(Today’s guy: Charles Stross
If you’re the sort of person who thinks that mixing higher mathematics, spy fiction, and the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of cool… well, you’ve probably already read The Atrocity Archives
Looking for something to read? (Charles Stross)
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See, this is why I don’t mind funding the National Endowment of the Arts.
You can watch the video below only if you promise to read David Thompson’s post on it first. It’s important that you do that: it’s not fair for me to reproduce it in full here, and it’s just too good to miss.
OK, you did that? Excellent. Here’s the video:
OK, see why I don’t mind funding the NEA?
Precisely: if we let somebody like Teixeira just wander around loose to try to find his own food, clothing and shelter, chances are excellent that when he finally autodarwinates* he’d accidentally take somebody with a net positive use to society with him.
So, it’s not so much a government subsidy as it is life insurance.
Moe Lane
*Thank you, Charlie Stross
…oh. Right. Should have checked first. Never mind…
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Book of the Week: The Jennifer Morgue.
In one of my odder switches, I’m replacing You Can Do Anything, Daddy
That’s a lot of meeting there, really.
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Book of the Week: The Trade of Queens.
Because I broke down and eventually read The Revolution Business
And so, farewell to The Cat in the Hat
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Book of the Week: The Fuller Memorandum.
Ten days to go until The Fuller Memorandum
Ten. Freaking. Whole. Days.
And so, back into the shadows with Out of the Dark
Moe Lane
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Odd thing about the Fuller Memorandum.
It would seem that The Fuller Memorandum
And that means that it has to be shipped to bookstores before the official publication date.
And sometimes they screw up, and put one copy in the relevant genre section.
And sometimes a person is walking through the relevant genre section in that magic golden hour between somebody screwing up, and somebody noticing the screw-up. On the off chance that something like this could happen.
And sometimes that person notices the book, grabs it without breaking stride, and heads for the register.
And sometimes that person buys the book, and gets away clean.
Not that I’d know anything about that, of course.
Moe Lane
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Just got my copy of the Laundry RPG…
…it’s very nifty. For those wondering: The Laundry is a roleplaying game based on the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross
Good times, good times.
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“Equoid.” (I said that unicorns were bad! I totally SAID.)
New Laundry novella from Charles Stross:
And of interest is this passage from the blurb:
…as it turns out, unicorns are real. They’re also ravenous killers from beyond spacetime…
I KNEW IT. Hell, I’ve been saying precisely that about unicorns for almost two decades now. And yes, I can prove that.
Moe Lane
PS: I only wish Charles Stross had borrowed off of me. Nah, I figure that he riffed off an idea of Terry Pratchett’s, which is pretty much what I did.
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In the Mail: Charles Stross’s The Rhesus Chart.
Part of his Laundry Files series. Lovecraft meets spy novels, etc. etc. etc. Looking forward to reading it.
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Book of the Week: “The Annihilation Score.”
This one I am anticipating: The Annihilation Score (A Laundry Files Novel) will not be out for another week and a half, and I don’t think that I’m going luck out with this one and find a copy at a Borders bookstore that had unaccountably been put out early (which is what happened to me with another book in this series). Mostly because Borders doesn’t exist anymore, of course. Anyway, this is going to be the latest book in Charlie Stross’s Lovecraft-meets-spy-novels-meets-computer-math series, and it’s been a pretty nifty series so far. Hopefully, Charlie can keep a handle on his increasing tendency to conspiracy crank before the Great Old Ones come to finish the series by eating everybody’s souls – which is a selling point for this series, actually. It’s Lovecraftian cosmic horror. You know everybody’s gonna die. The author promised.
And so, adieu to The Last Wish: Introducing The Witcher
Moe Lane
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In the Mail: ‘The Annihilation Score.’
Part of Charlie Stross’s Laundry series, which is one of the few series that I will religiously buy in hardcover and sight unseen. This one is supposed to be about the Mythos, government bureaucracy, and superheroes: should be a hoot. Especially since this series is apparently leaving the realm of Secret History for good. Or bad. Or squamous…
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In the Mail and Early, to Boot: The Nightmare Stacks.
A day early: all hail the power of hyper-efficient Amazon delivery systems! A… suggestion? If you have not effectively memorized* Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies at this point, perhaps you should go read that book first. You’re gonna need that mindset up and running, methinks.
Moe Lane
*You have, of course, at least read it, yes? – Because if you have not, well, this is what you need to do this week. The only reason why I’m not calling it Pratchett’s best book is because sussing out which is Terry Pratchett’s best book isn’t something that you do lightly.
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In the Mail: Charlie Stross’s gingerly-tap-dancing ‘Empire Games.’
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: one major reason why I bought Empire Games was for the amusement of watching Charlie Stross extricate this particular story line from the morass of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory that he originally drove it into. ‘Peak oil.’ ‘Aspartame causes brain damage in children.’ ‘Secret US nukes set up for domestic false-flag operations.’ ‘President Rumsfeld, master manipulator and Destroyer of Worlds*.’ It’s not nearly as bad as David Gerrold’s continuing inability to figure out how to get humanity to win the War Against the Chtorr**, but neither is it trivial. Fortunately, ‘alternate history’ can handle this sort of problem…
Moe Lane
PS: I got it today because Amazon apparently doesn’t take Martin Luther King Day off. Which is fine, because Pool Day fell apart and I had to switch from two hours in a Panera Bread with a half hour in a Burger King, which meant that I needed something to free-and-easy read anyway.
PPS: If the above seems harsh, I would point this out: I bought the book anyway, hey? So who really won this exchange, in the end: me, or Charlie Stross?
*I am given to understand that Donald Rumsfeld found that one particularly funny.
**Gerrold can have this one for free: the Chtorr are the biological equivalent of Saberhagen’s Berserkers. No need to worry about the original creators showing up after the Chtorraforming is over; they all got eaten millennia ago. Seriously, that makes the problem infinitely more manageable.
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In the Mail: The Delirium Brief.
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I enjoy Charlie Stross’s books quite a lot, but I think that he should possibly restrain himself to writing in either the past, or the far future. The man’s ability to accurately predict near-future events… well. Politeness is a virtue.
Still, The Delirium Brief should prove as entertaining as the rest of Stross’s stuff. Spy-meets-Lovecraft, and all that. I look forward to perusing it.
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Book of the Week: The Delirium Brief.
The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross is the latest in his Lovecraft-meets-espionage Laundry series, and it’s… well. How do I put this nicely? Charlie Stross — who is from Great Britain — has clearly been scared spitless by three specific current events since 2014 (two domestic and one foreign from his point of view, and you can almost certainly guess what those events were), and his horrified reaction to at least two of them clearly comes across in the book. The effect is much like reading “The Horror At Red Hook” when you’re not a racist; you don’t get the same effect as you would from reading about stuff that actually scares you, but the horror that you pick up from the author still gives a certain frisson.
There. That should be polite enough. After all, I do buy Charles Stross in hardcover.
And so, adieu to 1636: The Kremlin Games — and ain’t THAT a juxtaposition, hey?
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In the Mail: Dark State.
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: part of the amusement value in reading Charlie Stross is in seeing him struggle manfully to get out of the hole that his typically overconfident (and typically off-kilter) predictions of the future has gotten him into. Stross is an excellent writer, so he can typically can give it the old college try, and I can’t wait for the next Laundry novel, given that it was written in response to a particularly horrifying (for him) double-whammy by objective reality. As I think that I’ve noted in the past, reading Stross these days is like reading Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook; I understand that he’s legitimately terrified, but it’s at things that simply don’t scare me in the same way, or sometimes at all.
But, moving on: Dark State is an alternate history novel, and in classic SM Stirling-like fashion it has an appendix in back explaining various timelines. I read that first, and I have to say that it’s an absolute shame that there’s probably not enough money in enticing Stross to write the whole thing up as a GURPS Infinite World. I’m reminded slightly of Reality Cornwallis, but the whole thing does show how interesting the world would have ended up, sans the Enlightment, representative democracy, and capitalism. With ‘interesting’ being meant in the Chinese sense, of course. We’ll see if the rest of the book holds up to it.
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Looking for something to read? (Charles Stross)
(Today’s guy: Charles Stross
If you’re the sort of person who thinks that mixing higher mathematics, spy fiction, and the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of cool… well, you’ve probably already read The Atrocity Archives
↧
↧
See, this is why I don’t mind funding the National Endowment of the Arts.
You can watch the video below only if you promise to read David Thompson’s post on it first. It’s important that you do that: it’s not fair for me to reproduce it in full here, and it’s just too good to miss.
OK, you did that? Excellent. Here’s the video:
OK, see why I don’t mind funding the NEA?
Precisely: if we let somebody like Teixeira just wander around loose to try to find his own food, clothing and shelter, chances are excellent that when he finally autodarwinates* he’d accidentally take somebody with a net positive use to society with him.
So, it’s not so much a government subsidy as it is life insurance.
Moe Lane
*Thank you, Charlie Stross
…oh. Right. Should have checked first. Never mind…
↧
Book of the Week: The Jennifer Morgue.
In one of my odder switches, I’m replacing You Can Do Anything, Daddy
That’s a lot of meeting there, really.
↧
Book of the Week: The Trade of Queens.
Because I broke down and eventually read The Revolution Business
And so, farewell to The Cat in the Hat
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