Customer Reviews

The Fuller Memorandum

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bob Howard is a minor cog in a dangerous machine - the Laundry, a secret British department dedicated to protecting the nation from Lovecraftian horrors. In this universe, Lovecraft unwittingly stumbled on more of the truth than he knew. he was followed by Turing, who discovered that abominations from other dimensions can be summoned by mathematical theorems and invoked by computer code.

Would be tech support worker Howard has much more to worry about than the office cabling or backups.

This is the third in Stross's much praised Laundry series after The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. They are good, but in my view this is the best yet, pitting Howard against foreign spies, cultists and his own missing boss as he races to retrieve the missing memorandum itself. TFM picks up themes from the earlier books, being stuffed with technology in-jokes, nods to The Register (so, Bob's shiny new iPhone is constantly described as his "jesusphone"), and scenes of office life as well as darker humour. We also learn more about the Laundry itself - its history, personnel (look out for the "residual human resources") and why it is so obsessed with paperclip security - as well as the true purpose of London's Post Office Underground Railway.

The previous two books were styled and structured as tributes to/ affectionate pastiches of, respectively, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming, as Stross subverted the conventions of the Cold War thriller to address his cosmic occult threat. That added to the humour - watching Bob flailing in his part as James Bond, and ticking off the tropes in Jennifer Morgue, was great fun - but it also, possibly, sidelined the true and developing nature of the threat facing the Laundry and its world. The current book is avowedly based on the novels of Anthony Price, - see for example Other Paths to Glory (Coronet Books). When Stross made this known on his website I went off and ordered a number of them (they're mostly out of print now, which is a pity. I've been hunting second hand bookshops since to complete my collection.) However I didn't find Fuller Memorandum as close to Price as the earlier two books were to their models. Yes, some of the classic Price tropes are there - the urgent but mysterious threat whose secret can only be found in history, the trusted figure who has become unreliable. However, the one that strikes me most in Price's books - the bizarre skein of double, triple and quadruple motivations, the total perplexity about what is really going on - doesn't figure anything like so strongly as I'd expected or even as much as in many of Stross's other books. (It goes without saying that Stross has better characterisation and dialogue). I think that Fuller Memorandum is the better for this. Without ever being obvious - there is a lot happening here and you have to follow it carefully - it feels a bit less... crowded... than some of his other work, including the the other two Laundry novels, and the book is the better for it. The plot has room to breathe. The characters really take shape. I think that as the series is growing up Stross is freeing it from the earlier models and forging his own tone for it, a distinctively Laundryverse tone which I'm looking forward to more of. While waiting, there's The Laundry role-playing game, which looks fun.

So, go out, get this, read it, you'll love it (or else your soul has already been eaten by you-know-what).

This is Charles Stross's third novel in the ongoing story of Bob Howard, a career computer programmer and IT guy who happens to work at "The Laundry," the British Civil Service arm designated to protect against threats mystical and magical.

Stross here cooks the familiar stew of geek references, office politics parody, spy thriller, and Lovecraftian occult esoterica that's flavored the Laundry series so well so far, and if you liked the first two books (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue) you'll like this one (although it's closer to the post-cold-war spy-thriller tone of the first book than the Bond-esque stylings of the second). Fans of the series will find out more about the mysterious past of Howard's boss, Angleton, and you'll see some further development of Howard's relationship with his now-wife, Dominique O'Brian. The book maintains a thriller-appropriate level of tension throughout, with some lighthearted moments, and numerous references to geek culture (such as a series of comic descriptions of an iphone, and a buried allusion to Jim Butcher's _Dresden Files_ books).

Where this volume does differ from the prior two books is in its sense of escalation. The occult players in Bob Howard's world are all moving towards "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN," the coming apocalyptic incursion of Lovecraftian Elder Gods into our reality, projected to happen sometime in the next few years of series-time. This volume has a definite sense of players shifting for position in game with increasing stakes -- if the first two books were set to "warm," this one cooks at a simmer, and it's pretty clear Stross plans to take us all the way to boiling in the next few books. If he maintains this level of quality, I'll be looking forward to them.

If you want a free foretaste of the Laundry series, there are two Laundry/Bob Howard short stories available on the web for free, respectively titled "Overtime" and "Funny Farm". "Overtime", at least, can be grabbed for free from the Kindle store, here:Overtime: A Tor.Com Original

Charlie Stross is an excellent writer and I can't recall anything of his that wasn't worth reading. The "Laundry" books, about the secret bureaucracy of, as it were, anti-spooks who guard the UK from Lovecraftian extradimensional horrors is, however, his best work -- with the "Merchant Princes" series a close second.

The dry humor and dynamite action combine with considerable psychological insight to make this top-of-the-line scienced fantasy and just plain damned good writing.

After an uneven outing in The Jennifer Morgue, Stross is back to the top of his game with The Fuller Memorandum. This is a dark book - even darker than The Atrocity Archive, and much darker than his excellent Laundry short stories. The reality of living in a world where the end is coming on quickly seems to be taking its toll on Bob and Mo.

The increased exposure of Angleton, and the character growth and development of Bob are the highpoints of the book. The idea that everything has a cost and that some are just too high is also seen here - the construction of Mo's violin is a good example.

A word of caution: be sure to read "Down on the Farm" (available online) before reading this book, or else certain aspects will be lost to you (i.e. why it is so dangerous to do some of the particular "tricks" that Bob has to end up doing). It also gives the background on Deeply Scary Sorcerers, a category that Bob is clearly destined for, given the events of this book. If he lives.

A great book - read it!

The Atrocity Archive (Not, incidentally, 'Archives,' despite what the cover says...) initially blew me away. The technologification of magic and the Cthulhu mythos was genius (er...you know...like...super-fun beach-reading genius...not like Faulkner genius...). Unfortunately, I liked it so much that it became like literary comfort food to me, and I read it fourish times. Yeah, I know...books like this are not really made to hold up upon relentless re-reading... Turns out that it doesn't take that long for random, contentless references to the Halting Problem, Godel, and diagonalization to get tedious--especially if you actually know something about these things. Nevertheless, I have to say, TAA was a lot of fun before I burned myself out on it. The Jennifer Morgue...also fun. Enough so that I broke my own rule against buying hard-cover novels, and sprung for The Fuller Memorandum. Meh. I had to be critical of Charles Stross who has provided me with so many hours of reading pleasure...but I guess I can't really give it above a 'C'. Worth a read if you loved the first two Laundry books...but likely to be disappointing.

Sorry to break from the fulsome praise others are lavishing on this book, but I found it to be a bit of a trudge.

The book's a spy-hunt, sort of like one of Le Carre's "Smiley" novels, combined with an attempt to free one of the elder gods to do whatever it is elder gods do. Oh, and a little old KGB lady gets killed in an industrial accident.

So, maybe it's not so much a trudge as a sort of dash from place to place, waiting for bad stuff to descend randomly. Take the wrong turn onto the wrong bike path, etc., and suddenly you're in a world of hurt. Mind you, those bike path bits did have a sort of "Deus ex Machina" feeling to them. Lock up the wrong file in the wrong safe, and suddenly soul-eaters are about to be on the loose. Basically, this book gives you the feel of being a hunted animal. That gets tiring after a couple of hundred pages.

iPhone aside, there's a lot less of the tech angle than there has been in previous books.

What else? Well, you want to see how things turn out, even if it's an illegal zombie rave.

Other bits. Organized (disorganized as well) religion gets the normal scoffing. Tories come in for more stick, although there's also a swipe at some Labour types. Presumably, the Labour types who get stick are insufficiently Trotskyite. An interesting argument is made for why the world is overpopulated. The underground life of London looks interesting - I'd love to see a ground-penetrating radar picture of London. You get more information about the Laundry, and especially Angleton, who turns out to be quite the character.

All in all, I suppose this is a decent addition to the "Laundry Files".

By now, just about any mythos fan worth his/her/its tentacles will have heard of Bob Howard and the Laundry, Charlie Stross' singular (um, er..) contribution to Lovecraftian fiction. If not, here is the saga to date.

The Atrocity Archive
The Concrete Jungle (a novella included with The Atrocity Archive)
Overtime (a short story available free online)
The Jennifer Morgue
Pimpf (a novella included with The Jennifer Morgue)

The premise of this marvelous series is pretty simple. "The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the ...things...that cast shadows on the walls of Plato's cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them." Previously folks like Abdul Alhazred stumbled across ways to access these alternate dimensions and their inhabitants; with the access of modern computing such incursions are becoming more common and more deadly. Governments have set up secret organizations to deal with the problem. If you succeed or come close to crossing the threshold, you are forcibly recruited onto the team. In the UK, it's SOE Q department (officially disbanded) AKA the Laundry). Agents go to the field armed with hands of glory, geases and wards, and try to tamp down the incursions. Unfortunately, the tentacles of government bureaucracy snake into every aspect of everything. As we approach CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right, accessing these other planes will be very easy and the world will be a much more dangerous place. In fact, the reason CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is approaching turns out to have nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with computational power (but maybe not the way you'd think).

The Fuller Memorandum is a novel released by Ace Books in the US. It is a great production and runs 320 pages. I only have one complaint. Previously, Mr. Stross' Laundry novels had their original hard cover release by small press Golden Gryphon Press with wonderful cover art by Steve Montiglio. The cover here is by Mark Frederickson and it pretty much sucks by comparison.

You do not have to be particularly conversant in Lovecraft to enjoy this novel, but it certainly helps to know a little bit about his more famous stories. I don't think you absolutely have to have read the previous Laundry stories either but it certainly would help to be familiar with Stross' cast of characters (and heck, all the other novels/novellas are corking good reads).

All I can say is this is a bloody brilliant book. I've read just about every Cthulhu mythos novel in print and this is the best. I never thought anything could displace Radiant Dawn by Cody Goodfellow, but in my estimation, The Fuller Memorandum does. The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue were warm ups; the author really hits his stride here. Mr. Stross has a nuanced appreciation of Lovecraft, an incomparable gift for techy writing and a razor sharp sense of humor. Like Lovecraft, Stross will take real places and people, incorporating them into his narrative to give it a feeling of veracity. Here Stross uses the real life almost mythic figure of Ungern von Sternberg, the Bloody Baron, to great effect. Apart from the trappings, however, Stross also can create a horrific scene that makes the flesh crawl. I was intensely creeped out while the expert was examining the Zann model violin. In The Fuller Memorandum we find out more about Bob Howard's wife, Mo, and his boss, Angleton, about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, about the Laundry and the worsening dangers everywhere. With only 310 pages of text, compared to modern fantasy novels) the book rockets along. Once you start, you will be swept away and done in a few short hours. I know Mr. Stross is putting the finishing touches on The Apocalypse Codex but it won't see the light of print until 2012. No worries! In addition to Mr. Stross' works, here is my list of excellent mythos novels you can while away the time with:

Radiant Dawn - Goodfellow
Ravenous Dusk - Goodfellow
Delta Green: The Rules of Engagement - Tynes
Balak - Rainey
The Gardens of Lucullus - Tierney
The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet - Meikle
Where Goeth Nyarlathotep - Reiner
Haunting of Alaizabel Cray - Wooding (Lovecraftian, not Cthulhu mythos really)
A Night in the Lonesome October - Zelazny
Gemini Rising - McNaughton
Downward to Darkness - McNaughton
Worse Things Waiting - McNaughton (The House Across the Way, although good, is not Lovecraftian or mythos, imo)
Queen of K'n-Yan - Ken
Threshold - Kiernan (very Lovecraftian but not mythos)
Mall of Cthulhu - Cooper
The Darkest Part of the Woods - Campbell
The Ceremonies - Klein
The Drums of Chaos - Tierney
Low Red Moon - Kiernan
Daughter of Hounds - Kiernan (these last two by Kiernan deal with the society of Lovecraftian ghouls)
The Red Tree - Kiernan (arguments can be made but I view this as a story of a portal into the Dreamlands, with references to ghouls)

As a closeted IT geek shunned by mainstream culture, I thoroughly enjoy immersing myself in the life and times of Bob Howard. This latest addition to the series does not disappoint at all. The corporate world of the Laundry is instantly identifiable to most of us as is the constant office politics that Stross covers in almost Dilbert-like detail. The situations they deal with however, are anything but commonplace. That being said the field of computational demonology feels a lot like a lot of the things computer programmers go through every day.

"The Fuller Memorandum" is the third novel in the "Laundry Files", a series of related novels by Charles Stross starring everyman hero and all-around computer geek, Bob Howard. For those not familiar with these works, the Laundry is a British covert intelligence agency charged with protecting the public from incursions and summonings of demons, gods and other all powerful elder races from other dimensions who threaten the very destruction of our world. Stross borrows heavily from the "Chthulu Mythos" of H.P. Lovecraft in the descriptions and names of the other worldly horrors, but in his universe, it turns out that mathematics and computation is functionally equivalent (but far more reliable) than old-fashioned charms, incantations and other methods used by the ancients. This is a truly original and marvelous idea that Stross uses with great skill to blend various genres of adventure, espionage, SF and horror, liberally seasoned with subtle and not-so-subtle humor.

The stakes have risen steadily since the Atrocity Archives, the first in the series. In the Fuller Memorandum, Bob and his wife Mo (Epistemological Warfare Specialist grade 4 - another Laundry agent) are both involved (separately and independently) in the actions of a cult that looks to use an old Laundry File called the Fuller Memorandum to raise an entity called the Eater of Souls that could trigger the end of everything. There is more action, danger and pain in this entry and less Bond-like behavior on the parts of Bob and villains, but there is still a generous helping of geek humor and inside jokes and and allusions to other genre fiction.

I liked this book very much and am now totally hooked. The Fuller Memorandum is self-contained and has a satisfying ending, but your reading pleasure would be enhanced by first reading the Atrocity Archives and then the Jennifer Morgue. And, despite a "happy" ending, there is clearly more to come, but I'm afraid that I'm going to have to wait another 18 months or so to see what happens next.

If you've read this far, then try it. I'm sure you'll like it.

JMT

Each of Stross' books seem to improve expodentially. This book is hard to put down once you start and leads to reading into the wee small hours of the night. His combination of horror, humor, and real human interaction puts him near the top of the genre and at the very top of the its humorous subsection. However, I do have one point of disagreement with/question for the author. If calling Jews "Yids" is condidered proof positive of small minded facism, why is calling Christions "Jeezoid freaks" a sign of cutting-edge hip sophistication. I supect it is just another case of the need to have a currently acceptable designated "other" to dump on. My five star rating is for the quality of the author's writing not for his open mindedness