Thoughts on Book Tone
Aug. 15th, 2010 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesFinished 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.
In the background of the book, it's mentioned that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN may be happening in a couple of months, according to theorists -- space will get weak, suddenly human thoughts will warp reality a lot more, they'll be a week or two of this rush of power, and then things come out of the woodwork and eat us for being the people who don't turn their stereo down. Bob mentions it's one of the reasons he and Mo won't have kids -- because what kind of parent brings a life into the world knowing that in a couple of years, they might have to kill it to avoid the whole 'soul-consuming thing'.
Now, the Laundry has precautions -- one of the short stories was about using Britain's closed-circuit traffic cameras to reproduce a basilisk and the trouble that can happen when the wrong people can hack the system. No one's quite sure if it'll be enough, but people are going down fighting. At least those few that that know about the threat. Some are even willing to draw lines in the sand -- Mo takes her violin in to be examined, and she notes that some time during the 1930s, at least twelve innocents died in horrible ways to make the thing. The appraiser is knowledgeable enough to know what he's dealing with and says so -- and she notes that she's hoping the detailed report will cause her superiors to decide the cost of making another isn't worth it.
Of course, some people who do know have gone the cultist route which is 'this is happening, anyone who thinks we can fight this is crazy, therefore we're going to find a way to capitulate that will keep some of humanity alive, preferable us in particular'. In addition to Russian spies, the book deals with cultists trying to control what they can control.
But something about the book, even with the horrors -- and both Mo and Bob had horrors aplenty in this book -- gives the tone of 'we're not going to go gently into the good night', which makes it somewhat less horrible. I guess part of Lovecraft is this existential dread of 'there is a universe which is vast and incomprehensible, and things that live in it will impersonally eat my face/soul or drive me insane, without a conscious thought'. And the Laundry series has that... but it also has people who are willing to say 'yeah, okay, so we're going to do what we can to keep idiots from accidentally getting their souls eaten or blowing up towns via magic, and do what we can to protect humanity'. With the very real idea that agents will die, or be driven insane, or get their souls eaten -- and I was expecting someone to die/go irreversibly insane/get their soul eaten* in this book -- but at least we're trying.
It's something...
* Granted, Bob notes that his employment contract, to avoid raising dead agents for information, means that death = soul go bye-bye, so these aren't mutually exclusive
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.
In the background of the book, it's mentioned that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN may be happening in a couple of months, according to theorists -- space will get weak, suddenly human thoughts will warp reality a lot more, they'll be a week or two of this rush of power, and then things come out of the woodwork and eat us for being the people who don't turn their stereo down. Bob mentions it's one of the reasons he and Mo won't have kids -- because what kind of parent brings a life into the world knowing that in a couple of years, they might have to kill it to avoid the whole 'soul-consuming thing'.
Now, the Laundry has precautions -- one of the short stories was about using Britain's closed-circuit traffic cameras to reproduce a basilisk and the trouble that can happen when the wrong people can hack the system. No one's quite sure if it'll be enough, but people are going down fighting. At least those few that that know about the threat. Some are even willing to draw lines in the sand -- Mo takes her violin in to be examined, and she notes that some time during the 1930s, at least twelve innocents died in horrible ways to make the thing. The appraiser is knowledgeable enough to know what he's dealing with and says so -- and she notes that she's hoping the detailed report will cause her superiors to decide the cost of making another isn't worth it.
Of course, some people who do know have gone the cultist route which is 'this is happening, anyone who thinks we can fight this is crazy, therefore we're going to find a way to capitulate that will keep some of humanity alive, preferable us in particular'. In addition to Russian spies, the book deals with cultists trying to control what they can control.
But something about the book, even with the horrors -- and both Mo and Bob had horrors aplenty in this book -- gives the tone of 'we're not going to go gently into the good night', which makes it somewhat less horrible. I guess part of Lovecraft is this existential dread of 'there is a universe which is vast and incomprehensible, and things that live in it will impersonally eat my face/soul or drive me insane, without a conscious thought'. And the Laundry series has that... but it also has people who are willing to say 'yeah, okay, so we're going to do what we can to keep idiots from accidentally getting their souls eaten or blowing up towns via magic, and do what we can to protect humanity'. With the very real idea that agents will die, or be driven insane, or get their souls eaten -- and I was expecting someone to die/go irreversibly insane/get their soul eaten* in this book -- but at least we're trying.
It's something...
* Granted, Bob notes that his employment contract, to avoid raising dead agents for information, means that death = soul go bye-bye, so these aren't mutually exclusive
