I’ve been blabbing on about Charlie’s excellent blog for a while now, both here and on Twitter, so it should come as no surprise that I’d eventually get around to reading some of his books. I figured I’d start with the Laundry series (named for the nickname of the super secret British bureaucracy/counter-espionage agency/counter-nameless-many-tentacled-horrors-from-beyond-spacetime agency that employs Bob Howard, the series’ protagonist) because the premise sounded interesting, and because like a lot of genre fiction, it’s bloody hard to find copies of his books that aren’t those horribly shitty, fall-apart-if-you-look-at-them mass market paperbacks, and the two Laundry books were the only ones I could get trade or hardcover copies of.
So, the premise: mathematics and magic are, on some level, more or less the same thing. This actually makes a certain amount of sense the way Stross explains it. I’m going to quote about two and a half pages of the book, because it’s really the only way to get a handle on it (and it’s a good introduction to Stross’ writing style):
For the most part, the universe really does work the way most of the guys with Ph.D.s after their names think it works. Molecules are made out of atoms which are made out of electrons, neutrons, and protons—of which the latter two are made out of quarks—and quarks are made out of leptoquarks, and so on. It’s turtles all the way down, so to speak. And you can’t find the longest common prime factors of a number with many digits in it without either spending several times the life of the entire universe, or using a quantum computer (which is cheating). And there really are no signals from sentient organisms locked up in tape racks at Arecibo, and there really are no flying saucers in storage at Area 51 (apart from the USAF superblack research projects, which don’t count because they run on aviation fuel).
But that isn’t the full story.
[ … ]
I could wibble on about Crowley and Dee and mystics down the ages but, basically, most self-styled magicians know shit. The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn’t work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem—named after Alan Turing, who you’ll have heard of if you know anything about computers.
That kind of magic works. Unfortunately.
[ … ]
The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—translation: all your bank account are belong to us—and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.
This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes there are things that listen, and talk back—see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics—computerised or otherwise—draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)
Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of those other universes don’t play by our rulebook?
Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters—which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem—and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don’t want to be standing at ground zero when that happens.
Which is why we have the Laundry… (p. 16-18)
That’s a lot, especially if you don’t speak Geek (I don’t speak it like a native, but I have enough to get the gist—Conversational Geek, if you will), but generally the idea is that you can use computers, your municipal power grid, a dash or two of blood, and the right kind of math to summon Lovecraftian terrors from other realms to suck brains, destroy sanity, or even dramatically speed up the eventual heat-death of the universe. There are various CIA/NSA/MI-6 analogs around the world who try to keep this from happening, but also try to harness some of the powers to better play out local power games (where “local” means “on planet Earth”). It’s an interesting blend of the horror, spy, and science fiction genres, and as you can see from the long passages I quoted above, there’s no shortage of smart-ass Geek humour either. (In fact, far from there being a shortage, there’s often too much. What comes off as clever in a 2,000 word blog post can get awfully grating across a three hundred page novel.)
The good news is that Stross does his level best to keep the techno-illiterate afloat, and for the most part it’s uniquely good fun. Our protagonist, Bob Howard, is a civil servant who works mostly in departmental IT, and he has to deal with the bureaucracy that comes with that, but he’s also becoming a field agent, for which he is almost completely unprepared. His narration is a good balance between learned guide and fish-out-of-water reader-analog, and even though he’s a snarky jackass half the time, he’s kind of likable.
There are some things that Stross just doesn’t do very well, though, or at least, doesn’t do well in such a way as to open up the book for a more general audience (Bob Howard, a pale, graceless, mildly obsessive technophile with zero taste and only slightly better than zero social skills is pretty much Stross’ target audience distilled), and a lot of that has to do with the spy thriller aspects of the series, but we’ll get to that when we talk about The Jennifer Morgue, when it’s more central to the plot. For right now, I want to talk about characters.
There is a trope in science fiction that goes back almost all the way to the beginning (or at least to the early 20th Century) of the scientist or engineer as hero. It’s not quite a Mary Sue (a brand of authorial wish-fulfillment of particular concern to the science fiction community), but it’s close enough to be problematic, in my estimation. The archetype shows up in a lot of Neal Stephenson’s fiction, though generally heavily adapted for context, and with substantially less critical distance in some of Cory Doctorow’s work, to name some contemporary examples (the appallingly bad “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” from Overclocked is a particularly egregious example of this, and a big part of why I think Doctorow is such a hack). The idea is that an engineer or scientist (regardless of discipline, really) can take a handful of basic tools and a predilection for logic and pure reason, and save the Earth, get the girl, and/or spearhead the reconstruction of human society, his or her skillset being so clearly more useful than anyone else’s that folks will fall in line behind him. This is actually not so far off from the way a lot of my computer/engineering geek friends see themselves (though, of course, not all), but it’s complete and utter bullshit in the real world. There’s no accounting at all made for psychology, emotions, politics, or even the simple fact that a knack for logic doesn’t translate in the ability to master every sort of utilitarian skill. Life just doesn’t work like that, but science fiction, unfortunately, sometimes does. Now Bob isn’t a rigid example of this archetype, but he is cast from a flawed version of that mold. After following the blog, it’s clear that he has a set of skills Stross values, and has little use or knowledge of the skills Stross doesn’t see value in (particularly skills that operate on a purely quantitative or social level; he refers to makeup as “warpaint” at one point, and while that is a way to read it, a not very nuanced, Feminist Primer for Practical Men kind of way, it ignores about a billion other things that are going on, including the power that mastering its application can sometimes grant, and Howard doesn’t feel the need to look at it any deeper, because Stross doesn’t feel the need to look at it any deeper). Bob Howard doesn’t know when to shut up, has an unsubtle (geeky, but unsubtle) sense of humour, has a believably fucked up relationship with his ex, and is more than a little neurotic, but he believes (and Stross clearly believes it, because it’s what happens) that if you gave him a multi-tool and a Palm Pilot, he could Fix Things. Considering that The Atrocity Archives is written by a computer geek (Stross is, to hear him tell it, the reason robots.txt exists), Bob Howard is about as close to a Mary Sue as a character can get before actually becoming one. (Hardcore Stross fans: I look forward to your letters.)
The other character I want to talk about is Mo, or rather Doctor Dominique O’Brien, The Atrocity Archives‘ female lead and, naturally, Bob Howard’s eventual love interest. Mo is an almost perfect example of a female character in the vein of the Canadian Indie Style, which means it probably comes from some kind of impulse that’s less localized than I first imagined. As far as I can tell, the only quality she lacks from my tentative definition is bisexuality, but that’s more of a “yet to be determined” thing than a definite “no.” Her first appearance goes like this:
Mo is striking. She’s a good six feet tall, for starters. Strong features, high cheekbones, freckles, hair that looks like you could wrap it in insulation and run the national grid through it. She’s got these big dangly silver earrings with glass eyeballs, and she’s wearing combat pants, a plain white top, and a jacket that is so artfully casual that it probably costs more than I earn in a month. Oh, and there’s a copy of Philosophical Transactions on Uncertainty Theory in her left hand …
You see where this is going, right? Mo is the smart, tough, capable (but beautiful—the tall redhead, a kind of Red Sonja/Amazon type, is an extremely popular idealized female body type with male geeks in the various geek communities I exist on the fringe of) female scientist (or in this case, philosopher, but in a sciency way) who has Discovered Something Worth Killing Over who must now be rescued, but who will nonetheless be the aggressor in forming a romantic and sexually exciting relationship with the pasty, snarky, socially awkward (but really smart!) guy in the pocket protector. She suppresses her femininity (or rejects most—not all, remember the jangly earrings—conventional displays of femininity) in favour of the functional, going so far as to discard her interesting, multi-syllabic given name in favour of a single-syllable masculine one. While Bob Howard smells vaguely of geek wish fulfillment, Mo fairly reeks of it. She even dresses up in Ren-Faire chic for a classy night on the town. Stross makes Mo so clearly attractive and capable a character for his core audience that I found I didn’t much like her. She was just too perfect. It read like Stross was swapping the perfect male hero with the perfect female heroin, but leaving her in the role of princess in the castle (more on this when we get to The Jennifer Morgue).
For someone like me, who sees books like The Atrocity Archives as a diversion from more serious reading (not just from more serious literary reading, but more serious genre reading as well), this is a book with a lot of problems that still manages to present a fascinating world with a secret history that’s a lot of fun to escape to. As far as those problems go, however, I am clearly an edge case for Stross; interested, but not part of his core audience. He’s simply not writing for me. I should also probably mention that my copy of The Atrocity Archives included a short Bob Howard novella called “The Concrete Jungle,” and a very interesting essay on the origins of the Laundry series called “Inside the Fear Factory.”
Next up is The Jennifer Morgue, by Charles Stross.
