The Concrete Jungle

Charles Stross' overtures to the Laundry universe continue in The Concrete Jungle, joined with The Atrocity Archives (previously) to make book one of the series. Yet again we join Bob Howard, IT monkey and hapless geek-thrown-into-fieldwork-of-a-rugose-and-squamous-nature. The bon mots are frequent, the silliness is pervasive, there are blood-pumping action sequences interspersed with tedious buzzword-filled officespeak.

This novella features:

1. smart, good-aligned nerds who are bad at bureaucratic-politics-navigating skills,
2. technologically inept bureaucrats who shine in the paperwork-'n'-politics realm, and
3. an eldrich explanation for why DRM won't die.

Every story seems to involve some civilians being exposed to the Real Lovecraft Underpinnings of the Universe, and thus being forcibly enrolled in the Laundry, the British government's branch that deals with suppressing and controlling the same. At this rate of expansion, it's no wonder that the bureaucracy is sprawling, inexplicably ramified, and variously inept (applying inappropriate "solutions" to nonexistent problems, or worse, to very serious and existent problems).

The idea of a bureaucracy so thorough, ruthless, and unflinching that it can execute a near-real-time paperclip audit (justifying every use and tracking each deployment) is as frightening as any of the mundane, merely Lovecraftian horrors that feature in this novella.

It is a joyful, sarcastic romp.

In the afterword/author's note, Stross goes into detail about the alignments of various elements that hummed resonantly in his brain and caused him to create this universe and its stories. I want to quote the entire thing, but I'll limit myself to this quip from p. 301:

The metafictional conceit that magic is a science has been used in fantasy --- or science fiction  --- several times. ... There is something about mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about it --- in the philosophy of mathematics.

This post's theme word is mumpsimus, "a view stubbornly held in spite of clear evidence that it's wrong" or "a person who holds such a view." The accountant was such a mumpsimus that he stepped into the summoning circle, even after the runes had started to glow and the scent of brimstone filled the air.

The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

Catherynne M. Valente hits another one out of the park --- and all the way up to the moon --- with The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (previously: 0, 1, 2). Our protagonist continues to be September, no longer a little girl but a teenager, ageing at a fairly steady one year interval between books. This was another excellent jaunt to Fairyland, with  involved the question of free will and Turing tests and fundamental rights and lots and lots of silly and ridiculous fairy-magic. Yetis are involved, and time speeds up and loops back on itself variably. The observer effect is used, and of course the omnipresent narrator sneaks in some sly marginalia.

September meets her fate, written in a book (of course), and observes that  "You can't argue with something that's written down... there's nothing for it. Once it's written, it's done. All those ancient books always say 'so it is written' and that means it's finished and tidied and you can't say a thing against it." (p.162) The narrator continues by directly, fourth-wall-breakingly, replying:

Oh, but September, it isn't so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written --- but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and respahe and pull out the wrong parts... Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic.

The entire book is full of these little touches and flourishes, head nods towards growing up and towards preserving magic and towards clevernesses in all their forms. As before, Fairyland is full of comic takes on adult life, as rephrased in terms of magical nonsense systems. But here Valente does the converse, too: she describes normal reality in magical terms. She blends from both directions. September is learning to drive, and gets a car in some parts of the adventure --- leading to the description by a fairy of gasoline as "saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons" (p. 151), a rather delightful stance to take on a fundamentally boring description of everyday fuel.

Nothing in Valente's writing is boring or everyday. All descriptions are amped-up, as if the Fairyland writing style were a baroque chest of drawers.  When describing the scene laid before the adventurers, it gets to be "vermilion and viridian and cerulean and citron and bold, glossy black, fairly glowing in the twilight." (p. 40) That's right: where other books might say it was red, green, blue, and yellow, with black outlines, Valente instead provides readers with an imaginative raid on the thesaurus. This is applied enough to be fun without verging into the exhaustion of rococo-saturation.

I continue to love this author. Read this book, too; if you've properly followed my recommendations to read its predecessors, you'll be drawn to read this book by your own reading gusto.


This post's theme word is logomania, "obsessive interest in words," or "excessive and often incoherent talking." Pardon my logomania, it is brought on by my logomaniacal reading habits.