[YHN]≫ PDF On Her Majesty Occult Service Charles Stross Cover Art By John Picaco 9780739481127 Books

On Her Majesty Occult Service Charles Stross Cover Art By John Picaco 9780739481127 Books

Download As PDF : On Her Majesty Occult Service Charles Stross Cover Art By John Picaco 9780739481127 Books

On Her Majesty Occult Service Charles Stross Cover Art By John Picaco 9780739481127 Books

I wish I could write half as well as this guy. Heck, I wish I could *fold newspapers* half as well as this guy writes.

He knows his background material cold. Moreover, he's able to convey that background in such a way as to make it interesting. His sentences sparkle. There's always a fresh twist in every line of every paragraph. This is the proverbial "page turner" come to life. If you're not waiting for some glowing monstrosity to materialize on the next page, you're holding your breath to see what new juxtaposition of metaphor and description the narrator's world-weary and rather resigned (but still witty) voice comes up with. Humor and shivers are mixed in the Very Best Ratio...like the perfect (shaken, not stirred) martini. Oh, and did I mention the perfect plot pacing and the skilled construction of the stories?

Though "The Jennifer Morgue" story gets a little sluggish at times (bogging down in the plot requirement that Ian Fleming's novels play an important role), still the narrative forges ahead seductively, providing, at the very least, a Good Read.

Hats off to you, sir. You have given me hours of pleasurable "premature burial" among the pages of your story.


Tags : On Her Majesty's Occult Service [Charles Stross, Cover Art By John Picaco] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Bob Howard was just a typical hacker until he accidentally re-discovered the darkest secret of computational math and nearly summoned an Elder God. He soon found himself working at The Laundry - a bureau so secret even the government barely knows it exists - trying to fight eldritch horrors while fending off the dreaded paper clip audits,Charles Stross, Cover Art By John Picaco,On Her Majesty's Occult Service,Science Fiction Book Club,0739481126

On Her Majesty Occult Service Charles Stross Cover Art By John Picaco 9780739481127 Books Reviews

Seriously... this book just earned itself a place in my TOP 5 FAVORITES. I can understand why many people might not care for it, since it meshes so many genres together; but that's exactly why I loved it! I'm so tired of cliched, predictable tales and stock players running their lines. You want something different? Exciting? Hysterical? Read this book.

I mean, we're talking about a hacker geek who gets conscripted into the British SuperBlack Ops group (MI-666?) because he was playing with a code that almost summoned a extra-dimensional monster into London. Whoops! Now working as an IT specialist and sometimes field agent for "The Laundry", Bob Howard runs around with a smartphone complete with a nextgen daughterboard filled with apps that allow him to used applied Non-Euclidean algorithms that access the omniverse and tap into sentient alien life as a proxy to do things like, oh... give him invisibility. And he usually carries a cybernetic Hand Of Glory for protection.

Yeah.

And by "alien life," I mean fun folks like Cthulhu and the rest of the Lovecraft gang. It seems there's been a treaty with the Deep Ones since before WWII, and Innsmouth is now a training ground for Occult Spies. Oh, and the USA has a version of The Laundry called "Black Chamber," who are almost as bad as Human Resources. See that's the other thing; besides being a mash-up of horror/espionage/technology thrills, it's also written with enough humor and absurdity to keep you thoroughly engrossed. I'm talking "Laugh Out Loud" moments here.

Will this book be over 50% of the heads of the people who try and read it? Probably. But 50% will get it, and 25% will love it. There's spy slang, computer terminology, hardcore mathematics, and major Lovecraft references. No, a mean a lot of all of those. But it's woven so well, told so wonderfully, characters so wacky... I absolutely loved it.
Stross at his best. His writing style in the Laundry series is lively and a joy to read. Fascinating premise - at some point science becomes magic. Excellent characters. Well-defined, interesting plots. Stross does his homework in detail, factual and historical, and writes to the well-formed intellect with pithy asides and inside humor. Highly entertaining. Well worth the price of admission.
Seriously fun. My brother loaned my his copy and after reading it I had to buy a copy for my library too. Combination of fantasy/spy world. My brother and his wife are extraordinarily well read and educated and the books they like tend to require thought and attention.
Charles Stross is developing a loyal cult of followers and well deserves it. Taking Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and mixing it with John Le Carre, Ian Fleming and healthy doses of computer geek terminology, he adds an anti-hero, Bob Howard, who just wants to make a living at a super-secret British spin-off of the SOE, known as "the Laundry" because it cleans up other peoples' dirty linens and used to be above a Chinese laundry. Bob's job is to find and remove from computer games "accidents" in programming that might give Lovecraft's Great Old Ones a trapdoor into our reality, and then (hopefully, but life is rarely orderly) go home to his spectacular red-haired girlfriend Mo, herself a whiz in the alternate universes field, while avoiding messes left around the house by his roommates Pinky and Brains. The result is great fun, if not always comprehensible to us old geezers who didn't go to grade school speaking the language of Artificial Intelligence.

Frankly, I would have given two of the components in this anthology five stars, and gave it the lower rating only because the other two aren't quite as good, even if only by a hair. "The Atrocity Archive" is one of the few sci-fi books I've read recently that I re-read almost immediately (if only because this is a tale that grows in the telling). Take the mixture above and add an especially terrible Nazi survival (the Ahnenerbe SS existed, by the way, and you can google them to find out more), a monstrous infovore from a dead universe that wants to do the same to ours, an alien (or is it?) planet whose weather is literally that of summer on Pluto, and a nuclear weapon whose timer is ticking away, and you have a story that starts somewhat slowly but about one-third of the way through takes off like a roller coaster and leaves you hanging on for dear life. (Word of Warning As Stross himself says, if you are a Tim Powers fan and have read the latter's book "Declare," don't be surprised if you get deja vu - the two were written at about the same time but parallel each other to a fairly remarkable degree.) "Pimpf" is a priceless short story, if only for the image of Our Hero invading a video game similar to Warcraft to rescue his clueless intern, accompanied by a huge and irate cross-dressing orc mercenary in a pink, frilly dress with matching shoes and club.

The other two stories are somewhat less gripping and illustrate the drawbacks of this hybrid form of literature, although both are quite good. "The Jennifer Morgue" deals with the attempts of a shadowy multi-billionaire to rescue (for his own purposes) a dormant Cthonian from the bottom of the ocean, an effort to which the Deep Ones take decided exception. But Stross gets so involved in trying to write a James Bond story (with a reverse twist) on Ian Fleming's model that the supernatural element gets short-changed in all the heroics. "The Concrete Jungle," a Hugo Award winner, starts out as a promising short story about unnamed malevolent parties trying to infect the UK's web of security cameras with a virus that gives them the lethal stare of a basilisk, but bogs down in detailing the Laundry's vicious office politics.

If you're interested in more Stross, I suggest his collection of short stories, "Toast," several of which are so bizarre that they will have you wondering if we and Stross are even in the same realities! In any case, his book will set strange winds blowing through your mind if they're not doing so already.
Be aware that this is a compilation of two other books, The Jennifer Morgue and The Atrocity Archive; it does not expand the Laundry Files collection if you already have those. It was issued only in hardcover.
I wish I could write half as well as this guy. Heck, I wish I could *fold newspapers* half as well as this guy writes.

He knows his background material cold. Moreover, he's able to convey that background in such a way as to make it interesting. His sentences sparkle. There's always a fresh twist in every line of every paragraph. This is the proverbial "page turner" come to life. If you're not waiting for some glowing monstrosity to materialize on the next page, you're holding your breath to see what new juxtaposition of metaphor and description the narrator's world-weary and rather resigned (but still witty) voice comes up with. Humor and shivers are mixed in the Very Best Ratio...like the perfect (shaken, not stirred) martini. Oh, and did I mention the perfect plot pacing and the skilled construction of the stories?

Though "The Jennifer Morgue" story gets a little sluggish at times (bogging down in the plot requirement that Ian Fleming's novels play an important role), still the narrative forges ahead seductively, providing, at the very least, a Good Read.

Hats off to you, sir. You have given me hours of pleasurable "premature burial" among the pages of your story.