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Book Review #68: The Jennifer Morgue
Title: The Jennifer Morgue
Author: Charles Stross
Genre: Urban fantasy
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Technomagic bureaucrat gets sent to play spy in the Caribbean. He's not actually very good at it. Which is a pity, because if he fails, the Old Ones are probably going to eat us all.
Thoughts: I had found the first book of the Laudry Files, in which mathemagic exists but is controlled by a bureaucracy every bit as stifling as any real life government agency, intriguing but uneven. In this second novel, most of those problems get evened out for a smooth, clever, fast-paced ride.
I don't want to spoil too many of the twists here. Suffice it to say that Stross takes the Bond archetype and does some truly clever things with it. I was particularly pleased with how he chose to handle the gender politics. Bond as originally written is a deeply sexist fantasy. (Fun, don't get me wrong, but not particularly female-friendly.) Stross' protagonist is a reasonably pro-feminist guy who's not much of a ladykiller; the ladies around him are significantly better killers. But Stross is clever enough not to end up with a Strong WomanTM. His women are complex and interesting in their own right and significantly more than their ass-kicking abilities.
There are also a ton of fun ideas tumbling around. The Glomar Explorer as an attempt to retrieve cthulhoid tech. Makeup as a surveillance method. Literal death by Powerpoint. This is a book for anyone who has dealt with the shitty systems that result from layers of red tape and struggled on despite them. And for anyone who has a guilty affection for movies with a lot of bikinis and explosions in them.
Author: Charles Stross
Genre: Urban fantasy
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Technomagic bureaucrat gets sent to play spy in the Caribbean. He's not actually very good at it. Which is a pity, because if he fails, the Old Ones are probably going to eat us all.
Thoughts: I had found the first book of the Laudry Files, in which mathemagic exists but is controlled by a bureaucracy every bit as stifling as any real life government agency, intriguing but uneven. In this second novel, most of those problems get evened out for a smooth, clever, fast-paced ride.
I don't want to spoil too many of the twists here. Suffice it to say that Stross takes the Bond archetype and does some truly clever things with it. I was particularly pleased with how he chose to handle the gender politics. Bond as originally written is a deeply sexist fantasy. (Fun, don't get me wrong, but not particularly female-friendly.) Stross' protagonist is a reasonably pro-feminist guy who's not much of a ladykiller; the ladies around him are significantly better killers. But Stross is clever enough not to end up with a Strong WomanTM. His women are complex and interesting in their own right and significantly more than their ass-kicking abilities.
There are also a ton of fun ideas tumbling around. The Glomar Explorer as an attempt to retrieve cthulhoid tech. Makeup as a surveillance method. Literal death by Powerpoint. This is a book for anyone who has dealt with the shitty systems that result from layers of red tape and struggled on despite them. And for anyone who has a guilty affection for movies with a lot of bikinis and explosions in them.