Customer Reviews

Overtime: A Tor.Com Original

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a short little Christmas-themed story set in the same milieu as Charles Stross' _Laundry_ books, which concern the British Civil Service arm designated to protect against threats mystical and magical. It's short, at slightly over 400 Kindle "locations," and well-written and well-conceived; Stross is one of the more imaginative young SF writers these days, and a free snippet of his work is always welcome.

The structure is a little convoluted for such a short story, which might throw some readers for a bit of a loop, but it isn't a major flaw, and overall I found this entertaining enough, and well worth the download and time to read it despite having not read the other _Laundry_ books.

If you like this, you might want to try the other _Laundry_ books, starting with _Atrocity Archives_; you might also want to read his novel _Accellerando_, which (while very different in tone and structure from this short) can be downloaded as a free ebook from the author's website.

The Hugo nod enticed me, but in the end, thankful that I paid nothing for the download, I could only acknowledge this effort with the proverbial shoulder-shrug. I didn't particularly enjoy the story, and in fact, found it to be cluttered and choppy, (which may just be a personal problem; I most often gravitate towards a flowing narrative.)

That being said, and to be fair, I did find the subject matter interesting enough to follow for its entirety, but not intriguing enough to really care. I simply bobbed along.

In summation, to quote our protagonist while day-dreaming through a company speech, "Kringle is clearly talking about something of considerable importance, but my mind skitters off the surface of his words like a wasp on a plate glass window."

A sentiment to which I could most certainly relate.

- t -
15 June, 2010

With not a lot going on at home, Bob is happy enough to be assigned as 'duty officer' during the Christmas holidays. Someone has to stay on the job because the extra-dimensional monsters and ex-gods the Laundry exists to protect our world against don't respect the clock. Things start to go wacky when an egg-head from the forecast department announces that this will be the last office holiday party...and is, in fact, the last thing anyone has been able to forecast at all. When Bob comes across a series of body-part photocopies, the last being the hindquarters of what appears to be a giant cockroach, he realizes that his overtime has just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

All around the world, children are calling out for Santa Claus to slide down their chimneys, to take the goodies. One thing the ancient and hungry gods are good at is listening carefully and taking advantage of every opportunity they can find. Unfortunately, it's up to Bob to respond to the threat.

Author Charles Stross creates a fun situation, using the Christmas holiday as a setting and myths of Santa Claus as his mythical danger. It's a clever concept, as is the top-secret 'Laundry,' the government agency charged with dealing with extra-dimensional threats. It took Stross a while to get into the story. While clever and accurate about the way offices sometimes work, I found the opening pages to be a bit slow-moving. It wasn't until we arrive at the photocopies that the story accelerates.

Overall, OVERTIME is a clever and interesting tale. With a bit of pruning at the beginning, it could have been even better.

This is a clever short story. The premise is not very different than "Men in Black" - there are people whose every day, mundane job is to protect the rest of us from things we're not prepared to know.

Apparently this story is part of a series. I'll definitely look for other work by the author.

I really enjoyed this story and the idea of The Laundry. It is a "Men in Black" mixed with MacGyver and no crappy one-liners. I liked the matter-of-fact approach and the unexplained bits about The Laundry. I liked letting my mind fill in the gaps. I also liked the disjointed time-stream. It kept me interested, revealing more and more of what had already happened in a very "Catch-22" sort of way.

This is a very nice short story, a lot of fun if you like the laundry series by Charles Stross. However it can be read for free from the Tor.Com web page. The URL is: [...]

Brilliant! Crisp, snappy writing, engaging characters, and an end of the world plot. What more is there to a great read? Bonus--the totally believable bureaucratic/mathmatical/human take on magic.

If you are a fan of the 'Laundry' books, then this is a great little story to keep you entertained while waiting for the next full length novel.

What a great spin on the whole Christmas theme. Fans of the Luandry series will treasure this story as more of what they've come to expect from Charles Stross. It also rings true for anyone that's been stuck on-site over a holiday break as the duty officer on call. Bob Howard is stuck as the on call duty officer at the Laundry after he neglects to schedule his vacation (because he was in hospital recovering from a previous case!) read on as he faces the office Christmas party, inspirational speech-givers, cheerfully drunk co-workers and soul eating beasts from beyong time and space in search of cookies. Just another day at the office for Bob.

Have a very merry Charles Stross Christmas--filled with "gibbering horrors" from the frozen abyss of the multiverse sliding down the chimney on flaccid tentacles hungering for reindeer urine and human flesh. This is the Santa Claus the Night Duty Officer Bob needs to keep out of the house on Christmas Eve in Stross's short story.

Talk about holiday spirit.

Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princess series as well as the high-tech Singularity Sky and Accelerando, wrote "Overtime" as a Tor.com original for December 2009; as of June 8, it's now available on Amazon, for free, for the masses. For science fiction readers unfamiliar with Stross's Laundry Files novels (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and the to-be-released-July-6 The Fuller Memorandum), "Overtime" provides a short, clever, and geekishly funny intro to the Laundry--Britain's bureaucratic office for university graduated majoring in Applied Computational Demonology.

It's a bit like what Bob, our wry and irreverent narrator, calls "bureaucratic Pokémon"--you know, red tape mixed with Lovecraftian monsters.

The inherent contradiction of the mind-numbing and brain-eating is what makes "Overtime" (and the whole Laundry set) entertaining. And, of course, some nerd humor for the fan base--take the most-highlighted passage of the story for example:

"Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares at you also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)"

Ha ha ha. (Ho ho ho?)

"Overtime" is an hour or two read, with a handful of laugh out loud scenes (or just sentences--Stross's first person bureaucratic personal Bob is narrative gold) and a tight story that makes as much sense for first-time readers as dedicated Stross fans.

Verdict? Read it.