Charles Stross: Quantum of Nightmares (Laundry Files #11) - Spotlight
Quantum of Nightmares, Charles Stross (Laundry Files #11)
It’s a brave new Britain under the New Management.
A unique blend of espionage thrills and Lovecraftian horror, Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross’s Laundry Files continues with Quantum of Nightmares.
It’s a brave new Britain under the New Management. The avuncular Prime Minister is an ancient eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so much.
Hyperorganized and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. Now she’s in charge of the Bigge Corporation—just in time to discover the lethal trap Rupert set for her long ago.
Wendy Deere’s transhuman abilities have gotten her through many a scrape. Now she’s gainfully employed investigating unauthorized supernatural shenanigans. She swore to herself she wouldn’t again get entangled with Eve Starkey’s bohemian brother Imp and his crew of transhuman misfits. Yeah, right.
Mary Macandless has powers of her own. Right now she’s pretending to be a nanny in order to kidnap the children of a pair of famous, Government-authorized superheroes. These children have powers of their own, and Mary Macandless is in way over her head.
Amanda Sullivan is the HR manager of a minor grocery chain, much oppressed by her glossy blonde boss—who is cooking up an appalling, extralegal scheme literally involving human flesh.
All of these stories will come together, with world-bending results...
“For all of Stross's genuine ability to spook and dismay, Laundry Files are some of the most tremendously humane books I've ever read.”—Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth
Question for the Author: “How did you first get the idea to combine spy thrillers and Lovecraftian horror?”
Let me rewind to 1992, when I began writing a short story entitled “A Colder War,” which eventually surfaced in print around 1998. It’s one of the longest stories I’ve ever written. Now, “A Colder War” started when I was looking at At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which had some moments of sublime horror in it. It’s one of his classic stories.
However, Lovecraft’s horror has very much been devalued in recent decades. It’s reached a point where we have plush Cthulhu dolls and bedroom slippers, where it’s suitable subject matter for jokes or for comics. It lacks the level of cosmic horror it originally came with.
In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was trying to think: How do you put the horror back into H.P. Lovecraft? And I suddenly realized, you mate it with something that truly is horrifying. 1992 was just after the end of the Cold War, and if you were alive back then, you lived with the ever-present knowledge that vast intelligences thousands of miles away might at any moment be making decisions that would unleash the power of a thousand suns—basically, melt the skin from your face, and kill everybody around you, and destroy everything you hold dear, for entirely abstract reasons relating to an ideological struggle that never really touches you directly. There was something really terrifying about the Cold War that traumatized the generations that lived through it.
In “A Colder War,” I positioned it as a sort of a sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, in which a vast alien city is discovered, abandoned, in the Antarctic. I posited that, if this had actually happened, over the next decade or so, there would have been first an archeological race and then an arms race, as various global powers sought to steal alien supertechnology, the tools of an extinct race, and put them to use as weapons.
One thing leads to another, and it doesn’t end well. World War Three breaks out, Cthulhu himself is deployed as a weapon from the crypt in the Urals, everybody dies horribly, or worse, wishes they could die. This worked really, really well as a horror story. It’s still anthologized to this day on a regular basis. But, while I wanted to do more with this idea, I couldn’t do it in that particular setting. It was too dark.
Now, if you’re dealing with horror, one way of getting around the idea of it being horrifying—the subject material—is to add some snarky humor to it. We’ve noticed, for example, Jim Butcher do it with the Harry Dresden books. What I was doing with The Laundry Files was, I decided to go at it with situational humor. You take a setting, in this case, a somewhat grungy, down-at-heels, peeling-paint British government agency, dealing with something obscure and quite terrifying, and parachute into it somebody who is totally inappropriate, utterly unsuited to that sort of office culture.
In this case, Bob Howard is sort of a sandal-wearing, slashdot-reading hacker-geek, circa late-1990s dot-com startup culture. He’s been conscripted, effectively, into a branch of the British Secret Service protecting us from the scum of the multiverse. Almost a Men In Black scenario, except very, very different, in MacGuffin, as to what is going on and how it’s run.
He’s flailing around, gradually trying to figure out what is going on and what his role is in all this, as he becomes aware that the shadows are lengthening and some very, very nasty things are on their way to make life hellish all around for everybody.
A large part of the plot armature that the series revolves around is an eventuality that the British government had codenamed “Case Nightmare Green.” The stars are coming into correct alignment for the return of the Elder Gods—H.P. Lovecraft’s alien super-civilization of eons past, who previously owned and occupied this planet and are now returning, and will drive us all insane or kill us, or just sweep us from their halls like the vermin we are. The Laundry’s job is to defend the realm, keep the public from becoming too panicked over what’s going on, and try to find a solution to what is probably the end of the world that is heading towards them like the onrushing lights of a train at the end of a tunnel.
—(Interview: Charles Stross by THE GEEK’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY)
