Charles Stross – The Jennifer Morgue - Golden Gryphon Press, November 2006 (US), ISBN 1930846452

Charles Stross is probably best known for his singularity-flavoured science fiction, exemplified by the fix-up novel Accelerando (which netted its author an award from the World Transhumanist Association, as well as nominations for more conventional sfnal plaudits). However, he’s unafraid to trek off into different pastures, as The Jennifer Morgue demonstrates – there are sf tropes, plus fantastic and Lovecraftian horror elements, all wrapped up in another genre tradition that Stross has openly expressed his affection for – the classic British spy thriller.

Naturally, Stross being Stross, there-s more than a soupcon of dry humour involved. So we have as our hero one Bob Howard, who is employed as a computer expert (read as “hacker”) by The Laundry, a branch of the British Secret Service devoted to keeping a lid on multidimensional manifestations.

You see, magic is just mathematics, which means that the age of ubiquitous computing has made it very easy for some naive or stupid coder to accidentally invoke a hungry daemon or vengeful demigod, simply by trying to number-crunch the wrong formula. To paraphrase Bob, he’s no necromancer himself, but “he does countermeasures”. Basically, he’s a clean-up artist.

Or at least he used to be – right up until his employers saddled him with some active duty fieldwork, psychically entangled him with a demonically-possessed mermaid-in-mufti, and dispatched him to the Caribbean with instructions to infiltrate the machinations of a megalomaniac corporate uber-villain, complete with gun-toting goons, an immense yacht-fortress and a foul-tempered fluffy white cat.

If that sounds a little obvious, it’s supposed to. In many ways, The Jennifer Morgue is a work of metafiction – a playful, knowing and openly self-confessed deconstruction of James Bond novel and movie plots, mocking them and revelling in them at the same time. Each supporting character is a gag or cliché in his or her own right; for example, Pinky and Brains, a pair of exceptionally camp and gadget-obsessed tech support operatives who furnish Bob with the requisite tools for the task.

And the gadgets themselves, of course; Bob doesn’t get given Bond’s Aston Martin and Walther PPK, but has to make do with a two-seater Smart car and a Treo smartphone that fires silver-jacketed exorcism rounds. Bob’s innate cynicism comes through in the first-person narration, which deflects the outright silliness of the ideas into the realm of tragic comedy and farce and avoids the snake-pit of superficial spoof.

But does it work? Stross chipped into a recent resurgence of internet-based debate regarding the perennial “decline and fall of the genre” meme. In a nutshell, he suggested that one way to grow sf’s readership might be to “pitch for the Slashdot generation”, to write explicitly for an audience of intelligent and geekish outsiders who should (by rights and tradition) be sf literature’s core audience – and would be, if there was more material that flicked the right switches for them.

The Jennifer Morgue seems to encapsulate this demographic targeting, with our hero Bob providing a sympathetic lead to identify with. He hates management, ties and PowerPoint presentations; he shops online for T-shirts emblazoned with internet in-jokes; he is the socially-stunted computer nerd at your office, thrust into an unfamiliar world of deadly intrigue and occult nastiness which he sets about to hack as if it were a defective operating system.

The Jennifer Morgue is a fun book. And it’s funny too, provided you either know the Bond clichés backwards or you�re a paid-up member of the geek-and-proud subculture – probably doubly funny, should you place at the intersection of those two sets. And therein lies the flaw: The Jennifer Morgue is somewhat exclusive, in that a lot of the in-jokes and post-modernist nudges will fly straight past the average bookstore browser.

However, as a naked pitch for the I.T. crowd whose lingua franca is one of irony, knowing pastiche and a lot of acronyms, it fits the bill perfectly. Only time will tell just how hungry that audience really is for long-form written fiction. But if Stross has surmised correctly, The Jennifer Morgue‘s place in the padded laptop-bags of the techno-elite is already reserved.

[This review originally published in Vector #250; reproduced here with the kind permission of the editors.]

This is a little off-topic for VCTB, perhaps, but I feel I’m entitled to a bit of self-aggrandisement every once in a while.

So it is with great pride that I link you towards my (site-leader) interview with Bob Balch, guitarist of desert-rock veterans Fu Manchu, and my review of Fu Manchu playing Southampton’s Nexus with support from the excellent Valient Thorr.

Any VCTB regulars who read a lot of (or indeed any) music journalism, please give me some feedback – it’s hard to be objective sometimes, and my editor at that site is too busy to critique my work before publishing it …

… oooh, added bonus: my interview/review combo piece with Franz Triechler of Swiss industrial act The Young Gods is also available on teh intartoobs.

And I’m off to review Electric Six tomorrow night. Rock and roll, eh?

You may or may not have noticed that today’s Strange Horizons review of Extended Play: the Elastic Book of Music was written by me.

That’s my first piece for SH, and I’m very chuffed to see it there. It’s always a proud moment to see your work appear in a new venue, especially one as respected as Strange Horizons.

Coincidentally, it was probably one of the hardest reviews to write I’ve ever done, due to the wide range of story styles and genres included in the anthology. Let me know if you think I nailed it.

It’s true, I do. My review of Vernor Vinge’s early novel The Witling is in the current SF Site update, should you care to take a look.

Roger Levy, ‘Icarus’ – Gollancz SF, August 2006, 432pp, £12.99, ISBN 057507860X

Haven is a barren world, its surface scoured by ferocious winds. The human colony it holds has burrowed into the rock of the planet – years of desperate effort to stay alive have rendered their origins all but forgotten. What remains is held in the Vault, rigidly mediated by the Directorate of Fact. Storytelling is forbidden, as is the speaking of ‘unFact’. When two survey-drillers discover a vessel buried in a sea of solidified magma, far out beyond the boundaries of the colony, Fact moves to conceal the evidence that it contains. One of the Surveyors, Quill, manages to escape alive with some mysterious artefacts and a whole lot of questions. He is a wanted man, on the run and in search of the truth …

[This review originally published in Vector #250; the complete article can be read on the Vector website.]

OK, so perhaps it’s just me, but when I heard (from Big Blog of Cheese) that there’s a review written in the style of a graphic novel about a graphic novel, that is itself a story that combines not just the history of the graphic novel as a format but also a re-examination of a canonical English fantasist author -

Well, let’s just say that the whole meta-ness of it brought a real big grin to my face. File under ‘reasons to leave the house more often’ and ‘postmodernism is rotting my brain’, perhaps?

Interzone celebrates twenty five years of continuous publication with this, its two hundred and ninth issue. The fiction offering is supplied by a mix of old hands who owe a part of their current standing to the magazine (most notably M. John Harrison, whose work appeared in the first ever issue) and some new hot properties. Continue reading “Magazine Review: Interzone #209 (Silver Anniversary Issue)”

The second issue of Hub Magazine shows a marked improvement from the first, in terms of presentation – they’ve reigned in the images embedded in stories, which has made things a lot more readable. Some of the background images still make the text hard to follow, but there’s always a balance of compromise between impact and readability. What is plain is that they’re listening to their readers, which bodes well for the future. Continue reading “Magazine Review: Hub, Issue #2 (Winter 2007)”

I imagine that most of VCTB’s regular readers will have heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes. The Annals of Improbable Research is the magazine that sponsors them, a humerous science journal focussing on ‘science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think’. Continue reading “The Improbable Research Lecture Tour 2007″

Continue reading “Book review: ‘Hunters of Dune’ by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson”