RogerBW's Blog

2015 modern occult secret service, sixth in the Laundry Files series. As CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN continues, more and more people are developing occult powers, and they envision them according to their own mythologies. Which means superheroes. Mo O'Brien, combat epistemologist and wielder of the last Zahn violin, now has to run a super-crime-fighting squad.

This is the first Laundry book not to be told from Bob Howard's viewpoint. Mo is his wife, separated from him at the end of The Rhesus Chart on the official basis that her violin wants to kill him and can get inside her head, mostly in practice because of the thing that's now in his head after the events of that book.

The first problem is that Mo doesn't really have a distinctive voice. Most of what she says could have been said by Bob, except for the parts that make up the second problem: presumably in an attempt to give her that distinctive voice, Stross has chosen to make her a stereotypical emotionally-flaky woman having a minor nervous breakdown. This isn't what she has ever been like before (even if you retroactively assume that Bob was always giving unreliable narration, which Stross has now begun to claim), and it doesn't make her someone I want to read about. The first half of the book is a long series of her insecurities about working with other women with whom Bob may or may not have had relationships before they got together. Yes, the woman's story turns out to be all about the man. Talking about the Bechdel test (and getting it wrong), and giving a middle-aged woman a superpower of literally not being noticed, doesn't automatically give you a Feminist Ally Card.

In truth, there's a knot of tension behind my sternum that does not dissolve in relief at the idea of spending an evening in the company of a vampire and a mermaid who both once upon a time had carnal relationships with my currently separated husband.

And while Bob had nightmares from the violin for years and kept on being Mo's emotional backstop, the moment Mo starts to feel a little uneasy about him she's out of there and, while not talking to Bob about it, allowing herself to start to get involved with an attractive co-worker. Which again doesn't really invoke my sympathy. Sure, you can say she's having a breakdown/crisis/PTSD/whatever, but why should I care what happens to her when you don't give her any positive traits? This isn't "Mo O'Brien who's going through some tough times but whom I still care about because I liked her in previous books", this is an insecure narcissistic Bridget Jones clone without redeeming features.

So what about the plot? Well, just as The Rhesus Chart assumed a fascination with vampires, The Annihilation Score assumes a fascination with superheroes that I simply don't share. There's no effort made to get me interested in the conventional approach before the deconstruction begins. So people are developing paranormal powers, assuming that they are becoming superheroes (apparently in a world where comics froze in the 1980s, as everyone here is using a very old-fashioned four-colour Good Guys and Bad Guys model), and Mo's job is to head the agency that's going to discourage vigilantism, work with the police, and have its own high-profile superhero team to go after the villains. Meanwhile what seems to be a mad scientist, "Professor Freudstein", is committing major robberies…

Yeah, that "they assume it's superpowers" is a bad start. Apparently this all works by country, because all countries are monocultured and never talk to each other (except in the USA):

In sub-Saharan Africa we are tracking an upswing in reports of vigilante attacks on suspected witches. […] In predominantly Islamic countries there have been increasing reports of Djinn and ifrit, and witchcraft trials have been reported in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's tribal territories, and Afghanistan. […] There've also been outbreaks of miracles in Poland, Ireland, Mexico, and elsewhere in Central and South America. Statues of the Virgin crying tears of blood, that sort of thing. Religious manifestations in India, much speaking in tongues in Baptist churches in the Deep South.

But in England? Apart from one djinn in a Muslim area, it's all superheroes all the time, and nobody is even sceptical about it.

And of course that means you can't even pretend these books are set in anything like the real world any more. There are public superheroes, and people with weird powers, all over the place. This changes everything, and to claim that life will basically go on as before modulo a few more explosions seems ingenuous in the extreme.

Of course there's a mystery going on too, but here's another key to the book's problems: Mo doesn't solve it. She goes along with this and that and the other, defends herself at Home Office briefings just enough to keep her job, falls for some of the oldest tricks in the book, and is taken completely by surprise by the betrayal that was obvious to us back at the beginning while she was still whining about the fact that other women had once found her husband attractive. (It doesn't help that she's also denied information about what's going on from her Laundry bosses, apparently for no reason other than to keep the particularly dim reader in suspense.)

As a result of this failure, some two thousand civilians die. But we don't even get any of the tear-jerking manipulative stuff we got about the dead Laundry operatives in The Rhesus Chart, oh no; none of these people matter, they weren't the important ones, they're just there to bulk up the body count.

There are continuity errors and things that never get resolved. A "use this to call me in emergency" device never gets used. An important meeting is called but never happens. Worry about K-syndrome never goes anywhere. There's inconsistency about the locations the Laundry is using for offices. CRB checks haven't existed since 2012, before the book started to be written. Here in the UK we've mostly never heard of the American police PR campaign "Officer Friendly", so why would we call a superheroic policeman that? The editor, and the large number of credited test-readers, should feel ashamed of themselves, unless they told Charlie about this stuff and he ignored them.

all I can think of is a silly book that Bob told me he was reading a couple of years ago, by some dead famous author, who came up with a clever neologism, what was it… an out of concept problem? No: an out of context problem.

No, it was an outside context problem. Very specifically. But who cares about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug when you can write a 140,000-word book in eighteen days?

Or you could slow down a bit and get it right. Or at least fix it in the second draft before you invite people to put down money for your work.

(Yes, I'm bitter. I've recently been working on revisions to a much shorter book which will have a much smaller audience. But I am doing my best to make sure that every damn word in my book is the right word, because what's the point of doing it at all if I don't do the best possible job?)

A final frustration was that as soon as the King in Yellow was mentioned I knew perfectly well that this was a Major Clue, and I'd have been much more interested if the book had been about something a bit less well-worn, like, oh:

Delia Derbyshire's symphony for fixed-disk storage systems that requires about two million pounds' worth of 1970-vintage IBM 370-series mainframe: apparently if you move the disk drive read/write heads fast enough they make screeching sounds at set frequencies.

But that just gets a passing mention, and Lost Carcosa is the major plot driver. Ho hum.

The next book, working title The Nightmare Stacks, is apparently going to be from the point of view of Alex. Who? One of the interchangeable background vampires from The Rhesus Chart. At this point I have no plans to read it. Unreliable narrator indeed!