Customer Reviews

The Jennifer Morgue

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Like it's predecessor, "The Atrocity Archives," "The Jennifer Morgue" is based upon the premise that all of those nasty Lovecraftian horrors are real, all of the world governments know about it, and are engaged in an ongoing and highly secret occult intelligence gathering/arms race. A few other writers have mined this same vein, most notably Tim Powers in "Declare." But in contrast to Powers, Stross leaves no doubt that his tongue is firmly planted in cheek. The current volume is not only a send up of the cold war spy novel, but specifically of James Bond. Fortunately, Stross has the extraordinarily rare ability to satirize a genre without losing sight of what makes that genre work. Stross's Lovecraftian horrors are actually scary--in fact more so than those of most other writers who've tried to write serious Lovecraftian horror (which turns out to be surprisingly difficult to pull off). The cold war style intrigue, with intricately layered plots and counterplots also works beautifully. Stross could doubtless be a master of either genre if he could bring himself to take them seriously. But that's alright, because this is better. Much of the humor comes from Stross's hero and narrator, a cynical hacker forcibly inducted into the British occult intelligence service. As such, he is completely out of place in either of the genre's Stross is satirizing (watching him try to fit into a Bond-type plot is particularly amusing), yet in the world Stross has created for us, he is clearly the perfect man for the job. Along the way, Stross manages a particularly sharp (but somehow affectionate) deconstruction of the entire Bond canon.

I'd encourage Stross to drop everything else and devote all of his time to writing sequels in this series, except there's nothing else that he writes that I'd be willing to give up. Still, none of his other work manages to be quite this much fun.

If you liked The Atrocity Archives, you'll love The Jennifer Morgue. If some of the more geeky computer references confused you, you'll still enjoy the basic story here (everybody's seen James Bond movies, after all) but again you'll be missing half the fun.

As another reviewer has indicated, to get full appreciation of every little nuance, you need to be an old school UNIX geek, preferably with a familiarity with the Internet that stretches back a decade or two, who still yearns for the days when USENET ruled, and before The Eternal September began.

Not meeting all these criteria doesn't mean you won't find this hugely enjoyable, but the more of them you meet, the more you'll enjoy the book. Having known Charlie since before he'd had anything published and used to hang out in some of the seedier USENET groups, I think I fall fairly firmly into the target audience, and even I missed one or two of the cleverer references first time round. However, I read the book cover to cover in a single sitting and enjoyed every page. Multiple re-reads are a must, the cover's as superb a homage to the book's influences as the story itself, and the story itself leaves an impressive number of openings for more Bob Howards books, from direct tie-ins to the implications of GREEN NIGHTMARE, which Charlie seems to have put in place specifically to give him a way to shut down the Bob Howard universe completely should he ever tire of writing about the character.

Personally, I hope he doesn't tire of writing about Bob for a long, long time. Haven't enjoyed a book so much in years. In fact, although it's a very different sort of book, the last thing I read that established a permanent niche for itself in my mind so quickly was Pratchett/Gaiman's Good Omens in the early 90s. I'm picky about what I read, and I place these two books in a separate little league, all of their own.

This novel actually creeped me out a few times and had me rolling on the floor with laughter most of the time. SciFi would be the topseller in genre fiction, if more novels were like this one. Stross skewers James Bond, flips the Lovecraft style horror novels on their ear, infuses some of the best IT and hacker details that I've read in a novel, incorporates a pretty good love story paired with a perfectly frightening stalking, all while careening hilariously through a landscape littered with zombies, creatures from the deep, creatures from the universe's deep past, and more.
This novel provides one blisteringly hot answer to those readers who complain that there's not much new or fresh in SciFi. I say you're looking for authors on the wrong side of the pond. Some of the best SF to be found, these days, is coming from Britain (Scotland, in Stross' case).

I wish I could join in with all the rave reviews of this book.



Couldn't wait to get my hands on it, after absolutely enjoying The Atrocity Archives (though rolling my eyes a bit - I guess its a requirement for a new British author to get published to bring in evil Nazis somewhere). The "IT geek meets Lovecraft" setting was right up my alley.



Sadly, The Jennifer Morgue left me disappointed. Maybe it's because I'm not a fan of spy fiction a la James Bond (*insert gasps of horror from other male readers here*).



My impression of the story was that Stross *really, really* wanted to write a Ian Fleming style spy thriller while blending it with his "universe" and his characters. No matter the cost. As a result it seemed forced to me.



Also, too many repeats of the same old slashdot humour (equating Microsoft and Powerpoint with Absolute Chthonic Lovecraftian Evil gets tiring after the third time - never mind that it was already done in TAA).



I still give it 3 stars for the writing - as others have said, Stross can write. If he continues to find his own style I'm looking forward to his future works.

Charles Stross continues the adventures of Bob Howard (The Atrocity Archives) with The Jennifer Morgue. Bob Howard is an agent of The Laundry, a deeply secret British intelligence agency
which is focused on saving the world from the supernatural. Bob Howard is not your average agent, however. He is no James Bond. Rather, he is a computer hacker type guy who just has happened to stumble on to a skill set which has involved him in demonology.

The Laundry has set Howard up with an agent from the American Black Chamber (or perhaps it is the other way around) to stop billionaire Ellis Billington from raising something from the Pacific Ocean and in turn piss off at least one of the supernatural species inhabiting our planet which are much older and more powerful than we are and allow humanity to exist mostly because we have not inconvenienced them.

Where The Atrocity Archives was something of a combination of H.P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton, and perhaps Neal Stephenson, The Jennifer Morgue goes in a different direction. The Jennifer Morgue still takes the possibility of Lovecraftian creatures and introduces a send up of Ian Fleming's Bond novels. This is a Bond style adventure with good humor, high adventure, and clever, clever writing.

Stross has shown growth from The Atrocity Archives to The Jennifer Morgue and shows once again that this style of writing and the Bob Howard novels are very much in his wheelhouse and are shining examples of the talent and gift of Charles Stross. This is very original fantasy fiction which pays homage to the spy novels of yesteryear and yet takes it into an entirely new direction.

The hardcover also contains another Bob Howard story: "Pimpf" which deals with video games and the Laundry bureaucracy. "Pimpf" is decent enough, but lacks the heft of The Jennifer Morgue.

The only question left at the end of The Jennifer Morgue is probably what readers of Fleming's Bond or even viewers of the Bond series once asked: When will Bob Howard return?

And who will Stross send up in his next outing? LeCarre? Clancy? It doesn't matter. I trust that Stross will deliver once again.

-Joe Sherry

Alan Turing discovered that mathematics can do Lovecraft-style magic-- hence his subsequent suicide. Now it's ten years before the "stars are right," a.k.a. codename GREEN NIGHTMARE, and Capital Laundry Services, the UK's anti-supernatural government agency, is on the job. The main character is Bob Howard, a hacker who stumbled into the realm of magic and was given a job offer he couldn't refuse by Capital Laundry. Turns out, his middle names are Oliver Francis. B.O.F.H. Yeah. He's reading Tanenbaum for fun. And some fun quotes: "Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep." "...and while I know all the POSIX options to the kill(1) command, doing it with my bare hands is beyond my sphere of competence." Hah! What a hoot. It's still worth reading even if you don't get a lot out of the geek jokes, though. The main plot is very X-Files, with a dash of James Bond (and Kernighan and Ritchie!)

This is a fun, breakneck read, though not up to the electrifying Atrocity Archive. New conceptual territory is staked out, including Deep Ones and cthonic horrors. One can imagine a sequel exploring the actual nature of the protagonist's boss, who may be a bit older than he looks. The reason I was moved to review the book, though, is that it says the first printing is only 4,000 copies! One the one hand, better order your copy quick. On the other, why can't Stross get better publishing for his Robert Howard books? Are they only selling to brainy, dedicated geeks like him. If so, buy a gift copy for a Microsoft employee today!

I snarfed up one of the two copies that were available at my local Border's (sorry Amazon, I was jonesin') and went through it in a couple of hours.

So, here's the deal: It was an enjoyable read - James Bond meets Howard Hughes while exhuming HP Lovecraft's nightmare from the bottom of the ocean - but I think Stross is going to have to give the franchise a bit more edge if it's going to be sustainable. Since this is the guy who wrote "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", that shouldn't be a problem. I hope.

That said, it was a fun read. And, as an IT professional who was an early reader of Datamation, I enjoyed the inside computer operator jokes. (If you're wondering what I'm on about, pay close attention to the book to get Bob Howard's full name.)

I enjoyed this episode in the continuing adventures of Bob Howard, computational demonologist, dealing as usual with a mortal threat to the world from a mixture of H.P. Lovecraft horrors and weird science. It's both a good sci-fi/action story and a clever use of literary archetypes. (Can't say much more without spoiling things.) I wouldn't recommend it for anyone new to the series -- start with The Atrocity Archives by the same author.

This is the sequel to The Atrocity Archives, but is quite different from the first book. Here Bob finds out the true evil in PowerPoint presentations, more than he really wanted to know about the American Black Chamber ruthlessness and an introduction to James Bond mythology. This book consists, like the other book in the series, of a novel and a short story to finish it off. I enjoyed Bob's outing in this story of cross and double cross, where Bob's IT skills are not necessarily the ones which save the day. I'll still be looking out for any more books in this series, although for me this instalment was a bit more uneven and a touch less funny than the first book.