![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thoughts on Book Tone
Aug. 15th, 2010 10:45 amFinished reading the Fuller Memorandum, which is the recent Lovecraftian horror meets spy fiction book by Charles Stross. The protagonist is Bob Howard, a computer tech for a government agency, happily married to Mo, a woman in a different department of the same agency, with middle management woes, a boss that may well be immortal, and zany computer geek friends.
Of course, Bob's agency is in charge of occult security, in between IT jobs, he acts as a field agent and computational demonologist, and his wife's position is 'combat epistemologist' -- meaning she kills monsters with a violin made of human bone. He's gone though at least two managers trying to kill him, his friends summon demons in their basement and can turn iPhones into magic detectors, and creepy possibly-immortal bosses mean a whole different thing in context...
It's weird, but Stross's work deals with the Lovecraftian thing, where, are the protagonist notes, even atheism is a false comfort -- there are powerful beings in the universe and they will impersonally eat your face and soul for thinking too damn loud. Previously, one of the short stories mentioned CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, which is spy-speak for The Old Ones Come Back and Eat Our Souls.
( Spoilers for the most recent book )
Of course, Bob's agency is in charge of occult security, in between IT jobs, he acts as a field agent and computational demonologist, and his wife's position is 'combat epistemologist' -- meaning she kills monsters with a violin made of human bone. He's gone though at least two managers trying to kill him, his friends summon demons in their basement and can turn iPhones into magic detectors, and creepy possibly-immortal bosses mean a whole different thing in context...
It's weird, but Stross's work deals with the Lovecraftian thing, where, are the protagonist notes, even atheism is a false comfort -- there are powerful beings in the universe and they will impersonally eat your face and soul for thinking too damn loud. Previously, one of the short stories mentioned CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, which is spy-speak for The Old Ones Come Back and Eat Our Souls.
( Spoilers for the most recent book )
