The Apocalypse Codex (A Laundry Files Novel) [Hardcover]

Charles Stross (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 3, 2012 | Series: A Laundry Files Novel (Book 4)

Bob Howard may be humanity’s last hope.
Start praying…

For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the fast-track for promotion to management within The Laundry, the super-secret British government agency tasked with defending the realm from occult threats. Assigned to “External Assets,” Bob discovers the company—unofficially—employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations that may embarrass Queen and Country.

So when Ray Schiller—an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill—becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the brilliant, beautiful, and entirely unpredictable Persephone Hazard to infiltrate the Golden Promise Ministry and discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. And it’s Bob’s job to make sure Persephone doesn’t cause an international incident.

But it’s a supernatural incident that Bob needs to worry about—a global threat even The Laundry may be unable to clean up…

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Stross gives his readers a British super spy with a long-term girlfriend, no fashion sense and an aversion to martinis."

(San Francisco Chronicle )

"Bond and Bourne never faced the adversaries Howard confronts."

(Alternative Worlds )

About the Author

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He holds degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist. He is now a full-time writer.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover; Book Club Edition edition (July 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781937007461
• ISBN-13: 978-1937007461
• ASIN: 1937007464
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Stross, 47, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella, Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst).

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#66 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#94 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction

#66 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#94 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The last and best Lovecraftian technothriller we get before the world ends July 5, 2012

By Steve Proctor

Format:Hardcover

In this excellent supernatural technothriller, John Shirley's Demons meets Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. A British programmer turned demonologist works for the top-secret British organization called the Laundry. His superior is an embodied "Soul Eater." It's all the modern state's way of making sure that supernatural conflicts between good and evil don't end up swinging the wrong way. The current conflict? A strange, perhaps demonically involved American televangelist is getting a little too cozy with the Prime Minister. Problem: the PM can't be investigated by the Laundry. So it's necessary to exploit external channels.

So, is it any good? If you like hard-boiled narration, score one point. If you enjoy plots where the integrity of the fabric of the universe is hanging in the balance, score another point. If you enjoy plenty of hinted-at, but never fully-explained technologies that knit together the spiritual-demonic with modern electronics, score yet again. And if you enjoy a constantly unfolding, ever accelerating plot that drives toward a multi-dimensional apocalypse, score another point. And if you enjoy story elements that cause you to wonder if reality is a dim reflection in glass of a far stranger, and more twisted truth... then you really ought to just run out and buy this book.

For reality-bending that is more "literary," including infinite libraries and the end of the world, check out Borges' Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook). For a scholar's playful word-bending, check out THE Book of Word Games: Parlett's Guide to 150 Great and Quick-to-Learn Word Games.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The End Gets Nearer July 9, 2012

By P. G. Wickberg

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

A new Charles Stross Laundry novel is always a cause for celebration, and this one keeps up with its predecessors in quality but diverges from them by introducing a new principal character to accompany Bob Howard, the beautiful adrenalin junkie Duchess Persephone Hazard (undoubtedly a pseudonym) and her stoic companion Johnny MacTavish. Persephone is a fun character, more like something from Marvel Comics than from the dark world of the Laundry, and I suspect we will be seeing more of her in the future. An opening sequence in which the two burgle Schoss Neuschwanstein (from the air, no less) and it is implied that King Ludwig II of Bavaria was mad in more ways than one, is more James Bond than Laundry. Those who enjoy following the chronicle of Bob and his beloved Mo, however, may find the amount of space devoted to two new characters instead of to Bob's doings a bit irritating.

The other factor in this book that may cause some controversy is that the villains who Bob confronts this time are from the ranks of American anti-abortion evangelical megachurches. a group that may get irritable and reach for the nearest lawyer when they are mocked (and for those not familiar with Colorado, yes, the New Life Church of Colorado Springs does indeed exist, and is almost as influential as Stross implies). And Stross leaves some loose ends here (some of which will undoubtedly be unravelled later): what happened to those innocents caught in the final mass "conversion"? Did the bad guy really die? Did the Sleeper in the Pyramid turn him into something else? (On the other hand, Charlie still hasn't told us what happened to Jonquil the Sloane Ranger and her boyfriend from "The Fuller Memorandum," unless we are to assume that they were rounded up with the rest of the Wandsworth Coven.)

More disorientingly, for those who play Chaosium's Laundry game as well as reading Stross's books, we learn more about Mahogany Row and that the Laundry is actually only the public face (as much as a black intelligence organization can be public) of something much larger, older and deeper, of which the dreaded Auditors are just the tip of the iceberg. We also learn more about the U.S. black intelligence organization known as the Black Chamber, a spook organization some of whose members are literally spooks, and while it is always tricky to guess where Charlie's active imagination will go next, a few throw-away lines in Angleton's final meeting with them suggests that a head-on collision between the two organizations may be in the future. Finally, as Bob adjusts to the realities of his new status, one wonders exactly how much he will now be able to tell his wife, since his new co-workers are not even supposed to exist! All in all this is good fun, and not quite as dark as the previous novel, but the time when "the stars are right" is still inexorably approaching, something for which Bob and his friends are not at all yet fully prepared.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bob is Back July 19, 2012

By Nicholas A. Sanders

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was not a big fan of the previous novel in The Laundry Files series (The Fuller Memorandum) because I thought it was too dark and grim, and lacked all the wonderful touches of satire and whimsy that Stross normally brings to these stories. I am pleased to report that this latest novel is much less dark (though of course the subject is darkness and the Lovecraftian entities that lay beyond the darkness), and that Stross seems to be back in fine form.

Bob is back with a new mission, to be undertaken only reluctantly and without a full appreciation for what's *REALLY* going on (as usual). This time, he's accompanied by two new "External Assets" who give him an opportunity to practice his recently learned management skills. (The Laundry has finally come to appreciate his true potential, and is grooming him for promotion. Thus, offical training in the arts of management and leadership.) And Bob discovers, through the usual trials (and errors) that he does indeed possess management and leadership skills--as well as other skills that The Laundry appreciates perhaps more than the more traditional bureaucracy of HMG would.

Stross does a great job with plot, creating a credible threat that demands our hero's best efforts (plus a little more). The "External Assets" are great characters, apparently an homage to a comic strip of which I'm only vaguely aware (sorry about that). But even without an appreciation of the characters' relationship to the comic strip, I was still able to care about them and their fates.

If I have a quibble, it's that Bob's wife, Mo, who is an effective and capable agent herself, is not featured in this episode. It's pretty much all about Bob and his two "Assets" -- and Angleton, of course. And the Auditors. And the Black Chamber. And the horrors that lurk in the darkness outside our reality, hungry to come visit our dimension. But not enough Mo--especially at the end of the story, where her reaction to Bob's travails would (I think) have been very important to show.

At least one other reviewer has said Stross was too preachy, in preaching about the threat posed by an ostensible Christian sect and said sect's charismatic leader. I didn't get that. Sure, the sect was evil and Stross explained the implications of that evilness. But I didn't feel that he was indicting all Christianity--or even any particular Christian belief system. I thought his points could have been applied to any religion-based extremism. But maybe that's just me.

I really do think you need to start at the beginning of the series to truly appreciate who Bob is and how he got to the situation in which we now find him--and to appreciate his evolution as a man and agent of HMG. I would not recommend starting with this book as your first foray into The Laundry Files. That said, Stross does a fine job of giving the reader enough backstory so that a first-time Laundry File reader will not feel lost. So there's that.

All in all, a great story with a plot that moves right along. Populated by a character we've come to care about, and others we've come to fear. The book ends on a clear "be careful what you wish for" note ... but it is a very satisfying conclusion that promises more to come.