(10) CHARLES STROSS –

LAUNDRY FILES (2004-2023)

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Great Cthulhu in the Cold War!

One of my favorite SF short stories is Stross’ A Colder War, which is something of a precursor to the Laundry series, albeit in an alternative universe. What would have happened if the Antarctic expedition in H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” actually happened in our world? In short, nothing good – or a fate worse than global thermonuclear annihilation.

What ensues is a Cold War arms race, but with extra-dimensional entities instead of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union has its ultimate doomsday ace – or rather joker – in the hole in the form of a particular entity based on captured Nazi research into a certain underwater city. The United States has its own contingency plan in the form of 300 megatons of nuclear weapons, and when that fails, a backup contingency plan or insanely desperate last resort. There are worse things than death in the Cthulhu Mythos…

His Laundry series ups the ante on his use of the Lovecraftian horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. Commencing with the first book (and still my favorite), The Atrocity Archives, extradimensional entities of evil serve as the backdrop of a secret history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, espionage and government bureaucracy – all combined in the British spy agency known as the Laundry. Magic is simply higher mathematics – which applied in certain circumstances can open gates to other dimensions. The protagonist, a computer expert known as Bob Howard, unintentionally did just that and found himself conscripted by the Laundry, Britain’s occult secret service. Unfortunately, incidents like it are becoming increasingly common with the increasing computational power and mathematical applications of the modern world (and of human minds) – indeed, the Laundry anticipates this increase (amongst other things, such as the position of our world in space) will inevitably align or open up our world to other dimensions (“when the stars are right” in the parlance of the Mythos) and has contingency plans for extradimensional invasion. Of course, the Laundry is not exactly optimistic about humanity’s prospects – its usual best-case scenario is for repopulation after an extinction event – but it plans to go down swinging…

FANTASY & HORROR

Yes – this is one of my SF entries that obviously overlaps with fantasy…and cosmic horror.

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)