror category and Stross keeps name dropping to increasingly little point the Lovecraftian mythos. But when you are saving the Earth by sticking a sticker on it, it's long left horror and entered the world of camp. ...more
I like this book well enough, but can't really recommend it. It has numerous flaws that I found myself overlooking simply because it was pushing so maI like this book well enough, but can't really recommend it. It has numerous flaws that I found myself overlooking simply because it was pushing so many geek buttons. To begin with, the novel fails utterly to set the right tone for a horror story, and after page 50 or so its more like a slapstick comedy with an occasional gruesome murder. Also, the book has more techno-babble than an entire season of Star Trek: TNG. It's the worst case I've ever encountered in all of my years reading science fiction. Also, there are numerous references that can only be appreciated by someone with an intimate knowledge of Lovecraft's works, but all too often these references seem to be little more than random name dropping. In some cases, the reference didn't even fit. So, on one hand, if you haven't read the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft, then the amount of what will appear to be random techno-babble you have to wade through doubles. And on the other hand, if you have, then you'll be wondering why the cultist invokes the name of his god's most hated enemy when making a metaphor about contacting his god. Also, the more you think about the plot (and, not to give too much away but the meta-plot as well), the less the story makes sense. Ultimately, the twist comes from such far left field and is so poorly executed that it simply seems to be a bad trick by the author on the reader who has been in good faith reading the story. In the best plotted novels, when the twist comes, it makes scenes in the story make more sense and you get the sense you missed things. In this case, it made the story make less sense and muddled more prior scenes than it clarified.
Still, for all that, I found I couldn't help but enjoy a story about a guy whose job is to hack into the mainframes of necromancers with his shoelaces and cast spells of contagious data corruption on thier operating systems....more
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