Customer Reviews

On Her Majesty's Occult Service

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"On Her Majesty's Occult Service" consists of two main books, The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The world that Stross has created is our world, but just one-half step over ... maybe. Or maybe not - maybe he has just provided us with the real story for the first time? Who knows? Mixing Cthonian mythos, quantum physics and metaphysics, mathematical metatheory and spy thriller, Stross has made reading this book kind of like watching Monty Python in Japanese. There is simply no way to define the genre. That said, it is certainly a fun ride! Populated with computer programmer wizards, electronic gorgons, zombie birds and genetically engineered mer-people, this is a weird and wonderful world.

In "The Atrocity Archives," (which includes the title story as well as the short story "The Concrete Jungle"), we first meet Bob, who is our hero, and is a member of the Laundry - a section of the British Secret Services that is so secret that even knowing about it is illegal unless you are a member. The Laundry is dedicated to making certain that the veils between the realities don't end up being pierced by accident - some mathematician using an unusual theorem or a computer programmer coming up with something new - that would actually end up calling up the Elder Gods or opening up a portal to allow the gibbering hordes of demons access to our world. Bob was conscripted when a computer program he was working on almost ended up re-sculpting a large part of a section of Britain and opening a wormhole to a particularly nasty dimension. He recently made the mistake of asking to work in "active service," and that request has just been approved ... things keep going from bad to worse as he is continually thrown into circumstances that end up snowballing into events beyond his control; and things are never quite what they seem.

In "Concrete Jungle" he is awakened at 4 am to go and look at the sculptures of concrete cows in Milton Keynes; it appears that there may be an extra one - there are supposed to be 8. Bob finds 9. He discovers what appears to be the work of a basilisk or gorgon. How can this be? Again, things quickly tobaggon out of his control.

Bob is the perfect hero for the modern age - armed with a Palm Pilot and cell phone (and occasionally a pigeon's foot) rather than a gun; scrawny and nerdish rather than tall and handsome, he is the epitome of the modern computer geek/hacker. Somehow, despite his tendency to stick his nose where it doesn't belong, and to jump into the middle of things where he has no business being, he manages to always come out ... well ... alive.

The sequel to "The Atrocity Archives," "The Jennifer Morgue" consists of the title story, the short story "Pimpf" (first published on-line Jim Baen's Universe in June, 2006) and "The Golden Age of Spying," which is basically an afterword.

Bob has been sent on a standard trip to a convention - he expects it to be pretty boring, as the conventions are generally just a chance for the various occult groups from different countries to meet and mingle. However, things begin to get weird quickly as he first is met by a Black Chamber operative, and then is told he is supposed to be on a deep cover operation where he is to work with her. In fact, they are to be "destiny entangled" for the duration of the mission. As time goes by, we discover that the person who Bob is supposed to stop from destroying the world, somehow, has created a terribly involved geas field, involving all actors in this situation and placing them into a James Bond-type situation, wherein only a specific person, under a specific set of circumstances, has a chance to even approach him. He then hopes to short-circuit the geas so that he can complete his mission, which is to raise a cthonian device from JENNIFER MORGUE, which is on the abyssal plain, where humans, by treaty from the Deep Ones, are banned from going.

Obviously, things just get worse from there.

In "Pimpf" Bob is saddled with an intern, who ends up getting himself stuck inside a MMORPG which Bob had been designing in order to capture dungeon designers who have accidentally designed programs that would lead to problems - thereby bringing them into the Laundry. Bob therefore has to go into the game himself and save his intern, Pete, before it is too late.

In "The Golden Age of Spying," Charles Stross interviews Ernst Blofeld, Bond's arch-nemesis to get his side of the story, as well as generally musing about the cultural phenomenon that is James Bond.

I can definitely recommend this omnibus to just about anyone who enjoys a)Lovecraftian works, b)Monty Python, c)spy thrillers, d)British humor in general or e)basic, undefinable books that create a fun and interesting world. Don't miss out on Stross' weird and wonderful tales from the Laundry!

Charles Stross is developing a loyal cult of followers and well deserves it. Taking Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and mixing it with John Le Carre, Ian Fleming and healthy doses of computer geek terminology, he adds an anti-hero, Bob Howard, who just wants to make a living at a super-secret British spin-off of the SOE, known as "the Laundry" because it cleans up other peoples' dirty linens and used to be above a Chinese laundry. Bob's job is to find and remove from computer games "accidents" in programming that might give Lovecraft's Great Old Ones a trapdoor into our reality, and then (hopefully, but life is rarely orderly) go home to his spectacular red-haired girlfriend Mo, herself a whiz in the alternate universes field, while avoiding messes left around the house by his roommates Pinky and Brains. The result is great fun, if not always comprehensible to us old geezers who didn't go to grade school speaking the language of Artificial Intelligence.

Frankly, I would have given two of the components in this anthology five stars, and gave it the lower rating only because the other two aren't quite as good, even if only by a hair. "The Atrocity Archive" is one of the few sci-fi books I've read recently that I re-read almost immediately (if only because this is a tale that grows in the telling). Take the mixture above and add an especially terrible Nazi survival (the Ahnenerbe SS existed, by the way, and you can google them to find out more), a monstrous infovore from a dead universe that wants to do the same to ours, an alien (or is it?) planet whose weather is literally that of summer on Pluto, and a nuclear weapon whose timer is ticking away, and you have a story that starts somewhat slowly but about one-third of the way through takes off like a roller coaster and leaves you hanging on for dear life. (Word of Warning: As Stross himself says, if you are a Tim Powers fan and have read the latter's book "Declare," don't be surprised if you get deja vu - the two were written at about the same time but parallel each other to a fairly remarkable degree.) "Pimpf" is a priceless short story, if only for the image of Our Hero invading a video game similar to Warcraft to rescue his clueless intern, accompanied by a huge and irate cross-dressing orc mercenary in a pink, frilly dress with matching shoes and club.

The other two stories are somewhat less gripping and illustrate the drawbacks of this hybrid form of literature, although both are quite good. "The Jennifer Morgue" deals with the attempts of a shadowy multi-billionaire to rescue (for his own purposes) a dormant Cthonian from the bottom of the ocean, an effort to which the Deep Ones take decided exception. But Stross gets so involved in trying to write a James Bond story (with a reverse twist) on Ian Fleming's model that the supernatural element gets short-changed in all the heroics. "The Concrete Jungle," a Hugo Award winner, starts out as a promising short story about unnamed malevolent parties trying to infect the UK's web of security cameras with a virus that gives them the lethal stare of a basilisk, but bogs down in detailing the Laundry's vicious office politics.

If you're interested in more Stross, I suggest his collection of short stories, "Toast," several of which are so bizarre that they will have you wondering if we and Stross are even in the same realities! In any case, his book will set strange winds blowing through your mind if they're not doing so already.

A pleasant, gently humorous book; not particularly memorable but I enjoyed it and cheerfully recommend it.

Seriously... this book just earned itself a place in my TOP 5 FAVORITES. I can understand why many people might not care for it, since it meshes so many genres together; but that's exactly why I loved it! I'm so tired of cliched, predictable tales and stock players running their lines. You want something different? Exciting? Hysterical? Read this book.

I mean, we're talking about a hacker geek who gets conscripted into the British SuperBlack Ops group (MI-666?) because he was playing with a code that almost summoned a extra-dimensional monster into London. Whoops! Now working as an IT specialist and sometimes field agent for "The Laundry", Bob Howard runs around with a smartphone complete with a nextgen daughterboard filled with apps that allow him to used applied Non-Euclidean algorithms that access the omniverse and tap into sentient alien life as a proxy to do things like, oh... give him invisibility. And he usually carries a cybernetic Hand Of Glory for protection.

Yeah.

And by "alien life," I mean fun folks like Cthulhu and the rest of the Lovecraft gang. It seems there's been a treaty with the Deep Ones since before WWII, and Innsmouth is now a training ground for Occult Spies. Oh, and the USA has a version of The Laundry called "Black Chamber," who are almost as bad as Human Resources. See that's the other thing; besides being a mash-up of horror/espionage/technology thrills, it's also written with enough humor and absurdity to keep you thoroughly engrossed. I'm talking "Laugh Out Loud" moments here.

Will this book be over 50% of the heads of the people who try and read it? Probably. But 50% will get it, and 25% will love it. There's spy slang, computer terminology, hardcore mathematics, and major Lovecraft references. No, a mean a lot of all of those. But it's woven so well, told so wonderfully, characters so wacky... I absolutely loved it.

I already have all of the stories mentioned in other books. They are excellent if your vocabulary and computer/math jargon is up to comprehending what he is writing, but I was hoping this was a new book.

It claims to be James Bond meets Lovecraft and is, kinda ... but the everyman office worker main lead is just so dull I couldn't finish. The mundane office politics overwhelm the occult and the incessant expository dialog is a slog. Just call it a gun, don't give us all the statistics. Most of the part I read was either mundane office stuff (which I get plenty of at work) or people talking at length ABOUT summoning technology with plenty of long words that are meaningless. There was very little action and what little there was was over way too quick (like 10 pages of talking, 1 page of getting attacked by tentacles, then another 10 pages of talking about said tentacles). There are also too many in-jokes. Lots of "nudge, nudge, did ya get that name I just dropped?" That's fun occasionally but every other paragraph it gets old fast. Normally I'm a trooper and will finish anything I start but this one I just can't.