On Her Majesty's Occult Service

by Charles Stross

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0739481126
• ISBN13: 9780739481127
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Science Fiction Book Club
• Length: 562 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Mr. Bond, Meet Mr. Lovecraft

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

Amazingly undefinable, terrifically readable - don't miss it!

"On Her Majesty's Occult Service" consists of two main books, The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. The world that Stross has created is our world, but just one-half step over ... maybe. Or maybe not - maybe he has just provided us with the real story for the first time? Who knows? Mixing Cthonian mythos, quantum physics and metaphysics, mathematical metatheory and spy thriller, Stross has made reading this book kind of like watching Monty Python in Japanese. There is simply no way to define the genre. That said, it is certainly a fun ride! Populated with computer programmer wizards, electronic gorgons, zombie birds and genetically engineered mer-people, this is a weird and wonderful world. In "The Atrocity Archives," (which includes the title story as well as the short story "The Concrete Jungle"), we first meet Bob, who is our hero, and is a member of the Laundry - a section of the British Secret Services that is so secret that even knowing about it is illegal unless you are a member. The Laundry is dedicated to making certain that the veils between the realities don't end up being pierced by accident - some mathematician using an unusual theorem or a computer programmer coming up with something new - that would actually end up calling up the Elder Gods or opening up a portal to allow the gibbering hordes of demons access to our world. Bob was conscripted when a computer program he was working on almost ended up re-sculpting a large part of a section of Britain and opening a wormhole to a particularly nasty dimension. He recently made the mistake of asking to work in "active service," and that request has just been approved ... things keep going from bad to worse as he is continually thrown into circumstances that end up snowballing into events beyond his control; and things are never quite what they seem. In "Concrete Jungle" he is awakened at 4 am to go and look at the sculptures of concrete cows in Milton Keynes; it appears that there may be an extra one - there are supposed to be 8. Bob finds 9. He discovers what appears to be the work of a basilisk or gorgon. How can this be? Again, things quickly tobaggon out of his control. Bob is the perfect hero for the modern age - armed with a Palm Pilot and cell phone (and occasionally a pigeon's foot) rather than a gun; scrawny and nerdish rather than tall and handsome, he is the epitome of the modern computer geek/hacker. Somehow, despite his tendency to stick his nose where it doesn't belong, and to jump into the middle of things where he has no business being, he manages to always come out ... well ... alive. The sequel to "The Atrocity Archives," "The Jennifer Morgue" consists of the title story, the short story "Pimpf" (first published on-line Jim Baen's Universe in June, 2006) and "The Golden Age of Spying," which is basically an afterword. Bob has been sent on a standard trip to a convention - he expects it to be pretty boring, as the conventions are generally just a chan

Pleasant, worth reading

A pleasant, gently humorous book; not particularly memorable but I enjoyed it and cheerfully recommend it.