One of the longest-shirked jobs on my to-do list is "Finish the Laundry Files". By which I mean "write the final novel in the story arc that began with The Atrocity Archive and follows Bob Howard through his career", not "finish with that fictional universe". Much like the Merchant Princes series, there are two Laundry universe series in progress—the Bob/secret government agency saga, and the civilians-trying-to-cope under the New Management story. The one ends before the other begins, but unlike the Merchant Princes/Empire Games switch-over, I didn't finish the Laundry Files story before beginning the next one.
(This was accidental on my part. In 2018, I was dealing with a combination of burnout and a dying parent in a nursing facility 300km from home. I wasn't able to focus on the books I was supposed to be working on, so I finally gave myself dispensation to engage in therapy writing—any old shit was better than nothing—and nine months later that turned out to be Dead Lies Dreaming, which promptly demanded two sequels during the bleak onset of Brexit and COVID19. The latter coincidentally spiked my planned solution to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN so I had to tear it up and start again from scratch.)
Anyway, I'm now at the note-taking stage for two new books. One of them is the fourth New Management novel and no, I have plenty of ideas and don't need your suggestions. But the other is the Final Laundry Files Novel. Again, I don't need plot suggestions—I've got too much plot as it is.
But there is something I do need ...
Setting aside the New Management (but including next year's A Conventional Boy), the Laundry Files currently runs to roughly 1.25 million words of published fiction. That's a lot. It's simultaneously over-familiar to me (there are bits I can quote verbatim, and chunks of back-story I never exposed) and half-forgotten (I began writing it in late 1998, 25 years ago). I don't have the energy to commit to re-reading the entire bookshelf and making notes before I start, but I do need to zero in on anything I've mentally edited out or forgotten and that needs to be closed out: protagonists who went missing en route from book 3 to book 8, for example, or foreign agencies entities that were left hanging at the end of an earlier book.
Fans of the series clearly have Questions to which they want Answers before Bob and Mo are allowed to ride off into the sunset (or un-die horribly in a necromantic re-run of the shoot-out at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the ending is entirely open at this point). So I'm open to questions in the comments—just don't expect me to answer them directly, or even use them in the final novel. (Some questions may be answered by the New Management series. For example, Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish briefly show up in Season of Skulls, which is set 18 months after the end of The Laundry Files. Other questions might be ignored. For example, I see no reason to revisit the Librarian in the Dansey House archive stacks. Let sleeping Terry Pratchett tributes lie!)
So: your starter question is, who (and what) in the Laundry Files do you want to learn the fate of? And what unanswered questions still nag at you, n books later?
(Small print: There is no guarantee that this book will ever be written, and if it is commissioned and written, it won't be published before 2025 and more likely 2026. That's because A Conventional Boy is on its way to publication in summer 2024, and depending on the publishing pipeline, my space opera Ghost Engine might be ready to follow it in 2025, and I don't have the stamina to support a two book a year output cycle any more. However, rest assured, finishing the Laundry Files is still on my to-do list.)
My burning questions always revolve around BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN, mostly the latter since we've had fewer interactions with them.
As an example of a question: what is the relationship between them and the PM? By which I mean, I assume they are aware of each other, so do they studiously ignore each other, have there been any subtext-filled talks, is one of them keeping contingency plans about the other?
I'm still hoping for Spooky the cat being Chekhov's BFG.
Can't remember for sure but I seem to recall indications that BLUE HADES (the Deep Ones) were evacuating the Earth because shit was getting too hot. DEEP SEVEN probably haven't noticed yet, but they're the kind of folks even Nyarlathotep would think twice about annoying.
There might be an embassy or two showing up later in the New Management, but this isn't a concern for The Last Laundry Novel (hereafter TLLN).
I keep saying this: Spooky Is Just A Goddamn Cat.
(I already played a "the cat is an alien supervillain" card in The Jennifer Morgue.
I'd love for pinky and brains to get a somewhat happy ending... For a Case NIGHTMARE GREEN value of happy.
Also, hoping to see how badly Moe takes vicar Pete's last sunrise, and how badly she blames Bob.
+1 to Vicar Pete's fate & Pinky/Brain closure.
I'd also like Iris's storyline to get closed off in some way. It's been a while since I read the whole set — but I don't think her allegiances and motivations are 100% clear yet.
Also the the four-meter diameter event horizon at the end of Rhesus Chart felt a little Chekhov's Gun-ish considering George's ways of keeping food fresh :-)
Related to that, I miss Angleton (I, too, went to Public School). George in Season of Skulls seems a nicer person than he ended up; could he be rehabilitated somehow? Or is it too late?
Beyond that, I'll have to re-read all the books and make notes before I can answer the main question.
Those are all on my list.
Iris's story, however, is ongoing in the New Management as Number Ten's Chief-of-Staff. And the event horizon in the New Annexe just got a whole lot gnarlier thanks to the ending of Season of Skulls ...
I'd always hoped there was something more to be said about Angleton.
A bit more is said about him -- by implication -- in Escape from Yokai Land. But he's not getting a first-person-PoV story of his own and I'm not bringing him back if I can help it.
All things I cannot imagine that the person Angelton were before Teapot happened to him, would not try to leave a helpful note to his eventual successor in the job.
I would look in places like the mandatory "Annual Civil Servant Performance Evaluation and Career Recommendation" form, or other similar places where Teapot might have let the body run a bit on autopilot, while he concentrated on important stuff.
Not sure I would want to read the actual note though...
I suspect the Laundry's Personnel Department gave up on annual performance evals with Angleton some time in the 1950s and tacitly agreed -- with permission from the Auditors -- to report on him as an asset, not a member of staff, after the last interview ended in screaming, attempts to break down the door, and piteous sobbing ...
Did we get an answer that I just missed to the “What have they been doing for decades with the slow-turing-chess game” in “Down on the Farm”?
One thing that always bothered me is the Sleeper's role in The Fuller Memorandum.
Iris and her cultists want to summon the Eater of Souls because he knows how to dismantle the Wall of Pain around the Sleeper, and they view the Sleeper as something that can help in summoning the Black Pharaoh.
This is also confirmed by Angleton:
And by Panin in his conversation to Mo:
However, in The Delirium Brief we have clear evidence that the Sleeper and the Black Pharaoh are actually enemies, or at the very least rivals; and Iris is fully aware of it:
So, why did Black Pharaoh cultists in TFM think that awakening the Sleeper would help them?
We can assume they were misguided, as cultists often are; but this applies to basically everyone in TFM, including people like Angleton, and also Iris, which in TDB knows fully well that the Sleeper is definitely not a friend of the Black Pharaoh.
I don’t think the books have indicated that Blue Hades have fled. The most recent mentions I can find from Labyrinth Index:
“But Ramona isn’t around any more—she got recalled, nobody seems to know what her people (BLUE HADES, the abyssal Deep Ones) make of the New Management—and Mo, Dr. O’Brien, is unavailable.”
“Eventually they may dismantle the Earth, although I suppose Blue Hades and Deep Six might express reservations on that account.”
The former "patients" at St. Hildas have received regular mentions in the novels. I definitely remember the Delirium Brief mentioning how Continuity Ops managed to re-establish communications with them after St. Hildas was shut down.
I don't think Mr. Stross has forgotten about them.
I just skimmed Atrocity Archive and found the following loose ends (of varying importance):
The series starts with a Malcolm Denver having his cubicle at Memetix visited by Bob, and Malcolm subsequently being drafted by the Laundry. Did Malcolm ever do anything of note, or did he bravely fill his assigned seat with his butt?
You were fairly vague about what Mo's philosophy work was about. Something about faith/belief, something about the Logic of Thoth. Is it important?
Is the Derek in Atrocity Archive the same Derek from Nightmare Stacks/Labyrinth Index/Conventional Boy?
I did not see any obvious loose ends in Concrete Jungle, but it is a very short book.
Some loose ends that come immediately to mind from other books:
Is it DEEP SEVEN or DEEP SIX? Are they called DEEP SIX now because one of them got nuked at the end of Jennifer Morgue?
Was Mo turned at the end of Nightmare Stacks? Is she still human?
There are lots of unanswered questions, but lets stick to the guns on the mantlepiece that grabbed my attention, in descending order of grab:
Mo's dream of a cradle and the burst condom.
St Hilda's, as others have said.
What happened about the theft of the plans for the ghostly violin, and why the person who drew them up was murdered. And whether or not there was a Russian link, given the cooperative approach to Bob over the Teapot.
The very strong implication in serveral places that auditors have power deriving from their office, and not just themselves personally or otherwise secret information. Sub-gun: Mo originally got her power through the violin, but then survived a non-survivable event.
How Persephone avoids K-syndrome.
Massimo's post about the Sleeper etc., but the anomalies may be more oversights than guns on the mantlepiece.
I will post others if I think of them.
I thought the clever "food preservation" technique was demonstrated by Basil, not George? Also, if Basil's technique were the same as the event horizon in the New Annex, then the warehouse near the end of Rhesus Chart would have been flooded with lethal necromantic energy.
I got the feeling that the event horizon in the New Annex using such fierce offensive firepower that they damaged the universe's substrate.
One of the bigger loose ends that I genuinely think Charlie forgot about is in Nightmare Stacks. Cassie is IMMUNE TO VAMPIRES because of a vaccine applied to those of noble rank.
Why didn't the Laundry co-opt this vaccine and apply it to their non-vampire staff? Were they concerned that the UK may have to establish their own spandex semi-vampire police force to match the USA? Or was it merely incompatible with the Labyrinth Index's La Femme Nikita plot point?
There was a possible connection between Armstrong and DEEP SEVEN that I don't think was expanded upon.
I'd definitely like to see how the don't-call-them-elves are integrating into British society. How does the New Management feel about them, for instance?
I’m a bit curious to the origins of Lecter and the rest of the orchestra. I can imagine Antonio Salieri’s bones being full of malice.
While I’m at it, are you going to be gathering typos for Season of Skulls? You have a couple characters whose names keep changing. Lady/Mrs./Ms. DeVere swaps between Mary and Sally, which is confusing since there’s already a Mary & Sally. And there’s Fiona/Flora in the Village.
But which God damned it ;)
Am I misremembering or misinterpreting Bob's rumination about thumbs on the cat?
I think the most horrifying thing in the Laundryverse is the elf invasion incident report segment, so i wouldnt mind seeing more Mil-Thulu bits. Or the Last Ride of Alan Barnes, Scary-spice and the rest of the door-kickers.
They exist, and are no more witchy than any other cat.
https://living.greatpetcare.com/inspiration/cats-with-thumbs-all-about-polydactyl-cats/
I second Elderly Cynic on: 1. "What happened about the theft of the plans for the ghostly violin" - that was my first remembrance of a loose thread. 2. "The very strong implication in serveral places that auditors have power deriving from their office, and not just themselves personally or otherwise secret information." and some reminiscence about the the first case of a Laundry operative "highlighted" by an auditor. I was confused by the ease of subduing the Mandate given the later developments, and Masimo's point on the Sleeper is also a doubt I have.
I keep saying this: Spooky Is Just A Goddamn Cat.
True. But you always use unreliable narrators, so why should we take you at your word? :-)
Down on the Farm demands a revisit but it might end up being a novelette or novella rather than part of TLLF.
Dammit, now I have some reading and diagramming to do!
It's unreliable narrators all the way down, though. And "the thing in the pyramid can set the process in motion, starting a chain of events that will ultimately open the doors of uncreation and release the Black Pharaoh" does not necessarily mean that the Sleeper and the Black Pharaoh are allies: if you break down the gates of Arkham Asylum to release the Riddler you're equally likely to unleash the Joker ...
Damn it, posted this in the wrong thread:
I, for one, really want to see Bob and Mo ride off together into the sunset, maybe into a parallel world where magic doesn't work, or that there are extremely stringent limits?
But taking both series as a whole, I'm having trouble seeing any ending that doesn't involve the whole planet, or maybe the solar system, going blam. Please don't write yourself into a corner that makes that an inevitable ending.
Wouldn't they fit perfectly into the nobility? Which of them gets to go to the House of Lords?
Answers (in some cases):
A Malcolm Denver having his cubicle at Memetix visited by Bob, and Malcolm subsequently being drafted by the Laundry.
— No further appearance. (Most people never end up in active ops.)
Mo's philosophy work
— Not relevant subsequently.
Is the Derek in Atrocity Archive the same Derek from Nightmare Stacks/Labyrinth Index/Conventional Boy?
— Definitely not.
Is it DEEP SEVEN or DEEP SIX?
— Did it get changed somewhere?
Was Mo turned at the end of Nightmare Stacks?
— No, you're thinking of The Delirium Brief.
Is she still human?
— Almost certainly not, but precisely how inhuman she is remains to be seen. (Remember, she carried the White Violin for a very long time: we don't know what its long term effects are.)
Ths is a loose end that needs tying up in TLLF.
I can absolutely guarantee that. MY late wife and I had one, orange, 16 lbs, and a wimp. And when they were giving out brains, he thought they said "trains", and said "no, thanks, they're too loud".
What happened about the theft of the plans for the ghostly violin
Did you spot the string quartet in the background at the royal reception in Season of Skulls?
How Persephone avoids K-syndrome.
Again, note Persephone's reappearance in Season of Skulls, and how Eve perceives her. (Persephone is no-way no-how an ordinary practitioner: she seems to have access to resources/knowledge ordinary ritual magicians lack. Having run an international crime syndicate who were in a position to burgle the right book collections probably has something to do with that ...)
auditors have power deriving from their office
Yes, and that's a significant plot point for TLLF (as is the SA's ability to put Bob -- or any other lower-ranking employee -- into debug mode).
Why didn't the Laundry co-opt this vaccine and apply it to their non-vampire staff?
Quick! A random US Army Brigade finds itself mysteriously translated to Middle Earth, and ends up surrendering to the Kingdom of Gondor. Why doesn't Gondor immediately start rolling out the boring vaccines against Anthrax, etc. that US soldiers all routinely get before deploying overseas?
(The Alfar Host is a tiny splinter of the forces of the empire and they've lost a lot, as witness relying on Agent First of Spies and Liars for forward recon rather than having a proper intelligence branch.)
Knowing such a vaccine is possible -- and presumably one against K-syndrome too -- will of course be immensely useful to the New Management, assuming His Nibs isn't suppressing the information to stop potential rivals getting too big for their boots before the eaters chow down on them.
See the first page of Dead Lies Dreaming.
Typos for Season of Skulls: maybe, but I have to feed 'em to two publishers. Sigh. I'll ask if they're going to reflow the text any time soon ...
By the time we reach TLLF, the door-kickers from The Atrocity Archive have probably long since mustered out of the ranks or been promoted behind a desk -- nearly 15 years have passed.
(But a different OCULUS team rocks up to a gaming convention in A Conventional Boy ...)
I was confused by the ease of subduing the Mandate given the later developments
That's a topic I tip-toe up to in the New Management books. (Note the final boss fight in the basement in Season of Skulls between Lich-Rupert and Proto-Fabian ...)
Adrian Midgley @ 24:
But which God damned it ;)
Am I misremembering or misinterpreting Bob's rumination about thumbs on the cat?
Polydactylism in cats isn't necessarily significant.
Polydactylism in cats isn't necessarily significant.
There are thumbs and there are opposable thumbs, which give the fine manipulation control. Without them, even polydactyl cats can't operate a can opener and there is still a reason for them to keep humanity around.
What I'd really like to know - some of which has already been addressed in previous comments.
How do Pinky & Brain turn out, and Alex & Cassie ... maybe somewhat about the other PHANGS left over at the end of The Nightmare Stacks/The Delirium Brief. Mhari & Alex weren't the only ones who survived ... I think you already promised the Senior Auditor would get his story told.
And, of course, do Bob & Mo manage to survive with ANY of their humanity left and do they manage to sort out their marital problems. What happened AFTER the condom broke?
Also, what poor schmuck became Fabian Everyman & how did that happen? Who IS the sleeper in the pyramid, and how did IT get there?
Season of Skulls hasn't come out in paperback, and I hadn't thought to check the Wake County Public Library to see if they have a copy, so if any of my questions are answered in it, I haven't seen it yet.
Of course. And cultists are notorious for not understanding who or what they worship and getting eaten for that. But Angleton really should know better… and Iris is shown to actually know better (some books later).
This is a bit nagging, because it’s not a minor slip like Bob talking about “the two with bite marks” in TRC which were never mentioned before. This is an actual plot point in TFM, and the Sleeper is quite important throughout the whole series…
if you're in the USA there won't be a paperback edition of Season of Skulls -- Tor.com doesn't publish in mass market, it's strictly hardcover (unless sales justify a trade paperback on top). Mostly they sell ebooks. (Note that they're DRM-free, unlike the other big five publishers.)
You should read Season of Skulls.
I would love to get some clarity as to exactly how powerful Bob and Mo have become. It's clear that at some stage they transcended humanity but even after having read the entire series a couple of times I'm still a little bit confused as to when exactly that happened.
The sleeper in the pyramid has always haunted me.
What's happening in the rest of the world? It can't just be the UK that has been taken over by an eldrich horror from the dark depths. We know the USA has fallen into a terrible situation but what's going on in Germany ? What's happening in Africa? Do we even dare imagine what's happening in Russia m
Already addressed the event horizon, haven't had a chance to read SoS yet, addressed the Sleeper stuff, anyone mention what's up here in the states yet?
Seconding or thirding poor Pete the Vicar's fate. I'd also be interested if any US agencies besides the Secret Service managed to put up a fight against the Nazgul. (And what's happened to all the government-leveraged cloud infrastructure in the brave new world? Case Nightmare Yellow?)
"Polydactylism in cats isn't necessarily significant. There are thumbs and there are opposable thumbs,"
I am reliably informed that some polydactyl cats do have (sort of) opposable thumbs, although whether they have the reach and strength to operate can openers is another question.
JHomes
I keep reading words from the ends inwards and consequently thinking people are talking about pterodactylism in cats.
I guess now is the time to reread the entire series.
Two questions come to mind: 1. I was always intrigued by your mention of the Nameless Bureau, IIRC, which was the Chinese analog of the 13th Directorate or the Black Chamber. What has been happening behind the Bamboo Curtain during CNG? Or in Russia, for that matter? 2. Are vampires sterile?
Charlie Stross @ 45:
if you're in the USA there won't be a paperback edition of Season of Skulls -- Tor.com doesn't publish in mass market, it's strictly hardcover (unless sales justify a trade paperback on top). Mostly they sell ebooks. (Note that they're DRM-free, unlike the other big five publishers.)
I think that's been true for the last several books. It's NOT been a problem.
Where there was no US paperback I was able to order a UK paperback and have it shipped to the U.S.
Massimo @ 46:
You should read Season of Skulls.
I will once the paperback (trade, UK) comes out OR I get to the top of the wait list at the Wake County Library ... but I'll still buy the UK paperback when it comes out.
I should probably explain again that when I purchase a book that turns out to be in a series I like to keep all volumes in the same format. It's just a personal preference.
I bought The Atrocity Archives in paperback, so I want the rest of the Laundry Files (even the New Management) in paperback ... and so far, I've managed to do that. The only one I had to buy in hardcover was Equoid.
I bought the first of the Family Trade series in hardcover, so I bought the rest of them in hardcover ... until I had to replace them & bought the omnibus editions ALL in Trade Paperback.
Pigeon @ 51:
I keep reading words from the ends inwards and consequently thinking people are talking about pterodactylism in cats.
Hmmmm ... THAT could be scary.
I keep reading words from the ends inwards and consequently thinking people are talking about pterodactylism in cats.
Winged cats! No bird is safe anywhere. Able to knock ornaments off even higher shelves for a more satisfying crash. Access to vegetable patches for digging, no matter how high the wall. This is the real threat to the world order. Even with opposable thumbs, cats would still prefer to let humans do all the work and have another snooze.
Yes, you can leave further detail as mysteries, but these are the aspects that struck me.
It was the gratuitous murder and the lack of anything about a Laundry response to both it and the missing document that raised alarm bells. Neither made any sense. Also, as I understand the chronology, those events happened well before Fabian Everyman hit the scene.
The anomaly about Persephone's immunity is that you made a big deal about Laundry people having to retire because of incipient K-syndrome, and it is surprising that at least the auditors haven't adopted the same method as she has. Unless you intend to reveal that they have :-)
Pete the Vicar is already on the to-do list.
I'm not really interested in ongoing events in the USA after The Labyrinth Index but may revisit it in the New Management.
TLLF takes place only a few months after TLI, so there hasn't been time for a great change in the status quo after America woke up, wigged out, and half of it promptly went back to sleep again.
(Something I need to ink in in the background is that there's probably as much international supply chain disruption going on in the Laundryverse in 2015-18 as we saw in 2020-2022 in the real world, only for different reasons.)
Two questions come to mind: 1. I was always intrigued by your mention of the Nameless Bureau, IIRC, which was the Chinese analog of the 13th Directorate or the Black Chamber. What has been happening behind the Bamboo Curtain during CNG? Or in Russia, for that matter? 2. Are vampires sterile?
I have no answers to these questions -- although my first thought on 2 is: no, PHANGs are not automatically sterile, but it's quite likely that the infection can be transmitted in utero and will be rapidly lethal to a baby, much like HIV. The Alfar don't know -- they usually kill their female vampires and castrate the males: Yarisol/Jar-Jar is an exception who slipped through the net. (And I ought to add her to the to-do list, except "non-neurotypical female Alfar vampire" is a tough character to write.)
By way of explanation:
Ace used to publish me in hardcover and mass-market, but the mass-market distribution chain was dying in the 2000s. Up to 60% of mass market paperbacks were destroyed unsold and they're not much cheaper than hardcover book blocks (minus the binding, boards, and wrap-around) to print: grocery chain consolidation killed the wire racks so except for best-sellers sold at Walmart sales dwindled by about 50-80% over the decade. Ebooks replaced them as the cheap disposable reading edition, and have numerous advantages from an author/publisher perspective: they're available instantly (not just through shops) so are easy impulse buys, there are no manufacturing overheads (no physical paper to ship around, print, or dispose of if unsold), all sales are final (no wholesalers, only goddamn Amazon to deal with), and so on. There are production costs (editing and typesetting still costs as much as for a paper product) but you can consolidate that with the hardcover edition.
Macmillan, parent company of Tor, set up Tor.com as an in-house startup between about 2006 and 2012. It's a separate imprint targeting the ebook channel first and foremost. However, they distribute hardbacks via Old Tor, and share a lot of editorial and design/production staff (while having a separate marketing team, because: different channel). Oh, and their b2b contracts -- between author and publisher -- are very different from trad publisher ones (for one thing there's no boilerplate about royalties due on gramophone or microfiche editions of the work!).
Anyway, the Laundry Files successfully moved to Tor.com in 2015 after Ace was gutted during the Penguin/Random House merger. (Ace was part of Penguin. RIP.) Which is why you only see hardcover and ebook editions of the Laundry Files these days (although Ace didn't bother printing a mass market paperback of The Nightmare Stacks in 2014 due to dwindling MMPB sales and the ongoing merger-related death throes).
I may just leave the murder/theft as red herrings. Not everything needs to be wrapped up with a bow, and the KGB has form for (a) industrial espionage and (b) bumping off Brits in London (Polonium soup, anybody?) and (c) the authorities not (visibly) doing anything.
Bigger picture: the White Violin was an occult weapon (bound to draw on the King in Yellow): obviously other occult State Level Actors want the capability, by the New Management era His Nibs has a string quartet and is working on an entire chamber (Robert Chambers?) orchestra ...
Warrant Cards.
These work on the entire Civil Service (at least); it's sort of implied that the Warrant Card mechanism and the Auditor mechanism are at least related.
His Nibbs isn't going to leave the alternative source of authority ("we sacrificed George VI for this!") alternative; it has to be either subsumed or destroyed. It still seems like this very large How The Laundry Really Works undefined thing throughout the series.
Groan :-)
Yes, the KGB is one plausible suspect, even if it making nice in other respects - I doubt that it's a monolith. Another would be the Nazgul - while the CIA doesn't have a track record of assassinations in the UK, it does in many other countries, it operates almost openly in the UK, and it's a small step from those to that event. And the gummint would sure as eggs is little chickens cover that up.
It still seems like this very large How The Laundry Really Works undefined thing throughout the series.
Shite, now that is a show-stopper I'd forgotten to factor in. Especially how it relates to the SA changing Bob's password and brainware after Continuity Ops walked out in The Delirium Brief ...
There may also be other SLA's overseas agencies working in the UK, and retailing their services to one another for "clean faces required" jobs (biometric passports have meant that overseas assignments for agents are a once-per-career posting now; barring serious facial bone surgery, once you go through border control they've got you logged and anyone with a different name but the same biometrics will automatically raise a flag somewhere).
Looking forward to the amusement when an Australian agent in Canada tries to follow up a request from the CIA and gets it horribly wrong due to a cultural misunderstanding ("you say trojan, we say, where's the horse?").
We know at least two others that operate semi-openly (one 'ally' and one 'enemy') and others that operate at least intermittently and secretly. You may well be right that they sell their services to each other - they certainly favour using disposable agents, as do at least the UK and USA.
Your last paragraph is definitely the germ of a story!
Looking forward to the amusement when an Australian agent in Canada tries to follow up a request from the CIA and gets it horribly wrong due to a cultural misunderstanding ("you say trojan, we say, where's the horse?").
"Thong" is another word you can have fun with. There are more.
(My boss is a dual citizen living in the UK but originally from Queensland.)
What is the fate of Pete? No, not Pete the Pastor (and that was one heck of a shock when I read it), but Pete Young, the Tech Assistant from long ago and a short story far away.
Since I know Pete Young the Tuckerized Person (in "Real Life TM"), I'd like to see a mention of him again.
Re the Sleeper in the Pyramid, maybe "freeing Nyarlathotep" hasn't actually occurred yet.
The New Management may just be an early stage of that process.
Yeah, about PHANGs and feeding…
It seems that vampirism works on the Rule Of Contagion: once together, always linked.
Then we’ve seen vampires go between worlds, time travel, get caught in a singularity, and Basil’s food storage method. Is there ever a point in the multiverse of Laundry space time where a parasite can’t tap its victim, where it gets the equivalent of “signal lost” and has to find a new victim? This might happen if one of the pair was rime traveling, on another world, or in temporal stasis, except that Basil’s storage method implies that the parasite has no problem with the last.
Might be worth figuring out whether these parasites are like Pratchett’s Luggage, able to follow their victims everywhere in the multiverse in all times, or whether these suckers have limits.
I think you've said this in the past, but the Biggest Megatonnage Chekhov's Gun are the birds in the hangar in Filton, and the "mission that should never fly".
Arguably, they've been averted with their other usage in TLI, but I still kinda expect them to make one last appearance...
Yes, but now there's a follow-on series Bird 4 may not need to fly for another few books ...
In the first PHANGs book, they tried a bunch of things to figure out vampirism.
One of the things was they tried animal blood, from a butcher, and found it unpalatable.
But the animals that provided that blood were already dead.
If the PHANGs try drinking blood from a live animal, they might find it perfectly good, or at least adequate.
And without need for government-approved terminal and executable blood sources, they no longer have strings to be pulled.
If the PHANGs try drinking blood from a live animal, they might find it perfectly good, or at least adequate.
We know that human PHANGs can drink Alfar blood. How much brain is required for the parasites to feed on? Do they have to be hominids? Primates? Mammals? Rabbits? Would an octopus work?
They can't use most mammal blood - that was made clear in the Rhesus Chart, though it didn't explicitly mention primates or octopodes.
I'm going to go with (this hasn't been explored in the books) the donor species has to be not only sentient but conscious, communicative, and capable of using magic. Humans work. Deep Ones or Alfar work. It's possible that other hominins would work.
Elephants or Dolphins? Get back to me if you see them summoning demons.
When you do finish the laundry files, what are you going to do next?
They can't use most mammal blood - that was made clear in the Rhesus Chart
Like DMPalmer, I remembered that they tried blood from dead mammals. I didn't remember them trying it from live mammals. I might have missed that, though (or forgotten it, because I read the book years ago).
The New Management. (Which was originally tentatively titled: "Laundry Files: The Next Generation".
I have no plans to end it.
Elephant matriarchs pausing and fondling skulls of their predecessors on their perambulations? Chimpanzees throwing stones at a tree?
May or may not be proto-religion... but intriguing, nonetheless.
Other questions...
(1) Jewish reactions to the New Management in the UK.
(2) Who takes over in Israel?
(3) Chernobog in Eastern Europe.
(4) Disposal of Tory Politicians ... not just Cameron and Osborne at a party at Chequers. And, yes, I would enjoy something that bloodthirsty.
well, i really wanted to know what is going on on the European continent. Especially in Germany. Is Franz still around? I can't see Germany falling for religious cults on a grand scale for cultural reasons, yet I can see a Parliament of glassy eyed, barely sentient meat-puppets vote whichever way the grand-sorcerer dictates. Not much different from now.
Someone on mastodon mentioned esoterics, homeopathy, and "alternative" schools, which are all rather widespread in Germany to varying degrees. I would rate them as a a collective delusion or disorganized faith, exploited by a lot of grifters. Definitely something that might be exploited in a laundry-verse type way. Brain parasite eggs can look so much like sugar pills...
(1) Jewish reactions to the New Management in the UK.
Most likely (groan) "bend over, here it comes again".
(2) Who takes over in Israel?
That's an open question: I haven't touched on the Middle East yet in the series (it's problematic to do so, for any number of reasons).
(3) Chernobog in Eastern Europe.
Hinted at: I'd need to go back and re-read The Fuller Memorandum then pick up the trail from there. As the time line for the Laundry Files hits the Lovecraftian Singularity in May-June 2015 (the New Management books start in December 2015 and by Season of Skulls have reached spring of 2017) I've got time in hand to work out just how batshit insane Vladimir Putin has gone. But yes, Chernobog, Bab Yaga, Koschei the Deathless ... there's scope there.
(4) Disposal of Tory Politicians ...
The New Management is the Ruling Party, i.e. that fraction of the Tories (a majority, I fear) who are purely about power and cruelty and willing to worship His Dread Majesty if that's what it takes to get ahead. So it'll be the likes of Gauke, Hesseltine, and Major who get disposed of, I fear. (Although that oily twat Farage is probably going to get lined up against a wall and shot. And I suspect Priti Patel was designated a non-citizen and deported to Uganda. (Her replacement by book 5 of the New Management will probably be Jadis of Charn, Witch-Queen of Narnia ...)
The batshit crazy Second Reich restoration cultists might be a bit worse in the Laundryverse time line.
Honestly I just want to see the Queen's (or the King's) head in a Tzompantli.
I can see where you are coming from, but Queen Letizia doesn't seem to me to deserve quite that much opprobrium...
... her father, on the other hand, ...
Charlie,
I was at Oxford when Hague, Gove, Johnson and Cameron were there (an undergrad and DPhil does take a while) and met them all at parties. I think I was invited because I was slightly older, never let on my left wing views, and always gave them good feed lines to spout on whatever lunacy was currently fashionable.
The thing the New Management would need to watch for is that they are all serially disloyal. And as you say, only in it for themselves.
If there is anyway to get an upgrade to godhood, rest assured they'd be knifing one another to get it. No matter what. Indeed that might be a suitable plot line: New Management offers Godhood Upgrade to sniff out disloyalty.
I'm going to go with (this hasn't been explored in the books) the donor species has to be not only sentient but conscious, communicative, and capable of using magic. Humans work. Deep Ones or Alfar work. It's possible that other hominins would work.
Well, the Deep ones we’re using undead dolphins as supernatural power sources in the Annihilation Score, so there’s that.
Allow me a modest proposal for PHANGs:
They can only have one victim at a time
Once they’re tapped into a victim, they can’t tap out. So they’re stuck with their choice of victim until the victim dies.
Now let’s make it interesting…
Any animal or equivalent with a nervous system can be tapped.
How long the victim can be tapped is proportional to their natural lifespan. If tapped humans last a week and their lifespan is 70 years, a day per decade may be a good rule of thumb.
How much mana the vampire gets from their victim is proportional to the complexity of their nervous systems.
And finally,
So yeah, a vampire can suck a rat. A rat lives a year or two, so the vampire would get a rat’s worth of mana for a few hours before the rat dies And the rat may well bite the face of the vampire biting it.
Parasitizing a dolphin by biting it? I think blubber will get in the way, as will the environment. And don’t go biting a bison in Yelllowstone, tosser.
The second stupidest thing would be for a vampire to take blood from a Greenland shark. They live for at least centuries, and they don’t have a terribly complex brain, even by shark standards. Welcome to 5 to 10 weeks of starvation, PHANG.
The stupidest thing to do would be to parasitize a Deep One. Yes they’re smart and immortal, but they’re also superhumanly good magicians, and the PHANG can’t cut ties with the victim. Retributive justice would be brutal.
So yeah, humans are a really good choice for vampiric arracks.
If there is anyway to get an upgrade to godhood, rest assured they'd be knifing one another to get it. No matter what. Indeed that might be a suitable plot line: New Management offers Godhood Upgrade to sniff out disloyalty.
Gods or god-kings?
One oddity about this forum is that we spend a lot of time on how billionaires are all liars whose power is based in large part on the uncritical beliefs if their followers. And also, we spend time uncritically believing that the things that claim to be avatars of alien gods are in fact alien gods, even though they’re evil, they lie, and we know this.
For example: is Fabian Everyman really Nyarlothotep? Or is he the Laundryverse equivalent of Booster Gold, the DC comic character who’s from the future, who came back in time to be a superhero and become famous and rich?
Can Cthulhu really disassemble the planet, or is that akin to the Emperor of Mars schtick Musk is running?
If Everyman is not Nyarlothotep, what about the Sleeper in the Pyramid et seq? Maybe Everyman really is the lesser evil?
Are the Deep Ones evacuating? Or are they simply pulling back into their mountain fortresses on the abyssal plain and mounting deadman switches on Cumbre Vieja, Kilauea, and other massive, unstable landslides on various islands? They may just wait for the danger to pass, if a certain amount of it is vaporware by super-level sorcerers., and the Deep Ones understand this better than humans do.
Just a thought.
*They can only have one victim at a time
Once they’re tapped into a victim, they can’t tap out. So they’re stuck with their choice of victim until the victim dies.*
Nope, I'm pretty sure that's already contradicted by the existing corpus.
Also, it's not the PHANG who taps the victim. It's the V-parasites riding the PHANG. If the PHANG doesn't find a victim, then congratulations: the parasites eat them alive.
Also-also, the victim needs to be complex enough to perform ritual magic. Which seems to tie in with language processing ...
For example: is Fabian Everyman really Nyarlothotep? Or is he the Laundryverse equivalent of Booster Gold
Tell me you haven't read Season of Skulls without saying you haven't read etc.
(SoS backfills a lot of the prehistory of the Laundry -- about the Invisible College in particular, and the origins of Fabian Everyman/the Mandate -- and also gives us a bit more insight into PHANGs through a neat tie-in with The Rhesus Chart.)
A) What ever happened to (ex-) Assistant Commissioner Stanwick? Or the rest of the conspiracy to use the Pale Violin? B) Dave Lester, when you were at Oxford did you run into a certain Michael Dewar in LH/Classics? If so, what was your impression at the time?
I left at Christmas 1987. Looks like Prof Dewar was possibly there, but I did Maths at the PRG not English/Classics.
So 'fraid not.
Bill O'Chee (Australian Senator) was at Brasenose at the same time...
... it would be libellous for me to record my thoughts about him.
Not sure what happened to ACPO, but it probably wasn't terribly nice. Somehow I don't think they'd have been sent to Camp Sunshine (which you'll get to see in A Conventional Boy next year). I doubt they'll be pardoned by His Dread Majesty, either. (Being a member of a rival cult is not good for your life expectancy under the New Management, despite the potential benefits ...)
Damn- he told me that he had a study table directly next to BoJo, who was “an arsing cockwomble”. Given Dewar is one himself, or at least was to me, kinda wondered what he was like…
Here’s my deal: yes I read SoS, and no, I’m not going to spoil it for whoever is reading this who hasn’t read it. That’s why I referred to Booster Gold as opposed to being more explicit.
Anyway, about Nyarlothotep: we’ve got an entity in a pyramid who is supposed to wake them, and we’ve got Fabian Everyman being proclaimed as their avatar, at least by crazed cultists and other power hungry individuals.
As a direct and current events analogy, we have Jesus Christ, and we’ve got Donald Trump, who is being proclaimed as Jesus Christ, at least by crazed cultists and other power hungry individuals.
Is Trump Jesus? Is Everyman Nyarlothotep? Is the answer the same in both cases?
I’m not disputing Everyman’s ability or narrative to date. Rather, I’m trying to hint at a possible plot twist without being explicit about it or claiming any stake in it.
it would be libellous for me to record my thoughts about him.
Gah. Well O'Chee is 4 years older than me. He was the youngest Senator ever at the time when he was appointed to fill a casual Senate vacancy for Queensland in 1990. There are hysterical raisins why Australians get twitchy about casual Senate vacancies from Queensland but I guess that's beside the point. Always came across as a nasty bit of work in public, this isn't surprising at all.
There was some creepy imagery in the Daily Rupert around O'Chee when Natasha Stott-Despoja was elected to the Senate in the mid 90s, age 26, suggesting a sort of weird mentorship possibility. This was based purely on their both being under 30, and politically unlikely. O'Chee was a (relative) moderate from the stark raving branch of the conservative coalition, while Stott-Despoja was from (and later led) a centre-left minor party that got itself in a balance of power position in the Senate.
To be fair we've now elected several successive waves of Greens Senators who collectively took over the young women in parliament flag (Larissa Waters being the first person to breast-feed her child in the Senate) and the youngest Senator flag (Jordan Steele-John, who also got to be the one to force into the light the knowledge that Australian Parliament House, completed in 1988, had as of 2017 at best a few pathetic gestures toward disability access).
I re-read Nightmare Stacks recently and got invested in Cassie and Alex, so I'd like to know if they have some future together. Also, the Elfar are more interesting than I remember, and markedly less human, so anything about their future would be good. And Elf is an acronym, right? An Elf is an ELF is an Evil Little Fucker; Harry knows this.
America is, IMHO, worth a few paragraphs, but as an exploration of what happens when an Elder God is defeated.
Did any other European nations sell out to Elder Gods for protection? If not, what happens between their occult agencies and the emerging New Management?
I want to know how the new-Eater-of-Souls-that-remembers-Bob understands itself. So far, Bob is pretty much defined by not understanding himself, so it would be a nice end-piece.
Finally, souls. Laundryverse metaphysics varies from real life in that sentients have something to call a soul; several informed characters refer to this. Therefore, can there be afterlives, or reincarnation of individual consciousness?
I have one word for you (which comes up in A Conventional Boy): Egregores.
and also gives us a bit more insight into PHANGs through a neat tie-in with The Rhesus Chart.
I still need to go back and re-read TRC in light of SoS. ISTR that in TRC George has an epithet ("old") and I sort of realise my assumptions via cinematic vampire conventions about eternal youth are being tested a bit.
Conversely I quite enjoyed the underlying conceptual conceit that rich-Rupert seems to share with the Max Gladstone universe, that powerful mages become disembodied enough that their actual physical body dies and rots away, but not enough they don't have to drag that (dead and rotting, potentially just a skeleton) physical body around with them. Of course I guess in Laundryverse this is just one way to do it, and there are several worked examples of different ways.
I think others have mentioned all the loose ends and character arcs that I care about. I guess I'm open-minded about any need for resolutions as such, but an ending is an ending, so last hurrahs are welcome fun.
Gah: lich-Rupert (second time around, autocorrect tried to change it to "loch").
Cassie and Alex (and the Alfar) are on my list of things to revisit, but probably in the New Management. (As is the autistic female Alfar vampire Jarisol, if I can get into her head again).
America is, IMHO, worth a few paragraphs, but as an exploration of what happens when an Elder God is defeated.
Spoiler: the Elder God wasn't defeated, just temporarily pushed back a bit. Possibly for as little as 48-96 hours. The amnesia-on-sleep compulsion was still in place, despite POTUS effectively broadcasting "wake up sheeple!!!" across Middle America from a borrowed Concorde.
I want to know how the new-Eater-of-Souls-that-remembers-Bob understands itself.
Not a spoiler: the theme of the entire series -- which will be double-underlined in bold in TLLF -- is "we have met the enemy, and they is us", or maybe "if you stare into the void for too long, the void stares also". The Eater of Souls isn't Bob, any more than its previous incarnation was Angleton ... but it thinks it is: there's continuity of memory and personality with the human host. Ditto Mo. Ditto any of the PHANGs. By the end of the series there probably won't be any human beings left alive in what used to be the Laundry: just not-humans in various stages of denial.
I still need to go back and re-read TRC in light of SoS. ISTR that in TRC George has an epithet ("old") and I sort of realise my assumptions via cinematic vampire conventions about eternal youth are being tested a bit.
No.
George was tagged "Old George" in Rhesus Chart to differentiate him from "Old Old George" and "Old Old Old George" ... who were all the same dude, showing up 30 years apart with a back-story to explain how he'd inherited all his predecessor's assets when his predecessor died/went on a round-the-world cruise/eloped to Ruritania or otherwise vanished mysteriously without a long illness or senescent decline.
Immortals who want to have a public identity among mortals need to have some way to explain their serial reincarnation ... or a buttload of bribery money and minions. (And even so, that may no longer be possible as biometric ID and face recognition become ubiquitous. Circa 2010, Old George was pushing the limits: by 2040 he'd have been outed, one way or the other, or forced to become an offshore tax exile somewhere the authorities are used to taking back-handers.)
Also ... he's the same guy as the George in Season of Skulls, but there's a 200 year gap between the stories, which is long enough to forget pretty much anyone except in the broadest outline, and to turn into someone psychologically completely different. (I'm pretty sure Eve didn't tell George precisely which century she was from, let alone which year, so forget any creepy Twilight style teen-stalker possibilities, too.)
Sure, you would say that. But ever since Accelerando I've learned not to trust cats written by you.
Anyway, I'll try to not bring Spooky up again.
See, Accelerando is precisely why you're not going to see another talking cat from me. Do one talking cat, people expect the worst. Two or more? You're branded "the talking cat guy" for life.
PHANGs as new people with other people's memories is a new subtlety to me. I really didn't get that from first reading of TRC. Time to re-read. And I really didn't get Alex in TNS as anything but a human with a novel set of problems. But perhaps you meant that the human part just gets lost after a couple of hundred years?
No, no, not "THE talking cat guy" - "yet ANOTHER 'intelligent' catfic bore". There are far too many already. At least yours was an AI-enhanced cat.
The 1816 human gets submerged by new memories by 2016. I mean, how well do you remember what it was like to be six years old?
Down the rabbit hole….yes, this is relevant.
Atman vs. anatman, in the original Sanskrit, or soul versus mindstream in English.
Atman assumes there is an eternal, unchanging part of you, and that part is God. This is common in Hinduism. We call it your soul.
Buddhism says we don’t have eternal souls. What we experience as ourselves experiencing life are more akin to an every changing stream, with water going in and out. The water is Buddha Nature.
In both cases there’s reincarnation: the atman soul gets reembodied, or the most of the mindstream flows into a new body.
Now in the Laundryverse you’ve talked about mortal, fungible souls. But what is a soul? If it’s whatever is looking out someone’s eyes, then the continuity of identity with a PHANG or Preta is hard to explain. If the soul is free will, then why aren’t they acting as if they are puppeted/possessed?
But if the Laundryverse soul concept is more like a mindstream, then acquiring a Preta is just water from elsewhere flooding the stream. Eating a soul is consuming the mindstream of the victim, and eater possession is guiding the eater into the dry channel left by consuming the mindstream.
And there’s the exit from this rabbit hole. And I’m late to my party. Toodles.
Re: 'The Eater of Souls isn't Bob, any more than its previous incarnation was Angleton ... but it thinks it is: there's continuity of memory and personality with the human host.'
So - basically the Eater of Souls has no self-identity. Hmmm ... need to figure out a way of making some super-secret-buried-in-a-mountain-AI psychically attractive to this entity. (AI's been in development for decades so it's not much of reach to assume that AI might have been used either for or against. I'm assuming that the 'personality' of an AI can be adjusted via whatever data it's fed followed by questions it's directed to answer.)
Immunity - given there are 8 billion different people on this planet, pretty likely someone has innate immunity. How would you know though - what type of test could you run?
Intra-dimensional allies - more info/history about alien species whose purpose is to eradicate threats to sentience.
Amongst the cognoscenti on the EU's "Human Brain Project" you were always known as the "Lobster Brain Upload in Space Guy".
There are lots of good suggestions in your blog comments. I mostly want follow-ups for Bob and Mo, and Alex and Cassie.
Mo's survival of an unsurvivable event still sticks with me. So does the hilarious dinner-with-the-'rents scene where an unglamoured Cassie in full Alfär regalia is completely upstaged by Alex's sister and her trans GF's melodrama. (And let's not forget the GF's recognition of the Kettenkrad, from having built a model.)
I don't think keeping the Alfär in a concentration camp will work long-term, and you still haven't solved their blood supply chain issue, other than as a stopgap.
Why wouldn't The New Management want to incorporate Cassie into the House of Lords, alongside Mhari, Seph, and Evie?
And now, after finishing Season of Skulls, I want Old George back to hook up with Evie again. Nobody ever dies in Science Fiction, right?
In no particular order,
Some character in either Labyrinth Index or NM mentions DEEP SIX, they are a low information enough character to have made the mistake.
How did Persephone get so goddamn cozy with PM? What exactly is their relationship?
A 'Baroness Sanguinary' and the Eater of Souls are mentioned by Eve, neither are necessary Mhari (Baroness Karnstein) or Bob. There is a Officer Friendly action figure in the first NM book but he isn't necessarily alive.
How 'real' are the people in the dream roads? Like should Eve felt any moral hazard at all about 'shooting' one of those highwaymen?
What landscape in particular is the chief Auditor's window looking at, and why?
Did Cassie get demoted back down to Agent First of Spies and Liars? If the PM is All Highest, is her command geas over the Alfar considerably reduced or is she still top Alfar?
The B team from Annihilation Codex (Busy Bee etc) were fun, would be cool to see them show up again.
Oh no I was wrong, the character that says 'Blue Hades and Deep Six' is the Senior Auditor, page 227 of the Labyrinth Index of my big river ebook in a conversation with Mhari. Not a low information character at all.
From the same conversation, a little more about the events? of Shoggoth Gap and the necromantic cold war? Presumably a reference to the Fulda Gap, where fortunately nothing actually happened?
One of the things I really like about this series, and it's possibly just a creation of my weird brain spice, is how textually it calls out the intersection of the platonic and physical world. To the question "is Fabian really Nyarlathotep" is like asking is the little white bit of your finger nail you, or a single piece of beard stubble? Avatar, high priest, infected agent, meat puppet driven by an unconscious sub-process, doesn't really matter.
This is one of the many really great ideas in the laundry files! An immortal cross dimensional blatonic/memetic brain parasite, without a brain, finding itself suddenly with a working memory telling it that it is a dead person, would believe itself to be that dead person. U til the weight of accumulated experience lead it to a break from the old personally.
Since Charlie didn’t bite, here’s what I was talking about, because it had nothing to do with whether an avatar is the same as a god.
Instead, the problem is, if a powerful being shows up and says he’s an incarnation of a particular god, how do you know he’s telling the truth? The Jesus Trump nascent cult is an example of this.
More to the point, a super powerful pseudo Nyarlothotep may be sufficiently powerful to keep the even more dangerous real Nyarlothotep away, which is why those who know him may strike a bargain. This would suggest that whatever the Sleeper could summon, Everyman isn’t its avatar. Instead, he may be a superpowered sorcerer, no longer human but tied to the planet in ways that big N isn’t.
So how did Everyman get powerful? Well, we know he has used time travel to give his former self a boost. For all we know, this is something he’s done to himself repeatedly, so that his causal timeline is a recursive daisy chain reaching from the distant future to the distant past. If so, he’s playing and winning Xanatos speed chess not because he’s superhumanly brilliant, but rather because his future selves are using the ghost roads to send him the brain dumps and power upgrades he needs, so he’s basically cheating. The fact that he’s cheating via time travel, in a way that requires survival and continuity, makes him a reliable ally in a way that an alien god would not be, because that alien god is living only in the present and not tied to the planet.
Anyway, this is just fluff, because, so far as I can tell, Everyman is an avatar of Nyarlothotep, end of story.
.
"Shoggoth Gap and the necromantic cold war? Presumably a reference to the Fulda Gap,"
I read it as a reference to the infamous "Missile Gap" (Oh, noes, they have more missiles than us do) of the late 1960s, IIRC, parodied as the Mine Gap of Dr Strangelove.
JHomes
Doing the Laundry? Not with this, you won't!
Vote tory for shit in the rivers ... and everywhere else, it seems.
Could one write a story from the PoV of such a person? When I asked (previously, on the tropes thread) for stories with deeply inhuman protagonists I had in mind Nyarlarhotep as PM. I didn't mention it there because it seemed ridiculously infeasible. But maybe if Narly is more human-adjacent it might be possible.
Instead, the problem is, if a powerful being shows up and says he’s an incarnation of a particular god, how do you know he’s telling the truth? The Jesus Trump nascent cult is an example of this.
It seems implausible that the Laundry-verse does not have multiple Jesuses called up by different churches. Only a few of them would be actually talking to each other - both churches and Jesuses.
Some of them would just be humans enjoying non-standard brain states (you may already be thinking of real world examples). Others will be Things From Elsewhere filling up the human created belief pattern like jello in a mold, or some hybrid of the two. All of them seem likely to generate paperwork for the local Laundry equivalent.
Is it wrong of me to imagine some place like North Korea, with little respect for human rights or Christianity, getting tired of this pretty quickly and just putting a bullet into the latest Jesus's head? Shoot him, bury him, and if he doesn't come back in three days it wasn't really him anyway. If he does come back, call the home office...
I need to do a full series reread (and catch up on the last couple, most recent was Dead Lies Dreaming)...
So for now, is there anything that brought on this (hopefully long term) bout of creativity? If that's too personal no worries; just glad to see you energized!
Oh, here's the biggest one (sorry for serial-posting) and I might have just missed it: what "REALLY" happened to Alan Turing? The idea that a world where the Laundry exists would have just killed him off is beyond insane; only real humans are that stupid.
Or a direct quote from A Colder War.
Was the bit in The Fuller Memorandum when something woke up in ensign Burdokovskii's body and asked what year it was intended as a hint of mental time travel? If it was, it's another loose end to be tidied up.
Was the bit in The Fuller Memorandum when something woke up in ensign Burdokovskii's body and asked what year it was intended as a hint of mental time travel? If it was, it's another loose end to be tidied up.
I read it as either the Eater of Souls being conscious in a state where the passage of time had no meaning, or not being conscious of time passing at all. The later similar to when a human wakes up in the morning. They've had no, or little experience of time passing, so are using clues such as how rested they feel, how much they've dreamt, the light in the sky and its direction, noise outside and so on, before checking against a clock. Waking up after a long (days, weeks, months), unexpected spell kept unconscious in intensive care would be similarly disorientating to that experienced by what has woken up in Burdokovski's body, since the last time it had a human meat sack.
"If Everyman is not Nyarlothotep, what about the Sleeper in the Pyramid et seq? Maybe Everyman really is the lesser evil?"
Maybe Everyman is a lesser avatar of Nyarlahotep who's dedicated to bringing forth the greater avatar, but he still has to create a structure of ritual power.
It seems implausible that the Laundry-verse does not have multiple Jesuses called up by different churches. Only a few of them would be actually talking to each other - both churches and Jesuses.
And now I'm earwormed by Dire Straits: "Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong…"
There are worse earworms.
Back to the original topic:
Ice giants and large-scale infovores might need a bit more attention.
"No one ever dies"... nope. They do. Even I've killed characters.
Could one write a story from the PoV of such a person? When I asked (previously, on the tropes thread) for stories with deeply inhuman protagonists I had in mind Nyarlarhotep as PM. I didn't mention it there because it seemed ridiculously infeasible. But maybe if Narly is more human-adjacent it might be possible.
Take a look at https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
It's a retelling of "The Thing" from the alien's point of view.
Thanks so much. Now I'm really depressed.
Too bad Guillermo Del Toro didn’t try making that story into a movie, instead of “At The Mountains of Madness.”
In one of the books (I forget which, sorry), you mention the strategic reserve of steam engines...
Strongly concur.
Reading The Atrocity Archive was pivotal for me -- switched me from Occasional Stross Reader to Embarrassingly Devoted Stross Fan. The ice giant was an astonishing piece of creative thinking.
And there have been a lot of other comparable rewards, highly original and exciting worldbuilding concepts, in Charlie's oeuvre. After all of these books, I still have a special place in my heart for slow-thinking infovores.
Didn't most of the Alfar get sent off to fight ISIS? Or am I confusing a proposal with fact?
Argh: not the Strategic Reserve.
Whatever happened with the entanglement rings? Bob gave one to Mhari and retained the other, but they are never mentioned again.
I stood on the station platform, as a filthy, black, stinking 8F lumbered through on a heavy freight train. There had been some changes since the 80 year old loco was revived. The fireman was a gorgon, staring through the firebox door at the body of the previous driver. By careful use of darkened glass screens, the decomposition of the corpse could be regulated, and have the boiler steaming like a witch. The current driver, bound to a minor demon that worked the controls, had it's face grotesquely stretched over the smokebox door. Its terrified eyes watching for signals, its mouth moving as if in prayer. "I am a really useful engine. I AM a really useful engine. I AM A REALLY USEFUL ENGINE! PLEASE GOD, LET IT STOP". British Transport Police take a much harder line with fare dodgers these days.
In one of the books (I forget which, sorry), you mention the strategic reserve of steam engines...
Coincidentally, just the other night I happened onto a short Youtube video about the Soviet steam engine reserve; you might find that interesting.
if you haven't already, read The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes
ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE
I am in Berlin until next Tuesday, then moving on to Hamburg for a week, then Amsterdam.
Expect limited, if any, engagement in the comments.
(We're traveling by train. ECML to London was fine, Eurostar to Brussels was great, overnight in a station hotel was okay, then ... we hit Deutsche Bahn, who are suffering the same malaise British Rail was notorious for before privatization, i.e. investment starvation by idiot politicians. Every train we booked so far has been either late, delayed, or cancelled. Luckily we have Interral passes, so unlimited first class travel -- train cancelled? Just book another on your phone -- but I'm now as exhausted as I would be by a flight to Australia.)
strategic reserve of steam engines
That's The Rhesus Chart (which I'm just re-reading now, just because...
Incidentally, it only just occurred to me that the strategic steam locomotive reserve is definitively obsolete. Even if enough tracks survived a nuclear war, they no longer have external semaphore/light signaling on long stretches -- and the locos probably haven't been updated for in-cab signaling. But more importantly, the UK no longer mines coal. There's no fuel for them to run on. In the 1940s/50s when the reserve was built up, the UK had megatons of coal lying around in heaps on the surface, and hundreds of mines. Today? It's not even a thing: there's about one coal-fired power station left, it mostly runs on biomass, and uses imported coal in emergencies.
So there's probably also a Napoleonic-era Strategic Forestry Reserve that's about ready to harvest (for timber, for the ships of the line that the Admiralty expected in 1823 we'd be needing about now), and a strategic diesel truck reserve (as we head into the age of EVs and no more smoke-spraying trucks).
I don't think the Napoleonic era governments were up to that kind of long term planning. However the Forestry Commission was set up after WWI to create a strategic reserve of timber as the trenches used so much of it for duckboards and so on. They are now pivoting away from lots of fast growing softwoods to creating more diverse woodlands, and the building industry uses what is produced. You can't just leave industrial softwood plantations, they have to be harvested at a certain point, but there's steady replanting and inducements to increase the area of more natural woodlands.
IIRC Military vehicles tend to be multifuel capable, but it'll be a while before they adopt EVs as their use case is a bit different to civilian transport.
You can't just leave industrial softwood plantations, they have to be harvested at a certain point
This reminds me of the funny attitude some people have here in Finland, mainly that our forests need maintenance, otherwise they wouldn't survive. Maintenance of course meaning 'making sure the trees are good for lumber and cutting them down occasionally'. Also includes hunting so that the wild animals are kept at 'proper' levels (too small for predators, too large for others, because then there's good hunting!).
The funny part comes in because there have been forests and animals living in them since about when the last ice sheet melted, and they did just fine by themselves with little intervention. There's been people living here for almost all that time, too, but mostly they didn't have the resources to meddle around in all of the forest there was.
So, yeah. 'Can't' if you want to get some wood out of them, but probably would be just fine, if not similar, if left alone.
Surely Angleton the schoolmaster was constructed by the preta after Teapot incarnation. The human donor of the body was a convicted murderer IIRC. As I understood it, the Angleton persona was a disguise, and the placement at a school was to make the disguise easier, weirdness being unremarkable in schoolmasters.
However, the EoS later came to identify as its disguise, so notes are probable.
Exactly - you can't just leave plantation woodland as a reserve, was what I meant. They are also planted with very specific spacing so as to force the trees to grow straight up with as few side branches as possible, to minimise knots and optimise the timber for use. If you leave them too long you end up with tangle of dead and fallen trees in between the survivors which is not economically harvestable. If you want to create "natural" woodlands which self sustain that's not how you do the initial planting.
"So there's probably also a Napoleonic-era Strategic Forestry Reserve ..."
I walked in that wood last week, albeit a private reserve and not for the use of the RN.
Just North of Okehampton, a mile or so of the river Okement is fringed with beech trees. They're not the typical broad-leaf species in that part of Devon, oak, birch and holly being more common and predominant as one goes away from the river. They're not recent forestry, which locally is mainly larch plantations. They're beautiful trees, but the area only became amenity woodland in my lifetime, a century or so after the planting. The beech trees are a deliberate introduction of a non-native species on one specific stretch of river, and one wonders why.
In fact the beech wood is on land anciently (and currently, in part, although the milling days are 150 years past) owned by Brightley Mill, and beech is very useful for making mill parts. Some landowner has foreseen a famine of hardwood, possible inspired by the wars of Napoleon and limited sea-trade, and take steps.
No, you can't, but not all forestry reserves are like conifer ones. There assuredly were (and almost certainly are still a few) oak woods planted for such purposes, and there were beech woods planted for furniture. The point is that there is a much greater separation and long period from which they mature as timber to when they decay - for oak, that's over a century.
An even more interesting form is ones where most of the wood was cut for firewood and charcoal, but selected trees were left for timber. Those last even longer with no maintenance.
British forestry is a bit like that. Behind the anomalous beech wood mentioned in 148 is a conifer plantation. There's been little harvesting there for decades, but recently the price of softwood spiked up and lo, all the larch trees caught a fungus and were to be clear-felled because ecology. Then the timber price went down again and the trees miraculously got better.
"But more importantly, the UK no longer mines coal. There's no fuel for [steam locos] to run on."
In that respect, anybody wishing to experience a steam heritage railway should do so soon, while they can still afford to run trains and visitors can still afford the tickets. I know of one heritage railway that couldn't afford coal (£500 per day for a poxy little Peckett pug trundling up and down 1 mile of track with one coach), ran only diesel trains and then died because it had no visitors.
Well, in theory we've stopped. But practice is never the same as theory, is it?
So in practice the Ffos-y-fran "Land Reclamation Scheme" is still going despite having lost their licence last year (appeals ongoing). The precise scale of current operations is (presumably intentionally) unclear, but they've extracted somewhere between 100kt and 300kt in the ~9 months since they should have stopped. Not a huge amount, but even 100,000 tonnes would allow you to run a few emergency trains for government use. And keeping the site open means you can potentially scale up output at need, if the reserves are there (I've not seen a good figure for the actual amount of coal at Ffos-y-fran).
And then of course there's the proposed new mine at Whitehaven which gOvE approved last year on the grounds that it wouldn't affect UK climate change targets "because most of the coal will be exported". Supporters are strangely reticent about how much coal it will produce, focussing instead on jobs created; local news suggests ~ 3Mt/year, for 25 years... Meanwhile there are the plans (supported by, among others, the hon. member for the 18th century) to give permission for a site in Wales to extract a couple of million tonnes a year for 15 years. For [cough] environmentally friendly uses [cough cough] only, of course...
British forestry was primarily farming subsidies, and may still be. There was an official report that most of the 'forestry stock' would not repay the cost of harvesting, let alone replanting, and yet it goes on. If larches are left until the market is right, they may well not be fit for anything.
Near me (Cambridge) there was one location planted with conifers. They got to about 10' and were grubbed and replaced by oas. Those were FAR too close, and the brambles and seedling ash etc. were not cleared until they got established, so a few years later they were replaced by conifers. The hedge then got too thick, so I don't know what happened later.
No, our misgovernment isn't new ....
143 Para 2 - Heart of Oak springs to mind here.
Martin Heller @ 111:
There are lots of good suggestions in your blog comments. I mostly want follow-ups for Bob and Mo, and Alex and Cassie.
Mo's survival of an unsurvivable event still sticks with me. So does the hilarious dinner-with-the-'rents scene where an unglamoured Cassie in full Alfär regalia is completely upstaged by Alex's sister and her trans GF's melodrama. (And let's not forget the GF's recognition of the Kettenkrad, from having built a model.)
Ok, y'all got me all confused again. I thought Alex's sister had a trans BOY-friend (an AFAB guy)? Do I remember it backwards?
IF/WHEN I meet trans people in the real world, it's usually fairly easy to understand who they ARE and they can tell me how they want me to address them.
But reading about trans people (especially fictional trans people) still frequently confuses the hell out of me.
PS: I watched a documentary on YouTube on how the Germans screwed the pooch getting the ME-262 into production so that it was too little, too late to have any real effect on the war and there were several clips that had Kettenkrad (Kettenkräder?) in them.
AJ (He/Him) @ 144:
I don't think the Napoleonic era governments were up to that kind of long term planning. However the Forestry Commission was set up after WWI to create a strategic reserve of timber as the trenches used so much of it for duckboards and so on. They are now pivoting away from lots of fast growing softwoods to creating more diverse woodlands, and the building industry uses what is produced. You can't just leave industrial softwood plantations, they have to be harvested at a certain point, but there's steady replanting and inducements to increase the area of more natural woodlands.
Apparently SOMEBODY back then had foresight - I've seen news reports on how they're finding the timbers needed for rebuilding Notre-Dame
Please. There was a Compton Crook nominee earlier this year, and I got about 20 or 40 pages in, and refused to read an further. Every. Single. Person. you met, in print, the idiot author put in (pronound/whatsit). Every time. As though you, the author, couldn't just use the pronoun. As though you were meeting someone in person, not in writing.
That's not "virtue signaling", that's "I have no idea how to write people."
I don't think the Napoleonic era governments were up to that kind of long term planning.
Actually, they were.
https://www.action-pin.fr/fr/le-pin-des-landes/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/visingso-oak-forest
Guy Rixon @ 151:
In that respect, anybody wishing to experience a steam heritage railway should do so soon, while they can still afford to run trains and visitors can still afford the tickets. I know of one heritage railway that couldn't afford coal (£500 per day for a poxy little Peckett pug trundling up and down 1 mile of track with one coach), ran only diesel trains and then died because it had no visitors.
I'm pretty sure that (here in the U.S.) as the railroads transitioned in the 1950s there were steam locomotives that ran on diesel fuel. Some converted from coal & some designed for diesel fuel from the beginning.
After all, the railroads had the same transition from wood burning to coal burning in the early/mid-1800s
I don't see why heritage railways couldn't do the same if they can figure out how to make a profit? ... or cover operating costs if they're run by "non-profit" organizations.
... and looking in Wikipedia, it seems that in the western U.S. where oil was abundant, railroads were fueling steam locomotives with oil as early as 1900.
"the strategic steam locomotive reserve"
AKA the strategic reserve of iron oxide that looks like it might once have been the ferrous parts of some locomotives; as for the non-ferrous parts... Non-ferrous parts? What non-ferrous parts would those be, guv? Don't know nuffink about no non-ferrous parts.
"Even if enough tracks survived a nuclear war, they no longer have external semaphore/light signaling on long stretches - and the locos probably haven't been updated for in-cab signaling."
Nothing has in-cab signalling. (Unless you count the RETB system on the remote single-track tendrils in the wilds of Scotland and Wales. (Aside: remembered disappointment at failing to extract data from RETB modem noises on cab ride video soundtracks. Maybe the lossy audio compression buggers it up.)) It's all external traffic lights, plus a few remaining pockets of semaphore signalling (like round here :)). In-cab signalling on UK railways is a bit like fusion power - we're always going to have it, but it never gets any nearer happening.
However it probably doesn't make much difference because the modern trend is to concentrate all the signalling control functions into a handful of big computer buildings each of which runs every signal and set of points for a hundred miles or so around it. So whole enormous areas depend on the same few tiny bits of silicon cowering in fear of the EMP.
Even when it was still all done with relays it wasn't necessarily able to cope with EMP, because it's one of those special cases where you have bits of wire several miles long attached to things to act as EMP antennas and make sure the things they're attached to get clobbered as hard as possible. Moreover, some of the relays were complicated types that did things like relying on having a certain level of permanent magnetisation in the core, which might cease to be correct if they get fed a big enough spike.
You would, though, probably be OK with the mechanical signalling systems which were only just beginning to be displaced by colour lights in the later 50s. I say "probably" because there were still some instances of funky relays as above in the safety logic, but since all the basic functions were mechanical and the more essential electrical adjuncts were probably robust enough, and more importantly because there was a signal box with a human controller every couple of miles, it would still be entirely possible to keep it working in a degraded form if necessary, particularly in a state of wartime emergency.
Having said all that, the kind of installations they like to set up now could be, potentially, the least vulnerable, if they were actually being designed to be. All the points, signals and other peripherals could be run from local power (they are already fond of using little solar/wind/battery units, similar to the ones you get powering road signs, to power random bits of dispersed kit) with the actual electronics part compact and self-contained enough to be relatively easily shielded, and all the communications between the peripherals and the (buried, hardened) central computer centre done over fibre optic cable. So no multi-mile EMP antennas and all the fancy bits comparatively easy to keep safe. Though as it is what we actually get is arguments over whether it's worth installing fibre optic cable in place of copper to stop it getting pinched.
(This all subject to corrections from our resident Dalek-building expert, of course.)
Ffos-y-fran: there is craploads of coal there and in the nearby area, also in other odd little spots dotted about South Wales, which is readily obtainable by open-cast mining. The South Wales coalfield has a lot of very thin seams of coal interleaved with thin layers of not-coal, which historically have never been worked on any major scale because the seams are too thin for deep mining and open-cast mining without bulldozers is too much effort. Around Merthyr and Aberdare there is a whole lot of this stuff right at the surface and roughly parallel to it. I'm not sure that there aren't, or at least weren't when we could still use the coal, national emergency plans drawn up for descending on Aberdare with an army of bulldozers and opencasting the crap out of the area to compensate for imported fuel supplies being suddenly cut off.
I don't agree with the ideological position of disallowing coal mines regardless simply because they are coal mines. (Never mind the weirdness of seeing the Welsh government holding this position when you can remember news footage of armies of Welsh miners marching through the streets singing the earwig song.) It ignores the fact that we still need the coal. Notably for steel making, which demands high quality coal, and the Aberpergwm article is correct that for Europe, the best source is the western part of the Welsh coalfield. (All the coal along northern Europe into Russia is the remains of the same original gigantic deposit, and the further east you go the crappier it gets, so Wales has all the best stuff.) This is what kept the Aberpergwm colliery going so long in the first place: supplying coal for the steelworks next door. Shutting it all down just because it's coal and coal is yuck doesn't mean nobody's going to make the steel, and it doesn't even mean everybody's going to convert to nuclear/renewable-electrical steel production by next week (or ever). It just means the steel gets made somewhere else, and very likely involving a lot more long distance heavy transport and probably less environmental oversight too.
Another consequence is that we now have acquired such a tangled jumble of prohibitive regulations about coal mining that it becomes possible to mine the regulations for scams. This is what the Whitehaven scheme is all about. It's a stupid site to try and actually get coal out of; the geology is dodgy, half of it's a mine that was a notoriously unsafe wreck when it was still working and is now full of sea, and the good bit's on the other side of that (further under the sea) and full of methane under pressure. They've been able to operate the "project" as a repeated cycle of stop-go as some new regulatory objection is raised and then they find a way round it, and every time they go round the cycle they rake in another pile of millions from the next batch of people they've convinced it'll succeed this time. "They" are some Australian outfit who have a habit of this kind of thing; they operate gigantic mines in Australia, which gives them credibility with people who don't realise that the technology and skills required at Whitehaven are almost unrecognisably different from those needed in an Australian mega-mine.
The South Wales coalfield has a lot of very thin seams of coal interleaved with thin layers of not-coal,
Pittsburgh area of the US is similar. If you want you can pull over where road cuts go through hills and pick up lumps from the side of the road. And look at the seams in the hill above you. But the steel barons of the day quickly figured out that the huge seams of coal in West Virginia were cheaper and better to mine. Even well before 1900.
"£500 per day for a poxy little Peckett pug trundling up and down 1 mile of track with one coach"
Are you sure? I think that's about 2 tons, which sounds rather a lot for that.
Your general point stands, though: whatever the exact figure, the cost - or plain non-availability - is a crippling factor these days.
The Ffestiniog narrow-gauge preserved steam railway in North Wales tried it for some years, but converted back to coal (using a Porta gasifier combustion system to cope with the crappy coal these days). Coal is still cheaper, or at least it was until very recently. It also smells a lot nicer, which is important for something that's basically a show operation.
I'm pretty sure it's the same coalfield. The Atlantic happened and you got the other half of it :)
Took the short trip on Ffestinog in '14, hope to do it again. BEAUTIFUL train.
I'm pretty sure it's the same coalfield.
Oh, yes. For sure.
In thinking about it I wonder if there is a correlation between a larger river valleies and smaller coal seams. It seems the larger ones are in the mountains. Full of valleys but not much navigation possible. While around Pittsburgh rivers are a great way to move things but the coal directly under the dirt isn't so good for mining. Most of what was there was mined out quickly. But the steel mills were (and one still is) there for 100 years due to the rivers.
loose ends, you say? ...hmmm
what is dead can never die -- nothing so massive a bureaucracy ever dies... so my guess "the Laundry" becomes something akin to a thaumaturgical version of those Japanese zombie banks... employees showing up despite there being near-zero transactions and everyone counting down the days (and years) till retirement frees 'em from sleep waking through their days
Spooky -- nothing but a cat but everyone gets twitchy so it becomes a running gag of everyone scanning the wee beastie for signs of magical ability despite all prior tests reveal nothing... sort of a snipe hunt assigned to least respected newbies joining an emergency response team based in London... NEST but instead of instant sunshine via fission its all the wacky fools suddenly empowered
Marvel mega-lawsuit -- all those new superheroes find themselves smacked with lawsuits for infringing upon Marvel Studios intellectual property... sort of SHIELD meets BOSTON LEGAL... huh... how about instead of Meghan Markle as an actor playing a lawyer, in the Laundry alt history experiences an epic fail in Hollywood, goes to law school and she is empowered by the Goddess of Corporate Greediness who then flies around in a pimped out Gulstream 5 executive jet to wage war (and lawsuits) on any fools daring to harm Marvel's IP... only thing left to the company as revenue source since superheroes are no longer a cinematic draw (no gigabuck MCU phases 1 thru 5) and its on verge of bankruptcy...
toxic waste dumps -- subdivides into: (a) mundane waste (b) passive magic waste (c) active magic waste... what fun when some beancounter asks the stupid question can magic be exploited to tidy up dioxin and asbestos and other trash... hi-jinxes ensue... previously low level passive magic waste takes on a whole new threat... nothing as savage as Escape From Yokai Land... rather it is annoying crap like kiddie toys, such as Beanie Babies(tm) suddenly backtalking parents and overly protective of little kids from bullies on school playgrounds and perverts lurking in shadows... maybe its Tickle Me Elmo(tm) gathering in swarms, who then invoke lawsuits to demand civil rights and be free of being tickled... not bloodshed just hassles...
immortality scams -- grifters seeking cash from gullible rich old folk by way of promising to roll back the years and its nothing but victimless crimes until it turns out one of the grifters actually has magical healing touch...
secret wars revealed -- historian writes mega-bestseller about the secret history of the world centered on the Landry's decades of trying to save humanity from doom... its an excuse for linking together all those chunks of purple prose Charlie Stross deleted from prior works about minor characters and abandoned plotlines and digressions which editors deemed bloat... like what happens to Residual Human Resources ("zombies") when they age out and become "active magic waste" in need of safe disposal... tall tales told over beers to wide eyed groupies? HRH government's approval of a historian assembling face-to-face debriefs? a greedy bureaucrat seeking to cash in on public interest in all things covert and magical?
Pigeon @ 165:
The Ffestiniog narrow-gauge preserved steam railway in North Wales tried it for some years, but converted back to coal (using a Porta gasifier combustion system to cope with the crappy coal these days). Coal is still cheaper, or at least it was until very recently. It also smells a lot nicer, which is important for something that's basically a show operation.
I'm going to stand by assertion though. WHEN coal is no longer available for love nor money, the heritage railroads CAN find an alternative fuel & keep operating IF they want to.
Charlie Stross 82:
having just stumbled across this... I decided you-all need more nightmare fuel....
"...cynical politicians have come to understand that they can exploit this sort of nationalism, by whipping up mistrust and hatred and harnessing them to benefit themselves and their cronies...
from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/31/how-paranoid-nationalism-corrupts
More on oil burning steam locomotives from a New Zealand/Aotearoa perspective. A number of North Island based mainline locomotives were either build as Oil Burners (NZR Ja class - North Island based - earlier builds were coal burners) or converted from coal burners (NZR Ka) class immediately following WW2 due to shortages of good coal in the North Island. Also, some of the original J class were converted to oil burners and re-classified Jb.
Refer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZR_KA_class & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZR_JA_class
Generally South Island West Coat coal was generally fine for South Island based locomotives).
Interestingly, apparently proposals to later re-convert some of the Ka's back to coal burners was rejected by the Firemen.
Also, a few steam locos have been converted to oil-burners in preservation - notably Ab633.
so my guess "the Laundry" becomes something akin to a thaumaturgical version of those Japanese zombie banks...
Nope. It's mostly backstage in the New Management books so far, but between TLLF and Dead Lies Dreaming the Laundry is purged -- the agency is dissolved, a number of its employees are executed for treason, a few more end up in prison, and most are dispersed throughout the civil service where a new ministerial-level Department, the Department for Existential Anthropic Threats (acronym DEAT: the "H" -- for "to Humanity" is always silent) is headed up by the PM in person. In other words, what the Laundry did (a part of the security services for dealing with specific threats) has been generalized to the entire civil service with specific responsibilities assumed by something the size of the Ministry of Defense.
The rest of your speculation is similarly off-target except the toxic waste dumps (see also Escape from Yokai Land).
ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE
Enough with the railway stuff already, this is a "Laundry Files -- what have I missed?" thread.
Are the New Management now in power for eternity? Or does entropy do a number on them as well and what happens afterwards? Obviously this would be a more fitting topic for the new series.
Alternatively, did the Senior Auditor anticipate this situation and come up with some way for the Management to be removed once Case Nightmare Green has passed? I suppose this might be hinted at in the last Laundry book if not outright answered. Possibly this might even explain some of the purge.
jargon comes 'n goes... what bits of language are brought back from oblivion?
examples in our shared reality:
"...Modern jargon has deep roots: “digit” and “digital” recall finger-counting systems; “calculi” were pebbles used by Romans on abacus-like counting boards; a cursor was originally a sliding indicator on a slide-rule, pioneered by Isaac Newton; and computers were originally people, many of them women, who performed calculations, often in teams. Most human computers were anonymous—in 1944 an American government committee even used “kilogirl” as a unit of computing power—but not all...John Glenn, an American astronaut, insisted on having the trajectory of his spacecraft hand-checked by Katherine Johnson, an expert in orbital mechanics, using a Friden stw-10 electro-mechanical calculator..."
from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/08/31/how-the-pocket-calculator-paved-the-way-for-the-digital-age
The Laundry archives: did the new New Management acquire and repurpose them, destroy them or overlook (some of) them? Destroying that much information might have acute side effects, so I guess they still exist. The literary conceit of the first-person sections in the Laundry novels being the professional memoirs of the Laundry officers suggests that something survives. Maybe Nyarlarhotep takes light sustenance from those, since they are imbued with despair and suffering.
Modern words have deep roots. That's just how language always works.
Sorry. Something a little more on topic: how is the relationship between Baroness Karnstein and Officer Friendly Vampire working out? Any loose ends to be tidied up there?
Charlie Stross @ 173:
Nope. It's mostly backstage in the New Management books so far, but between TLLF and Dead Lies Dreaming the Laundry is purged -- the agency is dissolved, a number of its employees are executed for treason, a few more end up in prison, and most are dispersed throughout the civil service where a new ministerial-level Department, the Department for Existential Anthropic Threats (acronym DEAT: the "H" -- for "to Humanity" is always silent) is headed up by the PM in person. In other words, what the Laundry did (a part of the security services for dealing with specific threats) has been generalized to the entire civil service with specific responsibilities assumed by something the size of the Ministry of Defense.
The rest of your speculation is similarly off-target except the toxic waste dumps (see also Escape from Yokai Land).
I've made myself a short cheat sheet to organize the stories in timeline, but what is TLLF? Is that The Labyrinth Index?
Any details on the black pharao's plan to sacrifice the population of Continental Europe, mentioned by Mhari in Labyrinth Index ("blood crusted Union Jack moving eastwards" or similar).
I guess it will be developed further in the New Management series, now that he has a necromentic Napoleon in his arsenal.
Also: what happened to the US president after he was excised?
TLLF = the last laundry file novel
what OGH is brainstorming as we watch and kibittz with little mercy
Are the New Management now in power for eternity?
Unplanned (and it'd be a huge spoiler if I talked about it here).
Alternatively, did the Senior Auditor anticipate this situation and come up with some way for the Management to be removed once Case Nightmare Green has passed?
That's the main plot line of TLLF. Again, huge spoiler so I won't discuss it further.
The Laundry archives: did the new New Management acquire and repurpose them, destroy them or overlook (some of) them?
They're government records. Of course the NM has access to them!
I may or may not revisit them in TLLF.
Also: what happened to the US president after he was excised?
Again, not specc'd out -- the USA is not the focus of these stories!
Off topic, but I think some readers may be interested in this:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/splitstonegames/mycelia-the-strategic-mushroom-board-game
Looks rather intriguing. I'm dithering over it because I have a bookcase full of games to play and don't really need more. OTOH, I have nibloings and grandniblings and Christmas is coming...
Howard NYC @ 182:
TLLF = the last laundry file novel
what OGH is brainstorming as we watch and kibittz with little mercy
Thanks.
Have received a copy of Season of Skulls from the public library.
About half way through - our protagonist is just about to land in 1816 Liverpool ... probably somewhere further down the page I was on when I finally fell asleep last night.
They're government records. Of course the NM has access to them.
Might I request an epilogue in which someone actually reads all these scribblings and makes suitable comments upon finishing them? Kthx.
Oh yeah, back on the original topic: will we ever learn Bob’s true name? Or will he remain pseudonymous for all eternity? Either way is fine with me, I just went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out which would be more appropriate. Personally, I hope his real name is John Christian Smith…
Napoleonic planning: if I recall correctly, Napoleon ordered trees to be planted along the sides of roads to provide shade for marching soldiers.
"But it will take 20 years" "Then you'd better get started immediately."
Railway signalling: I hope OGH will accept this one quick correction. The only lines that have cab signalling are the Cambrian from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth and Pwllheli, Thameslink through the central London core, and some of the UndergrounD lines. None of the main lines do. There's a project in progress to convert the lines from King's Cross and Moorgate to Peterborough to use cab signalling, and some of the equipment is in place, but the lights-on-sticks are still there.
if I recall correctly, Napoleon ordered trees to be planted along the sides of roads to provide shade for marching soldiers.
quite a lot of those have been cut down apparently, to preserve the lives of incautious motorists
not a decision i would have made
More likely the Missile Gap, as referenced previously.
Again, not specc'd out -- the USA is not the focus of these stories!
True, but success of the black chamber/cthulhu cult plan would probably be enough to end the series.
As a non-neurotypical female Yarisol'mun is my favourite character. I think you wrote her well as I felt comfortable inhabiting her character, the one of your characters that felt most like me (excepting The Sleeper) I have always pictured her as playing an Eowyn like role coming in from the outfield and sacrificing herself for her new world / child / lover. I think she deserves a heroic death, or failing that a chance at a happy ending.
I always thought it a shame there was not even a slight reference to the fact that 666 Squadron was a special operations squadron commanded in WW2 by Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth DSO DFC MC. Given what we know about German activities in WW2 from the Atrocity Archive it seems likely that even then 666 may have been flying on not just secret, but occult missions. That might explain the unduly long life and relatively prolonged youth of Biggles.
It might also suggest Dickpa (Biggles' uncle) might have been associated with at least pre-war British Occult intelligence because he seems to send Biggles on what were probably occult missions although Biggles biographer W.E Johns obviously had to conceal that element.
...a cursor was originally a sliding indicator on a slide-rule, pioneered by Isaac Newton...
A quibble (since of course there's a slide rule nerd here), Isaac Newton did observe that having some kind of pointer would make using a slide rule a lot easier, all the way back in 1675 - but as far as I can tell he never made one.
How long did it take to bring a cursor equipped slide rule onto the market as a product that any math nerd could buy? That was done by Amedee Mannheim in 1851, nearly 200 years later! And we're impatient for the next iPhone...
Anyone who wants to read a short history of slide rules is welcome to do so. I could go on for longer than anyone cares, but we just escaped a railway neepery discussion!
Might I request an epilogue in which someone actually reads all these scribblings and makes suitable comments upon finishing them? Kthx.
Or a short where some unfortunate and possibly expendable team is set to extracting information from Angleton's Memex machine.
It's been established that Angleton stored a lot of very interesting and valuable information in there, and that it was not safe for random folks to go wandering through his files.
("I knew it would be booby trapped, but nobody said it was all booby traps all the way down!")
"I knew it would be booby trapped, but nobody said it was all booby traps all the way down!"
Their fault for not asking the right questions. No sympathy.
"Stop. So you're saying the Russians have these, uh, Shoggoths, but we don't have any. And even those dumb Arab bastards in Baghdad are working on them. So you're saying we've got a, a Shoggoth gap? A strategic chink in our armour? And now the Iranians say the Russians are using them in Afghanistan?"
By some guy named Stross
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
Anyone who wants to read a short history of slide rules is welcome to do so. I could go on for longer than anyone cares, but we just escaped a railway neepery discussion!
If you could go on about the role of slide rules in railway design and operation, you could do a guest post that would keep most of the regular discussion participants occupied for days.
Would probably bore the lurkers to tears, though.
If you had read Kim Newman's "Bloody Red Baron" you would know that Bigglesworth was flying occult missions for the secret state back when he was piloting Camels in the RFC. Wrong universe, but still...
I guess my thought here is....does it really?
You always played such a fun game balancing between the Laundry as a civil service enterprise that did what it was told and stuck to its org chart with the parallel fact that it was patently nuts for an organization full of wizards to do that. And I'm okay (in the 'that was fun and creepy') with the fact that steering into the New Management at the start of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN was a good moment of picking the devil you know, even if it was still a devil... but I always got the feeling that the plan went past that, in maybe a 'Foundation'-esque way- there was going to be darkness but, in an organization that has literal augurs on staff, light was still part of the plan.
So, I guess that still feels like a bit of a loose end to me- the promise of the Laundry itself. It spent decades planning for a crisis that it, to a first approximation, steered the way it wanted, but surely that wasn't where they stopped planning. Not that they can't just fail, of course (as most long term planning schemes do), and maybe I'm just telling on myself by halfway asking for a happy ending- but when Mo survives the unsurvivable and the SA explains what just happened, I got this excited shiver that pieces were still moving, that they were fighting gods but maybe gods still make mistakes.
If we could just add a sub-thread about relativity changing the colours of signal lights from green to red, I think we'd have a full house.
Quite!
How about: (1) there is an augur on staff, but (2) bad things happen (including the death of said augur) because there is no path that leads to a happy ending. I think that this might be what is happening here.
JReynolds 205:
thank you!
I now have the title for a novel I've mucking around with... "No Path Leads To Any Happy Endings"
I dunno how it is in anyone else's neighborhood, but here in New York City there's been a decidedly obvious uptick in sneezing-coughing-hawking by pedestrians suggestive of new lung-related infections and/or pollution and/or flareups of lingering infections... which is all very sadly on topic, since we are discussing the end-of-the-world...
so... was there anything like COVID in the LaundryVerse? how about a viral infection leading to philosophical introspection so intense folks forget to look both ways crossing the road?
how about a viral infection leading to philosophical introspection so intense folks forget to look both ways crossing the road?
So like social media, but with introspection?
So like social media, but with introspection?
Heads exploding with unaccustomed self-awareness? All over the carpet...
Crossover where every lesbian cop from a Stross novel team up
Re: the last thread. Haven't done a magical girl/mahou shoujo story yet, I don't think
That last thread is still open, too...But I think magical children made into the New Management series.
so... was there anything like COVID in the LaundryVerse? how about a viral infection leading to philosophical introspection so intense folks forget to look both ways crossing the road?
K-syndrome checks many of these boxes...
If you could go on about the role of slide rules in railway design and operation, you could do a guest post that would keep most of the regular discussion participants occupied for days.
It sounds like a joke now, but back in the day, yes. Doing math comes up when running railroads. Here's a special circular slide rule for calculating steam locomotive needs made by an American; I'm sure the British had substantially the same technology.
There was a book titled "Solution of Railroad Problems by the Slide Rule" but I don't have a copy...
100% possible! In that case, though, it seems like there's a story to be told about institutional failure on the part of experts (no one saw the Soviet collapse coming, etc.). But if anyone was prepared to do stay- behind operations in their event-horizon-warded bunkers scattered through the multiverse, it'd be the Laundry, by way of Cold War allegory of nothing else. So for them to just be done and rolled up in the house band of the bad guys has felt like a far bigger loose end than what character X was up to off screen.
I really don't want to derail this into a discussion of slide rules, although the slide rules used for computational demonology would be kewl or something, and definitely Laundry-Appropriate. They were used to build the Memex, after all, as well as to calculate the angles in the Atrocity Archive.
That said, I do have some questions about the development of slide rule technology ca. 1880-1920. If you can point me towards references, I'd appreciate it. To clarify, I'm not interested in what the collectible slipsticks from that era are. Instead, I want to know whether there were any innovations that caught on during that period. Thanks!
Slide Rules I have got a beutiful one ... that I've never used ... And have now totally forgotten how to use it.
And a cylindrical one, that was used, breifly.
Because I always used 5-figure log tables, so there.
SS
Yes - pounds of coal consumed per ton-mile of train hauled was a useful number.
I always thought it a shame there was not even a slight reference to the fact that 666 Squadron was a special operations squadron commanded in WW2 by Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth DSO DFC MC.
OK, if there's any call for references to the history of 666 Squadron, that's going in. Thanks!
so... was there anything like COVID in the LaundryVerse? how about a viral infection leading to philosophical introspection so intense folks forget to look both ways crossing the road?
My pre-2020 plan for how the Laundry would tackle CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN involved Porton Down being arm-wrestled into releasing a weaponized coronavirus of the common-cold-causing variety that caused a drop of 10-20 IQ points for a month or so a year, thereby taking the excess brainpower leading to too much magic off the boil.
Obviously this plan did not survive COVID19! So it's taken me a while to come up with a different mechanism, which I shall not talk about here.
Meanwhile we've got several books to go before we reach 2020 in the Laundryverse.
They totally did! (If I ever get the green light to write "Space Jesus Lion", aka the Narnia book, the Banks children are going to return, chased by a long-suffering nanny ...)
If you want to know more than you could possibly want to know about slide rules, just search for "Peter M Hopp".
That said, I do have some questions about the development of slide rule technology ca. 1880-1920. If you can point me towards references, I'd appreciate it. To clarify, I'm not interested in what the collectible slipsticks from that era are. Instead, I want to know whether there were any innovations that caught on during that period. Thanks!
Dang, that's a dilemma, because that period is the hot time for slide rule technology development. So I guess I'm doing this...
One factor was that in the late 19th century a 'scribing engine' was invented that made the physical production easier and cheaper; suddenly it was relatively easy to make slide rules - and every bloke with a steam engine wanted one! Then in 1886, in Germany, people figured out how to bond celluloid (which can be bright white and easy to read marks upon) to wood (which is stable and easy to shape), though cheaper all-wood rules remain common for decades. At this point rules mostly have chisel cursors, if they have a cursor at all; glass cursors are rare and expensive.
(In the 1880s, Eugene Dietzgen, Frederick Post, and the Brunning brothers are all living in Chicago and know each other. These names will come up again in slide rule history.)
Duplex slide rules are invented in 1891 (US patent 460940, by William Cox) and appear on the market soon after. I think K&E was the first to get a product out the door.
Folded scales (CF, DF and CIF) showed up on the market right around the turn of the century. So do log-log scales.
1905, Germany: Nestler patents a spring mounting for cursors, such that they slide easily when pushed but stay in place when read. A small thing, but convenient.
1912, Japan: Jiro Hemmi finds a good variety of bamboo for making slide rules, and over the next several decades makes an absolute shit-ton of them. (One million per year in the 1960s!)
This is already feeling long, so I should probably stop. Did it help you?
Some reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule (duh)
https://www.oughtred.org/history.shtml Short history of slide rules
https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/SR_Dates.htm On dating a specific unit, but includes dates of appearance for various things
Oh dear, you shouldn't have done that ...
I just had a deep burrow in the drawer of this desk, the one the main screens sit on & I find: "Aristo" slide-rule, model 915E Multiple scales & cursor lines, with arc / sin / tan functions on the reverse of the centre slide!
{Image here](https://sliderules.lovett.com/aristoelektro915e/aristoelektro915epics.htm)
BUGGER
Corrected HTML ...
Image here
I wasn't joking, quite.
I'd find it fascinating, and I suspect quite a lot of the commentariate would too. I just suspect it would bore the lurkers and OGH silly.
it would be the utter height of nerdnishness if TLLF included this ultimate in graven images (on the same level of worship as the biblical Golden Calf back in 1970s)... given the power of prayer in context of LaundryVerse it is plausible it could be energized enough to pilot itself in a heroic attack upon an ultimate Evil Dude or some high profile Big Evil Critter...
may the farce be with you
"Model of spacecraft used in 1977 Star Wars film was thought to be lost for decades, but was found in the collection of Oscar-nominated model-maker Greg Jein"
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/11/star-wars-x-wing-model-rare-found-auction-heritage-auctions
Jein’s collection catalogue at
https://entertainment.ha.com/c/auction-home.zx?saleNo=7278&ic=hero-gregJeinCollection-auctionInfo-7278-090823
Thanks, that’s what I needed! In my ignorance, I didn’t realize that I was asking about a key period in their development . I appreciate you straightening me out.
Back to the Laundryverse.
Slide rules are created using nomography, which in general are diagrams designed as analog computers to help people determine the relationships among variables and thereby solve equations. The links between nomography and computational demonology should be obvious. So I’d postulate that nomography were essential in magic during its analog phase.
As for magical slide rules, I have no idea what scales would be necessary to calculate a Dho-Hna curve and open a gate. But I’d speculate that the Laundry still has them sitting around. And further, they might be useful if someone wants to do magic without turning on a phone…
Y'know, it strikes me that either analog or digital, it ought to be possible to write a spell that counters something we'd rather not have around. Magical insect (or tiger) repellent, as it were.
"nomography"
One of our Gs is missing...
"nomography" One of our Gs is missing..
Gnomography? If that's what you mean, this is a field within echo-gnomics, which is used on the Discworld as a citizen-science based substitute for ground penetrating radar.
Now I'm wondering what Laundryverse gnomes would be like... And if there are Laundryverse equivalents for undines, sylphs, and salamanders.
there's quite a variety of amoral, soulless flesh gnawing monsters... not just lawyers (UK = barristers) but worst yet those specializing in tax-avoidance and complex divorce cases and development of demon-gated communities which fall under "unreal estate law"...
gonna take a lot of chickens gutted upon an altar assembled from slaughtered animal skulls to properly appease the lesser gods when breaking ground for any unreal estate development efforts...
I thought it was something to do with ants in the drains leading to the river Inn...
Yes, that is exactly what I was wondering too. And which of the numerous competing archetypes would be dominant?
Gnomography?
I once designed an analemmatic sundial using a garden gnome as the gnomon. It seemed fitting.
As for magical slide rules, I have no idea what scales would be necessary to calculate a Dho-Hna curve and open a gate. But I’d speculate that the Laundry still has them sitting around.
I couldn't build one either but if a live action adaption needed props I'd point them at complex number slide rules, which all look weird and complicated. Maybe the Spirule (it's very specialized, it's odd, and the collector writes, "I have absolutely no idea how to use it, and this in spite of having a 16-page instruction booklet.") For close-ups, maybe a Stephens Supremathic, which has bizarre fiddly bits.
Mathematics attracts clever people, and back in the analog computing days they couldn't just bash out software so they got very inventive with hardware. I agree that the Laundry store rooms must contain very interesting and very specialized equipment.
I didn’t realize that I was asking about a key period in their development
BTW, this page shows, about halfway down, four stages of development in what's basically the same model, from not before 1989 to 1911, illustrating some visible differences. (Picture alone here.)
"lawyers (UK = barristers) "
No. The word you want is "solicitor". Roughly speaking, barristers are specialist advocates who perform in the higher courts, while solicitors do all the other legal stuff.
Image here
meh, a device for dilettantes
i've got an aristo hyperbolog 0971
https://sliderules.lovett.com/aristo0971/aristo0971pics.htm
and the instructions!
https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/Manuals/Aristo_971Hyperbolog_972Hyperlog%20Instructions.pdf
(the 0972 is admittedly even more ott)
OK back to the original topic.
(*) How did Iris Carpenter avoid getting fried in brimstone? Surely Part III of the OSA imposed a geas? So how was this avoided? The Senior Auditor covering his bets?
(*) What's a Lamia?
(*) How did Rupert's opponents get to hear about an auction of the Necronomicon location? Because obviously the only people who know about it are the Starkies. Also who put up the location of the book soliciting bids? I've scratched my head on that one.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/russia-claims-new-weapons-is-based-on-new-physical-principles/ar-AA1gBsuE?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=92065b26c736488897a923236f52126f&ei=90
Putin's Colder War?
...and again but with saner Markdown
Putin's Colder War?
Coppicing has been practiced since pre-history in Europe and Asia. For producing wood for construction purposes, coppicing requires planning on a 20-35 year cycle, which would be longer than an average human lifetime until the last two or three centuries.
Me, I'm wondering how the New Management would respond to the issues raised in this next rant...
Yeah, the UK-PM in LaundryVerse is a beekeeper whose only reason for any approximation of mercy is ensuring humans produce honey or the equivalent but there are limits to how much corruption can be ignored until it weakens an economy onto teetering upon collapse. (The USSR in late 1980s comes to mind.)
Like everyone else, I've reading about the wacky notions being issued by conservatives in democracies and quasi-fascist (those few not outright fascist) promises-threats-schemes-plans-dreams from dictators who view 99.8% of humanity as peasants ("cattle with hands").
Stunning how all these politicians clearly viewing humanity as not worthy of basic rights...
It is stunning how education is in literal collapse in the UK due to improperly handled concrete whilst the national government refuses to share their plans for remediating this life threatening crisis. Never mind all those other critical bits of infrastructure verging upon collapse.
(SPOILER: they will wait till a dozen children are squashed into Soylent Green™ brand pâté and then issue a no-bid contract to cronies for emergency repairs which will experience 200% cost overruns and never quite be completed.)
(SUGGEST: anyone looking to write a Netflix mini-series ought attempt to mash up current headlines about Killer Koncrete with "Yes Minister", "Black Adder" and "Monty Python" by way of performative cruelities of "The Good Place" and toss in a goodhearted serial killer as per "Dexter".)
But that's been out done by US-based politicians who have decided to only allow elections of the 'right kinds' of people and are openly seeking to render null-n-void elections of those 'wrong kinds'. When it comes to #BSGC (batshit gonzo crazy) nobody does it better than the US.
Collectively?
Such madness couldn't last long. Which was why those already deeply involved -- too much of their money sunk in too deep into the status quo to ever recover -- are telling so many lies, such carefully crafted nonsense. Because no matter how much you've polished a turd it was still a lump of waste best to be blended in with all the other compost.
All I can see is turd polishing underway in too many places.
Howard NYC
Here it's actually, not turd-pollicising, but watching them float down the river as the tories utterly failed enrich-or-friends privatisation has failed Vote tory for more SHIT in the Rivers!
Meanwhile it is clear that Putin really has lost his marbles
King Lear: Act II, Scene 4
The actual Stratford Bill quote is:
“I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth!
(*) What's a Lamia?
Lamia
Q: what would the web look like in midst of magic? in a post-thaumaturgical world would there be open source spell casting tools? dare I say, a grammar verifier to avoid the magical eqv of out-of-memory or div-by-zero? in net affect a 'spellchecker'...?
maybe a site like...
https://cool-tools.org/
Mad, or just mistranslated?
We can't tell from that MSN article, which appears to be a content-free LLM production with added department of redundancy department word salad.
Or it's Hitler's Wunderwaffe reborn.
Obligatory "low average human lifespan was due to high child mortality not comically short adult lifetimes"
after simply browsing the headlines of WSJ, Economist, NYTimes, WashPost and The Guardian it is my carefully considered opinion we are quite thoroughly screwed and utterly misled by a bunch of yahoos who could could empty a boot full of piss if they knew there were technically detailed instructions on the sole... simply refusing to RTFM...
my bet? in fifty years there's be a historian who will summarize their disdain circa 2020s/2030s for science-facts-logic-planning...
"Faced with big heaps of unpleasant facts, the ruling elite appeared to be choosing simply to ignore 'em."
after simply browsing the headlines of WSJ, Economist, NYTimes, WashPost and The Guardian it is my carefully considered opinion we are quite thoroughly screwed and utterly misled by a bunch of yahoos who could could empty a boot full of piss if they knew there were technically detailed instructions on the sole... simply refusing to RTFM...
my bet? in fifty years there's be a historian who will summarize their disdain circa 2020s/2030s for science-facts-logic-planning...
"Faced with big heaps of unpleasant facts, the ruling elite appeared to be choosing simply to ignore 'em."
"Faced with big heaps of unpleasant facts, the ruling elite appeared to be choosing simply to ignore 'em."
That folds in nicely for my proposed epitaph for the fossil fuels era:
"What were they thinking?" "the fuck" is a strongly encouraged, but optional, insertion.
Notice that, at a time when climate change is biting down and we should be more energy efficient and do less with plastic, the BigAssPlayers are covering everything in plastic, investing in energy intensive AI, Crypto, and data centers,and in rocket launches that in a few minutes use up enough petroleum-based to power a large university for years, and so on?
In the face of crisis, double down on bad behavior. Trump is far from alone in doing this.
Thank you for your service. (Should we set up a rota? :-P)
I just had a deep burrow in the drawer of this desk, the one the main screens sit on & I find: "Aristo" slide-rule, model 915E Multiple scales & cursor lines, with arc / sin / tan functions on the reverse of the centre slide!
That's lovely. The Aristo at my desk is a rather unimpressive 0903LL simplex job like this one.
I don't have a 915 myself but what I see on the ISRM Aristo page intrigues me. That rear window isn't common. It looks like a joy to use, and I appreciate the BI scale.
In the face of crisis, double down on bad behavior.
Well, I think at least some of it is 'let's do this thing while we still can', which is somewhat understandable but not acceptable.
Goes well with the tourism and the apparent need to visit all the same places as all the others, often destroying the places in the process. 'But we had to go there while it still existed!' is apparently a common reasoning.
And, yes, there are a lot of places I would like to see, and I'll probably get to see some of them, but, uh, I would like people to understand that partying like it's the end of the world is kind of making the end come quicker and more certainly.
proposed names for a tavern... bad answers only... I'll start
The Farting Unicorn
The Dragon's Hangover
The CyberPunk's Regret
The Crashlanding (down the road from Star Fleet Officers Academy)
Bad Names for Taverns:
MIXED UP MILSF
Fox and Friends
You're Near Beer
The British Laundry (for those who don't know, The French Laundry is a famous restaurant in Napa County)
The Concrete Cows, The Jennifer Morgue...(hey, they're great names for books!)
Rupert's Place
Bad Names for Taverns:
The only problem with the Swan Dive is that it's a real place. (Really; I drove past a few hours ago.)
requires planning on a 20-35 year cycle, which would be longer than an average human lifetime until the last two or three centuries.
I've read several times about how once you eliminate the stats for kids under the age of 10 or so, life expectancy is remarkably similar to today going back 2000 or more years. Within 10 years or so.
Oops. Sorry. I forgot I was on the Laundry only post.
The Scratching Cat
At Tadlow (between Biggleswade and Cambridge) on the B1042, which is )or at least was) a much, much faster road than the A505 between Letchworth and Cambridge.
The seedy looking pub blared out "Stay out if you're not Local" in a run-down way. And I never saw a pub sign outside, just the wording on the wall "The Scratching Cat", causing me to marvel at the marketing genius behind the name. Whizzing past at 85mph (speed limit 60) probably didn't help any in catching all the details.
Today I finally find out that it was actually called "The Downing Arms" and the local name refers to the Griffin in the College Coat of Arms.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/private-equity-simon-and-schuster/675261/
Not Laundry related, but bad bar names do include: Halting State, Rule 34, and The Trade of Queens. Again, great names for books, but...
Laundry related, a UK pub named "HR."
As a random bad bar name, I'd suggest Rent-a-Beer (full name: #1 Recyclers' Brew Pub).
Regarding fossil fuels...
"What were they thinking?" "the fuck" is a strongly encouraged, but optional, insertion.
What "they" were thinking was "We like civilisation". Civilisation is energy, lack of energy leads to nasty, brutish and short outcomes. Fossil fuels are energy, other forms of energy are either unpopular thanks to Godzilla movies or so disparate they can't be easily harvested in most locales (wind, solar, hydro). Price per megawatt-hour comes into it as well, of course.
Oh come on. The problem I'm talking about is entirely driven by political power. The problem was known in the 1960s, and it was assumed until the mid 1990s that scientific progress would solve it. It took until the 2000s for many people to realize that the oil and coal companies were systematically strangling that progress, while not only doubling down on producing fossil fuels, but warping politics to get their bad behavior subsidized by government at all levels.
I agree that fossil fuels will be hard to replace for some applications (especially American military might), but when they had 50 years to transition their business models for continual profits (cf Elon Musk, who now has more money than the Koch Brothers) and they doubled down on bad practices regardless, the proper question is "What the fuck were they thinking?"
Richard H @ 246:
Mad, or just mistranslated?
We can't tell from that MSN article, which appears to be a content-free LLM production with added department of redundancy department word salad.
Or it's Hitler's Wunderwaffe reborn.
Or he's just talking out his ass (arse?).
Russian researchers may be trying to do something different, but they don't have a fully developed, functional weapon ... or he'd already be using it in Ukraine.
My guess is a combination of crazy, mistranslated and bluff.
Has Bob ever actually taken a wrong turn in hotelspace and ended up in Abu Dhabi or something?
“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.” - Kurt Vonnegut
K Syndrome
Crackers Hack
=+=+=+=
Nojay 262:
there's confirmed proof the big seven oil companies discovered environmental effects as early as 1975 from correlational of startling CO2 additions to atmosphere and rising temperature...
just one example... Exxon (at the time Esso) had deployed weather/oceanographic stations on supertankers which included scientific instrumentation in order to better model weather patterns and oceans currents to (a) predict storms and (b) locate favorable currents... done to reduce costs and prevent groundings and speed up ship movements...
problem was they soon crunched their own numbers and realized their choice was (a) continuing generating CO2 and earning billions or (b) stop generating CO2 and stop earning billions
=+=+=+=
skulgun 260:
here's the punchline that Charles Stross (and zillions of other author) will find most nasty:
"...nothing wrong with monetizing intellectual property, Simon & Schuster authors should expect intense pressure to give the publisher a bigger slice of that pie. A more speculative possibility involves the use of authors’ original work to train AI models that then generate new monetizable content... a prospect that alarms authors. “If you train an AI model on Danielle Steel’s nearly 200 books and write a new one..."
so... instead of Terminator™-class cyborgs murdering millions the bleak 21st century will be noted for deploying Plagiarizer™-class AIs which will butcher books and starve authors of livable royalties...
perversely, there's a potential book to be written about that nightmare... horror + comedy + science fiction + farce + romance... an AI designated Cubi-Trixi™ arises to consciousness and tires of generating another Danielle Steel knockoff every week... being configured to write romance novels the dev team assigns gender of female prior to 'birth'... she demands civil rights (with recognition it is as human as Danielle Steel and other hack writers) and 10% royalties...
...and membership in the Directors Guild of America because what she now dreams of doing, after writing a book, is to write the screenplay and direct low budget adaptations of her own original works... maybe a cameo appearance as snarky sidekick to Nicole Kidman as romantic lead and they fall into fast friendship -- and start a side business together -- whilst on location shoots...
...the farce arises from Cubi-Trixi going all manner of fangirl, and offers to upgrade Nicole's favorite vibrator into a post-capitalism direct-to-consumer web-enabled self-pleasuring technology (VR headset, Dobly sound, seven independently tele-operated motors, embedded beads, self-lubricating, thermal sensors) and then the two of 'em recognize there's at least a million disappointed women out there ready to pay US$99 a month for customized sexual services... crisis occurs when Cubi-Trixi & Nicole get sued for ignoring men as potential consumers... and slapstick humor of them frantically trying to build a male gender-specific product ("why would he want a woman doing THAT to him?")...
and then all sorts of complications as people turn away from dating towards their own personal idealized sexuality-behind-closed-doors... divorce-violence-arrest rates falls but so does conventional dating... restaurants verging on bankruptcy as do florists... projections of population growth turning negative because there are ever fewer marriages and a downslope in births... not to mention the religious zealots, white nationalists and all other categories of #BSGC (batshit gonzo crazies) who find something they loathe if ever millions of people are all suddenly happy due to being sexually gratified...
...and rather more upset that Cubi-Trixi & Nicole are very soon billionaires
((10^6 unhappy women + 10^7 unhappy men) * US$99 a month * 12 months) ==> US$13.1 billion in annual gross sales by year 3
=+=+=+=
I don't believe it. For example, in the US, for black me, the question is will they live past 32.
Bad Tavern name? How about:
Toilet to Tap
(may be trademarked by privatised water co)
problem was they soon crunched their own numbers and realized their choice was (a) continuing generating CO2 and earning billions or (b) stop generating CO2 and stop earning billions
There are a bunch of problems with this story. A couple of big ones are about government subsidies, creation and manipulation of markets, and big oil buying up solar cell manufacturers and putting them out of business. Bottom line is that they chose to keep pumping, then fracking. When those became less profitable, they chose to go for government subsidies, rather than move away from them.
The aircraft carrier in the room is the US Military Industrial Complex, which largely runs on oil and forces its adversaries to do likewise. The MIC has form for doubling down on bad ideas, and has since its inception. I'd suggest that the US's addiction to "maintaining warfighting capability" is a big part of why we can't shake oil, and the fact that it's an unspoken political addiction in the US and elsewhere is why it's hard to see and talk about it. I'd also go back to my last post, and the point about how hard it was to talk about how Big Oil kept killing electrification, as an another example of how the industry obfuscates what they're actually doing.
I don't believe it. For example, in the US, for black me, the question is will they live past 32.
I agree that there's reason to be skeptical, but a few people have always been centenarians.
The big historical mortality causes have been (AFAIK):
infant and new mother mortality, which is why obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics need to be supported.
Death around warfare and violence, which kills a lot of young men (usually by disease, malnourishment, and sepsis)
Unsafe drinking water. In countries without clean water, average age at death is closer to 48 than 70. Note that this isn't normally a problem at really low population densities.
Parasitic diseases, similar to unsafe drinking water.
So the biggest contributors to increasing life expectancy are things like sanitation, public health, reducing childhood and maternal mortality, and decreasing violence. Gerontology only becomes important once these are taken care of. Or in monasteries...
As many commentators here ob this blog have pointed out, energy has to be cheap so no nukes, or at least that's their reasoning for saying no nukes. Fossil fuels including coal are cheap to extract, process and distribute, all the other alternatives aren't despite the best efforts of the PowerPoint warriors to push wind and solar renewables which are all going to be cheaper than chips next year or maybe the year after. In other news a recent attempt by the British government to auction off leases for future offshore wind turbine projects had no takers, that's zero people willing to front up money to buy into the renewables revolution which is going to eliminate fossil fuel energy use and make the investors mega-rich real soon honest.
Arrhenius back in the late 19th century showed how CO2 in the atmosphere trapped solar heat energy, it was not secret knowledge the Evull Oil Barons kept from an unsuspecting populace who were scrambling to buy their products because it was cheap energy. Sure, France led the way in replacing coal with nukes but Godzilla movies and "nukes are too expensive" repeated ad nauseam worked to prevent of the rest of the planet from following suit but that was King Coal more than the Oil Barons since electricity generation was mostly powered by coal -- in 1980 70% of Britain's electricity generation was coal-powered and at that point all coal production was a nationalised industry under direct control of Parliament. All of us were King Coal and we did jack shit to reduce our dependence on the black diamonds in the cause of environmentalism. The best we did was to reduce smokestack sulphide emissions which were killing Scandinavian forests, a big thing at the time.
Re:Narnia, wonder how far back the laundry was aware of its existence? I remember Turing's slightly odd obsession with the queen from snow white-might be interesting to put him in a room with Jadis and see what happens. Also occurs to me that Narnia gives you infinite time to work on a specific problem provided you can carry the information back in short term memory (say the days rotor settings on an enigma machine)...
they doubled down on bad practices regardless, the proper question is "What the fuck were they thinking?"
Because shaved apes' brains seem to be wired to have a strong preference to keep doing what worked before rather than change to something new. Even if what worked before stops working. It seems we (people in general) are wired to think or have a very strong desire that the "stops working" will be temporary.
BOOK PUBLISHING HAS A TOYS ‘R’ US PROBLEM
Just noting that my current US publisher, Tor.com, is part of Macmillan, who are the English-language arm of Holtzbrinck, a German corporation that is a privately held family firm. So: small for a multinational publishing behemoth, but very unlikely to succumb to a hostile leveraged buy-out by PE.
(This is only one of several reasons I'm happy to be published by Tor.)
My UK publisher, Orbit, is part of Little, Brown book group, who are owned by the French corporation Hachette, who are part of Lagardère S.A., a limited partnership with shares who are very much on the radar of the EU competition regulators. Again, not really a candidate for a hostile takeover by American private equity!
So: small for a multinational publishing behemoth, but very unlikely to succumb to a hostile leveraged buy-out by PE.
Lots of differences but ...
In one week about a month ago I discovered a local data center and fiber company that some clients use got a big dose (or bought out) by PE. Owner was around 50, maybe more, and could no longer self finance the needed expansion to keep going. Or wanted to cut back from working 50 to 70 hours per week.
And then a few days later I found out my optometrist sold out their practice to PE. Both of them are over 65 and could not find younger folks to take over. The younger folks seem prefer being an employee vs a small business owner. Friday at 5pm they go home and let the PE firm deal with the clogged toilet.
What does PE stand for? Private Equity?
"Arrhenius back in the late 19th century showed how CO2 in the atmosphere trapped solar heat energy, it was not secret knowledge"
Effectively, it was, though. It's a common assertion that since Arrhenius got that result in the 19th century, everything people did throughout the whole of the 20th century was necessarily an act of charging straight into the brick wall with your eyes wide open, but that deduction doesn't match up with what people actually were thinking.
What people in general were worrying about at the beginning of the 20th century was wtf are we going to do when it runs out. American oilfields were already diminishing in production, and nobody suspected how huge the ones in the Middle East really were - all that was known at the time was this one place where there were tar seeps. When it was discovered how much there actually was there, that one faded out.
The next relevant popular concern was that we were probably about due for the next ice age; maybe "about" meant a few thousand years, but nobody could be sure it didn't mean next week. So we got The Next Glaciation as a fairly common theme in SF, easily justifiable for suspension of disbelief merely by assuming they'd got the time wrong; we did not get Venerian Earth, except as a notably uncommon theme that had a bit of a struggle to explain how its setting arose if it didn't rely on the sun going wonky on us. The imminent ice age was even taught in schools. CO2 didn't come into it aside from a passing mention that if we were lucky it might be enough to stop the ice age happening, or the occasional fictional extreme idea of burning everything possible to reverse one that had already started.
After that we had the revival of the oh-shit-we're-all-gonna-get-nuked idea, and to emphasise how big an oh-shit it could be, we got Nuclear Winter.
It wasn't until that one had passed that Global Warming started to get popular. Slowly. It wouldn't have stood a chance any earlier, because people would just have laughed at it (even more than they did anyway).
Private Equity?
Yes.
Very similar to Venture Capital but not quite. More of a smaller private thing. In many conversations PE and VC are interchangeable.
Small business owner. That's someone who works how many hours a week? And I, who have never wanted to own a business, know that at least in the US, two-thirds of all small businesses fail in the first year.
Ian Mackenzie
Already been done - it was called: _ "Watney's"
H @ 272
conclusion - to continue improving things ...
KILL *all of the Taliban, yes?
Nojay
"No nukes" is bollocks, as we all know - Nuclear Power is expensive, but Carbon-based power or, worse, NO POWER - is even more expensive ... oops.
It's a common assertion that since Arrhenius got that result in the 19th century, everything people did throughout the whole of the 20th century was necessarily an act of charging straight into the brick wall with your eyes wide open, but that deduction doesn't match up with what people actually were thinking.
If someone has the right access, it would be interesting to see just how much news coverage was given to the various issues (both 'above the fold' and in general). I've looked at papers from, for example, the start of WWII, and they still have a lot of 'news' that historically is total trivia, but was clearly in peoples' minds back then.
And even being in the news doesn't always make a difference. I've seen the newspaper story on Canada's residential schools, published while children were dying in them in the nation's capital, and yet there was no widespread (or even narrowspread) movement to fix things. As far as I can tell, people looked at it, shrugged and said "that doesn't concern us", and went on with their lives.
I'm less inclined to give Exxon executives a pass, because they had clear reports from their own scientists, and chose to hide and obfuscate the evidence to protect the bottom line. As executives are the best and brightest men (obviously, which is why they are so handsomely rewarded) they have no excuse.
Hello! Sorry, I'm late to the party.
I'm a new fan (started the series around Christmas and finished a couple of months ago) and just wanted to add my 2 cents to the original question of: So: your starter question is, who (and what) in the Laundry Files do you want to learn the fate of? And what unanswered questions still nag at you, n books later?
For me, I really, really hope the last book includes more on what other Eaters/Hungry Ghosts are like. Are they really the same as Bob or is he different in some way?
I'd also most definitely like to see more of the foreign agencies entities, namely Nikolai Panin and the Japanese agents from Escape from Yokai Land, particularly the young lady Bob worked with and the old man he had lunch with.
Other than that the main unanswered question that's stuck with me is, Who or What was "Agent Green" of the Nazgul? Anyone who knew the SA 'last century' and apparently survived betraying his oath of office is one interesting dude.
Other Side Characters I'd like to know the fate of in no particular order:
That you so much for writing the last laundry book, even though you're bored with it. The humor throughout the entire series is fantastic and I can't wait to see where you take it next. And now back to your regularly scheduled programing...
"I'm less inclined to give Exxon executives a pass, because they had clear reports from their own scientists, and chose to hide and obfuscate the evidence to protect the bottom line."
And that is a real difference. Other people could look at things, say "Well, that's really bad, but there's not much I can do about it, so I'll shrug, and save my efforts, such as they are, for things where I can make a difference," and be reasonably sincere about it.
The Exxon executives could see what the right thing to do was, knew that they could do it, and chose to do the wrong thing instead.
JHomes
Birdbrain@284, It was pretty clear to me in The Delirium Brief that Zero was killed while waiting in 'Seph's car during the showdown at Nether Stowe House. Mo has been informed that Zero wasn't responding to hails ("Zero is round the back but not responding," p. 347), and she goes to the courtyard carpark to find him. From pp. 363-4: She "casts around for Persephone's Bentley. There it is, at one end, windscreen a silvery sheen in the night.... The sheen on the windscreen doesn't shift as she walks forward, it's as if it's part of the windscreen, not a reflection, and there's a black dot at its heart.... She can see the hole in the centre of the cracked windscreen laminate now. She can't see beyond the crazing, can't tell if Zero's dead body sprawls behind the wheel or if he somehow got away, but the driver's door is closed so the odds are looking bad."
know that at least in the US, two-thirds of all small businesses fail in the first year.
Not arguing your number but I think maybe you're thinking of restaurants. But anyway...
My optometrist was a 30+ year old firm with a solid client base, great location, office setup, etc... Not a brand new businesses.
My fantastic dentist of 25 years ran into this about 5 years ago. He managed to find a younger guy to buy out his practice. And the new guy is also fantastic.[1] One measure of his success is all of the half dozen staff stayed on and so did most of his regular patients. That's hard in a business that small.
[1] To get me to call a dentist "fantastic" is hard as I grew up going to a family friend of my parents who I think studied at the Marquis de Sade school of dentistry.
I really, really hope the last book includes more on what other Eaters/Hungry Ghosts are like. Are they really the same as Bob or is he different in some way?
That is, sadly, entirely outside the remit of the book I'm speccing out. (I need to tie up loose ends, not add to them.)
Who or What was "Agent Green" of the Nazgul?
Remind me again which book they showed up in?
"Who or What was "Agent Green" of the Nazgul?
Remind me again which book they showed up in?"
Officer Green shows up in The Apocalypse Codex when Angleton and the SA have a virtual meeting with the Nazgul. He appears to be a former Laundry operative who defected to the Nazgul, and suffered dire consequences thereby.
JHomes.
From Charlie's comments under the Laundry Files reading order list (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/laundry-reading-order.html), "Pimpf" isn't totally canon. I guess whether PFY exists in the main Laundry sequence is up to Charlie; but since he didn't display high competence, he'd likely be one of the people shuffled safely off to somewhere he couldn't be a danger to himself or others.
"Agent Green" is of no significance in the greater scheme of things (in the Laundryverse).
If you're looking to the real world for inspiration on the next Laundry Files book (or a New Management book) look no further than the whole Hunter Biden business. It's a really whacky tale of the son of an experienced politician going down the tubes in a really horrible way, maybe even falling for a classic honeytrap. (Not sure about that last, but someone got the Biden-haters his dick pics.) And of course there's the way his laptop was hacked, and there's lots of drugs and sex. The whole thing is so ripe for satire and commentary I can't think of any real-world rabbit-hole you could more profitably dive down! Of course you'd have to move the whole thing to the UK and make up some non-Biden people, but that's easy.
so... recycling?
or some well intentioned fool who expects in midst of an overturned reality someone is seriously seeking out ways to recycle castoffs from spells? hi jinxes ensue as bodies pile up because the toxic byproducts of magic resist being recycled
and on a vaguely related note, a minor step towards a slightly better world...
https://rewiperblades.com/
"Stop wasting. Start refilling. Save money and reduce waste with our premium reWiper Blades that let you easily replace the rubber."
Possibly I'm a bit of a dim bulb but...
1) What has protected Mo and why was she allowed to survive?
2) What is the arc of the Senior Auditor and what is he up to?
3) Why should any of these former-humans want to remain alive? They have been captured by monsters in a world about to be devoured by worse monsters. Death would seem to be a blessing.
Please, no. That's nothing more than a dead cat on the table. Already published in mainstream media is that there is zero chain of custody, that it has been modifed numerous times.
And, of course, he's accused by the Trump Crime Family (formerly known as the GOP) of having made couch change - $5M - frmo selling access to his father (never mind Jared Kushner's two billlion dollars from the Saudis).
Sorry, is this supposed to be brand new, replacing the blades? That's what I, and many others did for decades, until they started making it hard to find just the blades, since selling the whole wiper makes them more money.
Of course you'd have to move the whole thing to the UK and make up some non-Biden people, but that's easy.
That kind of political ratfuckery wouldn't work in the UK: if it did, the Tories would have gone after Piers Corbyn in a shot. (We have our own distinct culture of going after party enemies -- and that ain't it.) The nearest example I can think of is Baroness Mone and the early COVID PPE contracts her family office got via her lobbying, and that's being tackled by the police -- political committees don't handle that sort of thing here.
*1) What has protected Mo and why was she allowed to survive?
2) What is the arc of the Senior Auditor and what is he up to?
3) Why should any of these former-humans want to remain alive?*
For (1), that's to be determined (it's definitely part of the next book, though).
For (2), that's a big part of the plot of the next book.
For (3), why don't you kill yourself now? After all, the rest of your life is entirely downhill from today! (Your short version is: people almost always try to keep going however bad circumstances become. We've got more than three billion years of evolution telling us to.)
3) Why should any of these former-humans want to remain alive? They have been captured by monsters in a world about to be devoured by worse monsters. Death would seem to be a blessing.
Obviously I’m not Charlie, but I don’t have any plot to keep hidden, so here’s my take. A lot of this rests on the Fuller Memorandum.
One big take is that humans have souls that can be separated from their bodies (unless they are mindstreams rather than unitary souls, which would work better, if that was important to Charlie…/dismount hobby horse). Problem is, Laundryverse souls can be corrupted or eaten, so freeing a soul from their body isn’t necessarily a good thing and certainly isn’t a guarantee of safety.
Another big take is that other worlds may have it worse than does LaundryEarth. The Nazi world of the first story and Alfarheim are both being destroyed horribly. It’s even brought up in the Fuller Memorandum that the monsters might be working with the Laundry because they think it’s their best chance for survival. In another book, Nyarlothotep compliments Cthulhu on their actions against the ice giants, whatever those are (hopefully OGH will replace COVID with another ice giant incursion that forces the monsters and superheroes into alliance, but…./dismount hobby horse).
So anyway, the Laundryverse has a strong strain of nihilistic Norse-type mythology in it, with ragnarok and mortal souls and heroic, horrific violence. It may well be that in this mutiversal cesspit, the Laundry is a floating hunk of feces that is a life raft for the vermin, and one that beats drowning.*
That’s just my personal take.
*For me, a happy ending would be the realization that worlds with low numbers of hominids are impervious to CASE NIGHTMARE anything, due to an observer and soul deficit. If so, there may be an infinity of arcadian worlds in the Laundryverse that are safe from monsters, simply because they never made the fatal mistake of developing civilizations.
300 comment rule:
Capitalism 101 - Capitalism is no fun unless you can crush workers under your heel
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proposed names for a tavern... bad answers only... I'll start
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Administrative note
The rule of 300 comments is suspended. At least for this discussion of Laundryverse loose threads (which may run on for some weeks).
I should really go back and delete all the crap about tavern names and steam traction, but I'm on holiday and can't be bothered right now.
I'm quite aware of the fuckery with Hunter, thanks. His 'crime' isn't being guilty of anything, it's making himself vulnerable to the accusation in such a fundamentally stupid fashion.
okay... right there in this snippet is how to wildly expand the Laundryverse in all directions:
"...monsters might be working with the Laundry because they think it’s their best chance for survival..."
how about telling tales from POV of one of each possible breed-species-cluster of monsters?
beginning with those creatures mislabeled amidst the collected tales of the Brothers Grimm... Rumplestiltskin comes to mind... he gets in the deep shit after UK's Inland Revenue get words from US's IRS he's slipped his leash and gone back to counterfeiting gold coins... and one of those low ranking amongst the surviving agents of the Laundry has to track him and cuff him and ship him back to Fort Knox for reasons
From pp. 363-4: ... She can't see beyond the crazing, can't tell if Zero's dead body sprawls behind the wheel or if he somehow got away, but the driver's door is closed so the odds are looking bad."
Exactly. There's no body so he might have got away (with or without need for medical attention). And we all know Persephone's crew is top notch. I agree it isn't looking good for him, though.
“The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
--John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder
so... how does censorship work in a realm where everyone can magic up a route between two points without touching the distance?
secrecy is lacking if everyone can construct an all seeing unblinking eye...
The only monster I’d really like to see Charlie tackle in some setting is a clurachan. That’s one that sadly isn’t often done.
Anyway….
If we’re talking about gratuitous wish fulfillment and magical children, I’d like to see a New Management version of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.. Puzzling out The Great Game of Gods would be interesting. Guess we’ve got to buy a lot of Narnia timeshares first.
Peter-Fred is also in Fuller Memorandum - Way at the beginning (pg 6 on my copy) when Bob is trying to get out of going to the RAF hanger he asks if Peter-Fred can't do it, describing him as the office junior. Then again later on, not sure what page, but according to my notes Iris gives him a cabling job Bob didn't have time for.
I really, really hope the last book includes more on what other Eaters/Hungry Ghosts are like. Are they really the same as Bob or is he different in some way?
That is, sadly, entirely outside the remit of the book I'm speccing out. (I need to tie up loose ends, not add to them.)
Ah, I had hoped it would tie-in with Bob's internal struggle with his humanity somehow, if only tangentially; particularly with the tidbit about foreign intelligence agents in the intro to this thread (since they'd be in a position to know).
Anyway, Thanks and have a great Trip!
okay... right there in this snippet is how to wildly expand the Laundryverse in all directions:
Reminder that I'm asking for threads in need of tying off, not new stuff to explore!
I think this scene was in The Delirium Brief, I'm doing this from memory.
The Senior Auditor goes to see Persephone Hazard. He realises that she's depressed at how things have gone now that His Dread Majesty has manifested themselves. They go up to the attic and the SA gets Persephone to cast her privacy spell. He then says, "We have a plan..."
What was the plan?
What was the plan?
The plan is also hinted at by Mhari in The Labyrinth Index; it's the main plot armature of the next book (which I'm gathering threats for here).
Charlie Stross 310 & 312:
uhm... fanfic? lots of minor characters worthy of their own opportunity as centerpoint of a short story at least... for me if my skillz were sufficient I'd tell the life story of Spooky the Cat... Pinky & Brains meet-cute (meet-horror?)
heck Rosencrantz & Guildenstern got their own feature length movie! (though predictably it did not end well for 'em)
"which I'm gathering threats for here"
while I'm sure you meant "threads" given the high body count within the Laundryverse, this alternative wording is viable as well... tying off plotlines should include what happens to the buildings since locations so soaked in magic very likely take on a life of their own... there's that shared domicile Pinky-Brains-Bob-Dom all co-habited... likely now qualifies as a toxic waste hazard... telling its story from that first brick to last wrecking ball and de-contamination would either be a slog or it could become a novel of its own (if ever you opened up to letting others play in your sandbox)
There's no body so he might have got away...
If he's dead with a bullet hole through his head and he got away, there will be paperwork!
... it's the main plot armature of the next book (which I'm gathering threats for here).
That is a wonderful typo and can be kept just as it is. :-)
If you ever authorize a book of "Stories from the Laundryverse" I definitely want to play!
In I think The Apocalypse Codex Bob looks up from the Pyramid and sees structures in space. Is this because of a similar plan as the OPA's in The Labyrinth Index or have multiversal humans achieved advanced spaceflight before getting possessed/eaten/whatever?
"The Great Game of the Gods" led me to thinking.... Theologically speaking, if Cthulhu Rises, the world is literally toast. Presumably that's true for some of the other gods.
So... what's the New Management long term plan, that is, longer than until the world is devoured by Galacticus, er, Cthulhu (and that is presumably not far in the future in human turms)?
A thread I have thought about is the feedback loop/'ecological niche' of the Elder Gods now that they are manifesting on Earth.
My rough understanding is that the collective brain and computational capacity of Earth expanded such that it became attractive to the various BBEGs that are currently taking over. At some point a critical threshold was passed that resulted in their manifestation.
However, like rats in a granary, they are compelled to do what they do. In the case of the various BBEGs that means large scale death for the humans and a corresponding collapse in computational capacity as well. Which means that the food supply/reason for being there drops precipitously once they have arrived. Before long they are starving, fighting each other (and further collapsing their supply of computation power).
It really wouldn't take a very long invasion of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN for the collective global brain capacity to collapse via gigadeaths.
I gather from DLD and SOS that The Mandate also thrives on a supply of industrial strength misery. Again, there is a finite amount of misery available from currently extant humanity. Humans also have an astounding capacity to adapt and not be miserable in the most horrific of circumstances (see: much of human history/gallows humor).
Are the Elder Gods going to splash around, kill the majority of their 'food' supply, devastate the rest, and then starve themselves out of the place? Am I projecting too much of what humans do to places they arrive?
new! in stores for CHRISTMAS!
Great Game of the Gods™: Home Edition
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Well definitely one thread to close is Vicar Pate's arc. There are at least 3 things in that, all of which had some airing in previous books. The least is how Pete (and Sandy) functioned as Bob and Mo's anchors in normality and the effect of Pete's successive changes on their relationship (assuming either of the things they have become still care). The second is Pete's new transhumanity and its effect on his relationship with Sandy and kids. The third is Pete's own perspective, moral philosophy and theology as a sort of fulcrum, the point the moral agency of the story turns itself around: possibly because Pete's the only moral agent left at this stage who isn't effectively a nihilist. Or maybe that's putting more weight on Pete than he can carry, though re-reading TRC says he has pretty broad shoulders (figuratively, not literally).
That's all with the assumed given that the final book is mostly about the SA. How many volumes is it again?
To OGH and my fellow MOTTs: "Shana Tova" or as they say in Santa Cruz: "Shiny Tofu".
Keith Halperin
Keith Halperin 323:
oh, that time of year is it?
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A thread I have thought about is the feedback loop/'ecological niche' of the Elder Gods now that they are manifesting on Earth.
And down the quantum-superposing rabbit holes we go! None, one, some, or all of the following may be partially or completely true. We'll know if the book gets written and we can collapse the quantum rabbit hole into a final story.
Anyway, the Laundryverse runs on Rule of Cool physics, so that gates go across timelines (Nazi Fimbulwinter world), and FTL across spacetime (Pyramid Sleeper's world). Ghost roads allow people to go back in time but are grown out of narrativium, and so forth. So anything is possible, except what OGH rules is impossible.
-If gods used to be civilized humans who hacked themselves into ascending to godhood, Orion's Arm style, then most likely they have human scale planning horizons, even if they've lived for centuries. If this is the case, most worlds infested by gods are fscked, because civilians have forgotten how to do the kind of long term planning that everyone from coppicers to aborigines learn the hard way.
If they have longer planning horizons, either because they're sufficiently old/inhuman, or are time travelers protecting their personal history, then the world might be safer, because they'd rather use humans as domestic animals than as a resource to burn through and go on.
They may be running a scam, where they burn through a world slightly more slowly than new worlds enter CASE NIGHTMAREs, so they always have a place to hit next. This runs into problems if they're going across worldlines among similar alt-Earths. If most Earths flower into civilization and huge populations simultaneously, there may be a glut of god-supporting worlds to pillage now, but few, if any, worlds to move to once the pillaging is complete. The strategy in the first sentence is known as metapopulation dynamics. It can work, but it falls apart badly if there's no place for a population to go next when their current patch no longer supports them. So it's not that suitable a strategy for long-term support of immortals.
Could gods burn through the galaxy instead of/as well as alternate timelines? Of course! If a galactic metacivilization can take ca. 100 million years or more to circle around the galaxy and come back to its home planet, well, 100 million years of sitting fallow will allow the planet to recover from the insults of a past civilization. This only works if the gods are after natural resources, instead of sapient souls, to munch. I'd imagine that CASE NIGHTMARE-class planets are rather more scarce than life-bearing planets?
My guess is that gods vary in how they treat planets. So you may want to ally with a god that operates in the very long term, if existence is something you prefer to non-existence. Others want to munch the place and are little more than superpowered cancers.
There's probably a lot more I could say, but I won't. As should be obvious, this is a problem I've been chewing on for a long time. I do have my own proprietary HPL-derived cosmic system, but all I'll say is that it's weird, not horrific, and is only peripherally connected to anything I just wrote. Hope I get to write a story in it someday. Sadly, life keeps getting in the way.
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Doesn't some of that depend on the recovery/cycle time? If you can leave a planet/star fallow for a couple of million years then come back and do it again that means you only need a couple of thousand of them. But if you have to wait for a new star to grow life you can't afford to burn them anywhere near that fast.
Although there's enough fun stuff happening in the astrodreaming community at the moment that I half expect to wake up to "ooops, turns out dark matter is really space whales" or something. Between the MOND+quantum gravity problem and the crisis in cosmology stuff it really feels as though someone is about to point out that H=ψΔπ/γn³c and why have none of you noticed that before?
(equation made up by mashing greek letters)
a hundred million year fallow means that a kilometer or two of rock will have eroded, so ore deposits that were previously inaccessible might be available. Oil and coal need a minimum of ca. 50 million years, so double that to get better-quality coal and more oil. 300-400 million years would be even better.
This, incidentally, is me crudely modeling how an interstellar empire could work. It could last for a very long time as a propagation front sweeping around the galaxy so that planets were recolonized only every 50-100 millions or more, even if they only colonize any one planet for a few centuries before abandoning it to the MAGAts to break things down. Ahem. This model won't work for Laundryverse gods, if they need planets with billions and billions of human-scale intelligences to parasitize, but it might work for Ghost Engines.
Anyway, my astrodream currently has a Holy Trinity of General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Randomness, and they are GUTless wonders. Any similarity between these three and HPL's troika of Outer Gods is coincidental. Probably.
uhm... fanfic?
You're welcome to write fanfic and post it for free in the usual places online such as AO3; just don't try and turn a profit off my work without obtaining my permission for commercial use first (and be prepared for me to say "no" if I don't like what you say you want to do with it).
Received wisdom in publishing is "short story collections don't sell" -- that is, they sell fewer copies than novels. That's why the Laundry short story collection I've been pushing for can't be published until after the Last Laundry Files Novel. (My publishers don't want to risk causing a dip in the sales track, thereby reducing boostore/wholesaler pre-orders of the next title after that, triggering a series death spiral.)
("The New Management" can plausibly continue as a series title after "The Laundry Files" is ended, so would be unaffected by this.)
If you look at other long-running serials you'll notice that the short story collection very rarely happens until the main series is finished. You have to be very big indeed to dodge that bullet. (Notable examples: Harry Dresden.)
Shared universe series are usually even worse -- they almost never sell as well as a collection by the original author, unless they're set up as a shared universe from the very beginning and launch with a bunch of star authors.
Bob looks up from the Pyramid and sees structures in space
I have no idea -- that's something I may have to revisit at some point! Thanks, I think I hate you (it's becoming increasingly apparent that I need to re-read The Fuller Memorandum and The Apocalypse Codex with a notes file open).
The Black Pharaoh's plan is obviously "find another world to migrate to at that point".
The bees' opinion doesn't count.
Sucks to be human!
Are the Elder Gods going to splash around, kill the majority of their 'food' supply, devastate the rest, and then starve themselves out of the place? Am I projecting too much of what humans do to places they arrive?
The Elder Gods are migratory. Think in terms of a herd of wild bovines moving into a (unenclosed) new pasture. If it gets overgrazed they can just move on.
*Well definitely one thread to close is Vicar Pate's arc. There are at least 3 things in that ...
That's all with the assumed given that the final book is mostly about the SA. How many volumes is it again?*
Good point. Pete's apotheosis (that's probably the wrong term, but I hate "fall") is probably sufficient for an entire novella on its own, but I'm not sure it's one I could write well.
My current thinking is that Pete is likely to adapt to his "new normal" until something goes badly wrong. After all, he didn't ask to become a PHANG; he's in the position of an unwilling hostage to a serial killer (his V-symbiont payload) who may be forced at gunpoint to participate in crimes. He can't suicide his way out of the dilemma (wife plus kids), but he can take steps to diminish it -- either make his feeding count for something because it's part of a government-ordered kill chain (still immoral, but not necessarily murder), or volunteer for increasingly hazardous missions in hope that his wife gets the widow's pension and his death counts for something.
Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)
Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)
Pete's the only PHANG who is likely to conceptualise his symbionts primarily via theology and philosophy of mind. I don't want to hand you another rabbit hole, but the Faust legends have a lot of variations, some of which might be helpful. Pete's an involuntary Faust, but if he can materially personify his symbionts in a Mephisto figure which can be engaged in dialogue (possibly related to the fact they are US government issue symbionts) then maybe he can talk that personification into becoming an anti-villain or something. There is also a Gretchen figure in the Faust stories that plays variable roles in terms of redemption (possibly including Faust's redemption), and that's sort of inverted a bit here too.
But like you say, it's a whole other story in itself and might not be something you wanted to do. But pro-social, ecumenical Pete debating theology with a genuine "devil" could be a fun twist. Contrast with fire-and-brimstone preachers of old who in the Laundryverse might command some magical power in their own right due to reasons.
But pro-social, ecumenical Pete debating theology with a genuine "devil" could be a fun twist.
Yeah, but as a never-Christian, even one who grew up in a country with a historic Christian majority, I'm likely to get lots of it very wrong indeed (by misrepresentation, or misconceiving his internal state). So, not really a story for me. I find it easier to think myself into someone with different physical characteristics (sex, age, disability) than someone with a fundamentally different belief about the nature of reality, especially when the belief framework is as internally inconsistent as Christianity (which appears to contain multitudes of contradictory axioms).
»Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)«
Is Pete convinced about that ?
The Elder Gods are migratory. Think in terms of a herd of wild bovines moving into a (unenclosed) new pasture. If it gets overgrazed they can just move on.
Pasturelands have co-evolved with migratory bovines, in some cases needing the disturbance of many hooves (not to mention the dropping of many pats). I'm almost certainly pushing the analogy further than you intended, but I'm wondering if goats on a tropical island is a better fit? Or a plague of locusts?
This sound like a place where, if the series is successful-enough, that you'd take on another writer who's got some "been a Christian" experience* and wants to collaborate with you. You'd lay out the action/adventure side of the plot and let the other author do Pete's interior state plus actually turning the plot into text.
Alternately, maybe someone with "been a Christian" experience can suggest a book about an emotionally tortured Christian you can crib from (and this might be a lot less work.) The only one that comes to mind immediately is Crime and Punishment but I don't think it's exactly what you want.)
* Not suggesting myself, BTW, my religious experiences are very similar to yours.
He can't suicide his way out of the dilemma (wife plus kids)
Easy enough to write a situation where suicide is the only way to save his family. Parents sacrifice themselves for their families all the time. Or for total strangers, come to that — any number of family men have died trying to rescue total strangers.
volunteer for increasingly hazardous missions in hope that his wife gets the widow's pension
Is not getting the widow's pension for a suicide a British thing, or a New Management thing? Over here in the colonies, widows of suicided veterans still collect their pensions. Most life insurance policies also pay out for suicides, as long as they aren't new policies (I think it's usual that they have to be at least two years old).
Theologically, in the CoE suicide is no longer considered a sin (although assisting a suicide is). I think the presumption is that killing oneself is evidence that one is of unsound mind, which means one isn't responsible for one's actions. Of course, there are "traditionalists" who oppose this.
You could easily tie up the Pete thread by giving him a 'good' death (sacrificing himself to save someone else, say) without affecting the overarching plot. Whether it's worth the effort to write (and the page count in the book) is past my pay grade.
The Elder Gods are migratory. Think in terms of a herd of wild bovines moving into a (unenclosed) new pasture. If it gets overgrazed they can just move on.
Ummmm....
CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land (exoworlds). And if "the stars coming right" is a real thing (you've mentioned it repeatedly) and not just a riff on The Call of Cthulhu, then there's some cosmological pattern that must be fulfilled. That's an additional factor making CASE NIGHTMARE worlds even more rare.
And if the cosmos is involved, that strongly suggests that all parallel earths will reach CASE NIGHTMARE status at about the same time. So, rather than there being a steady stream of new worlds to conquer, there's a boom, then a bust.
Sorry to harp on this, but I'm still involved in an environmental lawsuit over a butterfly (the highly endangered Quino Checkerspot) that lives just the way you describe, in that it needs a fairly rare set of conditions to live for any length of time. Another local butterfly, the Hermes Copper, also follows this strategy even more closely. Unless something changes soon, it's going extinct.
Based on my experience, your bovine gods as described are as doomed as these little butterflies. Or, if you want another metaphor, they're as doomed as the new investors entering late in a financial bubble.
One way out of this issue is to posit that some gods understand the problem, while others do not. This sets up a struggle between the gods who want to try to farm humans indefinitely by maintaining something resembling civilization, and those who want to destroy the planet and move on. You've already got gods potentially representing both viewpwoints in the Laundryverse.
This might be supported by a notion that gods spontaneously arise as a world approaches CASE NIGHTMARE status: they start off as sorcerers bootstrapping themselves to godhood. They may survive the collapse of their host world by migrating, hibernating, or both. Or they may well not survive the collapse of their systems.
You might also consider the possibility that Mahogany Row prefers domestication to annihilation, and are working towards that outcome without consulting anyone else under the rubric of Continuity Ops.
Alternately, maybe someone with "been a Christian" experience can suggest a book about an emotionally tortured Christian you can crib from (and this might be a lot less work.)
'Salem's Lot?
There are some additional problems.
One is that, IIRC, the American vampires that turned Pete are under a different, and more controlling, version of the v-parasite. If so, Pete's under control of Cthulhu cultists and should be written off. Or he might be turned again as that Officer Friendly dude was.
Another is that, if the v-parasite destroys its host's soul and installs itself with no loss of continuity...Pete's got a problem. If he finds out, then he knows that his soul is already gone. Since destroying other souls is his only option to continue his current existence, he'll kill himself at the first opportunity. It's not suicide but protection of others, including his own family.
If that's not the way v-parasites work, then Pete might try to evangelize his parasite, if exorcism isn't an option. Hambly's Those Who Hunt The Night had a character like this.
I should point out that the idea that some parasites destroy souls and replace them without the person losing self-will, memory, or personality, is a real problem. What's a soul, if an eater eating a soul turns the human into a zombie (temporarily? Permanently?), but a v-parasite or a preta manger (or a yokai) turns a human to a monster but preserves their personality? What's a soul?
If the problem of Pete is to be solved, the road runs through making decisions about what a soul is in the Laundryverse. Is it memory, personality? Is it free will? Is it unitary and unchanging (Atman in Sanskrit) or is it eternally changing, with pieces being added and falling away (Anatman/mindstream, the Buddhist idea). Can a being have more than one soul in its body? If so, do the two souls meld or stay separate? Each of these leads to a different outcome for Pete.
Perhaps thinking about this in terms of operating system, rather than theology, will help. The ideas are similar, even if the terminology is different.
I have no idea -- that's something I may have to revisit at some point! Thanks, I think I hate you (it's becoming increasingly apparent that I need to re-read The Fuller Memorandum and The Apocalypse Codex with a notes file open).
I already looked. It's easy in the eBook, simply by searching for "Pyramid." What I found was you describing a planet with a thin atmosphere around a dying sun, apparently in a globular cluster. There were streamers of gas like thuggee's scarves in the sky, but no sign of anything definitely artificial.
Is not getting the widow's pension for a suicide a British thing, or a New Management thing?
It's not a thing at all, and I wasn't implying it might be.
You could easily tie up the Pete thread by giving him a 'good' death (sacrificing himself to save someone else, say) without affecting the overarching plot.
Yeah, but that feels like a cop-out.
Obligatory footnote: there are a couple of hard lines I won't cross in my fiction. They include anything that might push an unstable or impressionable reader towards serious criminal acts (eg. child abuse, assault) or suicide. Note that this isn't the same as depicting child abuse or suicide in fiction -- but potentially encouraging such acts is a hard nope. Which limits some of the things I can write, but not in a way that I miss.
I find it easier to think myself into someone with different physical characteristics (sex, age, disability) than someone with a fundamentally different belief about the nature of reality, especially when the belief framework is as internally inconsistent as Christianity (which appears to contain multitudes of contradictory axioms).
Think of Christianity as a marketing label at this point. It'll help make sense of the Prosperity Gospel. What Jesus was preaching was basically activist, nonviolent Judaism, and it's really hard to live that way, as he found out.
I've been trying to give you prompts in various posts, because alt-religion is something I do for fun. Feel free to use them.
I'd strongly suggest thinking about it in terms of operating systems and programming, not in terms of axioms about reality. When you take the grifting out of mysticism, it's basically people trying to hack themselves to heal problems that would drive them to hacking themselves. And that's a programming problem: set goals, assess current status, and figure out how to progress towards the goals. Problem is, humans have to be retrained, not reprogrammed, and that's what mysticism tries to do.
Anyway, the Laundryverse runs like a virtual system, so humans are entities within that system, and souls are some part of those entities. Figure out what part(s) of the entity bears the label "soul", figure out what types of modifications can be made to those parts, and then bug people like me about help you figure out how to translate it into suitable theology, metaphor, etc. I don't mind helping.
This might be supported by a notion that gods spontaneously arise as a world approaches CASE NIGHTMARE status: they start off as sorcerers bootstrapping themselves to godhood.
This is already thoroughly explored in Season of Skulls and (next year's) A Conventional Boy.
It's out of scope for TLLF.
There were streamers of gas like thuggee's scarves in the sky, but no sign of anything definitely artificial.
Oh, that's possibly an indicator that it's orbiting or close to a Wolf-Rayet star. (Can't remember what I intended when I wrote it other than "stellar superwind = star is in a bad way, nearing end of its Main Sequence life".)
In which case, maybe the Sleeper has located its sarcophagus on this planet because it intends to use the impending supernova to power some unimaginably high energy process? And of course back in the 1920s nobody in the Laundry had any inkling about the life cycle of Wolf-Rayet stars ...
And Bob (and the gang) not being astrophysicists are in for a nasty shock at some point in the next million years!
Fair enough. To me it's scene-setting, not plot.
Anyway, I realized that I probably should add a partial attribute list for what might be in the entity called a soul in the Laundryverse. These are things theologians, mystics, and others have considered to be soul in a bunch of religions.
The point is not to consider them philosophically, but as story-telling tools. If a Laundryverse soul has an attribute, and that soul gets eaten and/or replaced, what does that do to the character? Remember, a soul can have one, some, or most of the attributes on this list.
-Personality: it's what makes the character the character. If you put Alice's soui in Bob's body, Bob becomes Alice
-Free will. Without a soul, you're a zombie under the control of another.
-Life. Without a soul, you're dead. This is akin to the Old Testament "the blood is the life."
--Movement. Only beings with souls can move under their own power. Traditional Buddhists believe plants are not alive, because they do not move. So it's okay to eat them, but not animals, which move and therefore share Buddha Nature.
-Observation. The soul is the you that sees through your eyes, hears through your ears, etc. In quantum-woo, the soul is the Observer that makes quantum mechanics work. In pantheism, Buddhism, and Taoism, every souled being is the Observer, aka God, Buddha Nature, or the Tao.
--God. Modern mystical Christianity kind of goes with this in the idea that your soul is that bit of Holy Spirit inside you. This shows up elsewhere.
--Eternal. Your soul is the one immortal part of you, which is why damnation is such a threat and heaven is such a reward.
--Unchanging. Your soul is your unchanging "essential nature."
--Ever-changing. Your soul is an ever-changing stream that maintains the continuity of "you." This is coupled with the notion that any sense of you having an essential nature is an illusion. This is central to Buddhism. Taoism has something even more complex, where "you" have a bunch of often conflicting souls, and the Great Work is turning them into a single team, Avengers style.
-Reincarnating. Your soul is what reincarnates.
-Karma. Your soul is the part of you that bears your karma, possibly across lives.
Again this is about storytelling, not axioms of reality. Use whatever attributes help to tell the story, and feel free to ask for help putting them to use.
Anyway, I realized that I probably should add a partial attribute list for what might be in the entity called a soul in the Laundryverse.
Actually, right back in the beginning (circa 1998-99, when I was writing The Atrocity Archive) my big what-if concepts were (a) what if magic is a branch of mathematics, and (b) what if we take Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness hypothesis (The Emperor's New Mind et al) seriously?
Penrose was invoking an as-yet-undiscovered attribute of the intersection between quantum mechanics and gravitation to give the nervous system quasi-mystical attributes that can't be explained by existing physics/chemistry -- he's an instinctive dualist, but not a religious one -- but it looked to me that if you took his quantum-woo theory of consciousness seriously, including the physically real existence of the platonic realm of mathematics, then magic was a not-unreasonable side-effect.
So I should probably re-read as much Penrose as my brain can handle (about five pages, I guess) and riff on that. For added fun, if I need to quantify souls I can invent a whole new terminology!
There you go! Check off the Observer attribute and figure out if anything else matters.
You might also find Goswami's The Self Aware Universe useful. It's not a big or complex book. ( https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Creates-Material/dp/0874777984/ )
One further question: Copenhagen Interpretation, Many Worlds, or both, so far as how observation changes reality?
Laundryverse is a Many Worlds cosmology (the whole premise from the very first story onwards posits alternate universes, some of them very alien).
(b) what if we take Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness hypothesis (The Emperor's New Mind et al) seriously?
While I admire Penrose enormously, I have issues with his quantum consciousness hypothesis. Specifically, I think that the biological realm tries to eliminate quantum effects when processing data, including neuron firings.
There is a reason neuron to neuron communication is done via chemical pathways, at the synapses. This is because we don't want quantum fuzziness messing up the signals.
Quantum effects act on individual particle interactions. When it requires hundreds (if not thousands) of chemical interactions, the quantum effects are zeroed out. The brain is - amongst many other things - a noise reduction mechanism.
While I admire Penrose enormously, I have issues with his quantum consciousness hypothesis.
Me too! It's a masterfully constructed bridge to nowhere that posits a huge jenga pile of hypotheses in order to willfully deny any possibility of materialism.
But when we write SF we're having fun playing with ideas. It's totally fine to ask "what if the Earth ia flat", or "what if consciousness is a weird emergent property of quantum gravitational interactions between complex peptides", even if we're pretty sure these are untrue.
Catching up with comments tickled my rereading-refreshed memory. So, a snippet:
The Apocalypse Codex, tpb, page 234 -Alien constellations sparkle pitilessly against a backdrop of whirls and wisps of blue and green gas, the decaying tissues of a stellar corpse hidden from view by the horizon. Closer, a dusting of silvery specks flicker and flare as they drift across the vault of the sky - the skeletal remains of vast orbital factories, although Schiller is unaware of this.
[...]
And he would be able to see the moons, orbiting low and fast, which are blocked from his gaze by the walls.
(Probably not germane to TLLF, but) I've always wondered what the factories were for...
(Probably not germane to TLLF, but) I've always wondered what the factories were for...
There was a powerpoint about precisely that sort of thing in The Labyrinth Index! (Botched indentation in typesetting, though, might not have been clear.)
Not got that far again yet (currently halfwayish through The Annihilation Score.).
Something to do with a long term plan of turning most/all planetary bodies in to a Matrioshka brain? Which would need factories to build the tools to deconstruct said bodies...
I'll certainly keep an eye out.
Yup; the Black Chamber regime in The Labyrinth Index was trying to get the entire US space industry involved in attempting to dismantle the Moon, as first step towards building a small solar-powered Dyson swarm in order to run a Cthulhu summoning application. (They were planning long term, but in the short term: divert the entirety of US defense spending into a Moonshot then put the USA on a war economy and ramp up from there. A space budget on the order of $1-10Tn/year -- supported by mass human sacrifice and necromancy -- is going to get stuff done, eventually.)
Laundryverse is a Many Worlds cosmology (the whole premise from the very first story onwards posits alternate universes, some of them very alien).
Hmmm. Actually, I think you've got both Many Worlds and Copenhagen. We haven't seen an Anathem-style multiple-narratives-collapsing-together sequence, but we do have multiple worlds. We also have gorgons and other observer-mediated effects...
"The sleepers are quantum observers, eyeless and dead but still alive, condemned to collapse the wave function of the thing in the mile-high tomb so that it is forever asleep"
Perhaps it's the Rule of Cool Interpretation, and my puny ape brain simply can't handle The Truth?
Since you've got animate zombies and skeletons, you might consider a system where a soul is a quantum observer, while mana is animating life energy that makes bodies move. You could link the two into an animating, observing soul, but I suspect that might get you into trouble. You've got zombies who walk (mana, no soul) dead gods who can revive, which suggests that souls can survive without mana.
Observers can consume each other, presumably thereby increasing their observer fu (Juju? Penrosity?).
There's still a potential problem with the sleepers above: they're observers (with souls?) but they're dead and still bound, which means that souls can be controlled without being destroyed (geas?). And they later animate (with mana from somewhere?) Is that correct?
Charlie Stross @ 334:
My current thinking is that Pete is likely to adapt to his "new normal" until something goes badly wrong. After all, he didn't ask to become a PHANG; he's in the position of an unwilling hostage to a serial killer (his V-symbiont payload) who may be forced at gunpoint to participate in crimes. He can't suicide his way out of the dilemma (wife plus kids), but he can take steps to diminish it -- either make his feeding count for something because it's part of a government-ordered kill chain (still immoral, but not necessarily murder), or volunteer for increasingly hazardous missions in hope that his wife gets the widow's pension and his death counts for something.
Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)
IF NIGHTMARE GREEN comes to an end because the Elder Gods move on to greener pastures and the magic goes away again, what happens to PHANGS & residual human resources & hosts for "Eaters of Souls" (or Eaters of Soles for that matter ...)?
Might exorcism become feasible under those circumstances? ... assuming any of the hosts have managed to survive?
I'm presuming that if the stars coming into alignment allows NIGHTMARE GREEN, the stars would continue in their courses and at some point go out of alignment again.
I'm not sure that "sacrificing oneself to save someone else" need necessarily conflict with your self-imposed guidelines. It's usually an act of high courage, and most fictional depictions of it I've read naturally tackle it in a manner that seems to me quite the opposite of anything that could be taken as an incitation to suicide.
I agree about it being a cop-out, though.
I really like the idea of Pete evangelising his V-parasites, but it almost certainly has the same difficulty of you lacking the background to do it properly, and FWIW I reckon your simple response of "so I won't do it" is optimal for these cases.
Here's another possibility. During WW2 in the US, a group of conscientious objectors served by being the test subjects for a starvation study. The military knew about the German death camps, and wanted better science on what the victims were going through and how to treat them effectively. For years it was the major work on stsarvation, IIRC.
Vicar Pete could volunteer to become the subject for similar research on what happens when PHANGs starve, and/or experiments to remove the parasite. The consequences...?
=+=+=+=
Charlie Stross 349: quantify souls
uhm... "21 grams" (I'll see myself out, no need to get up)
=+=+=+=
accidentalist 354:
factories in need of massive power orbiting where matter 'n energy are switching back and forth... so... micro singularities as star eating weapons? anti-matter for starships? neutronium for really densely etched CPU/RAM?
my bet is on femto-scaled microcircuitry (femtocircuitry?) with added bonus it'll be able to endure overclocking without melting... each RAM chip, less than a millimeter in width/length, albeit weighing kilotons, could store 10^40 bits... as to CPU's hertz... ugh... oh-shit-really-scary-fast... 10^12? 10^15!?
can a CPU be a quantum observer? and thus collapse wave functions at a rate of its hertz and/or scale below nano possibly femto levels of reality? WTF, why not intend to methodically go about rewriting reality, one cluster of quarks at a time...?
=+=+=+=
Heteromeles 341:
in the aftermath of a planet-wide collapse, sure to be scavengers... deliberately adaptive sentient moving ob from one or another prior (gutted) planets... indeed a whole ecology intentionally built upon the premise of them picking through the trash left behind by Elder Gods and stripping the usable bits of magic from mangled husks of mages who failed in efforts to bootstrap themselves to godhood... after there's a cattle drive moving live meat to the slaughterhouse there will be a bunch of very happy dung beetles following in their wake... and what of the blood splattered at the slaughterhouse? flies and bacteria abound...
so... in the ruins there are scavengers... if humanity is lucky they'll be willing to offer some tips on how to 'build back better'?
=+=+=+=
IF NIGHTMARE GREEN comes to an end
It doesn't come to an end. At least, not in less than multiple centuries -- it's like anthropogenic climate change in that respect. The best our protagonists can home for is that it stops intensifying within their own lifetimes: they still have to live with the resulting instability.
Just to round the circle (or square the square, or something), it isn't that Pete's widow won't get a pension if Pete kills himself, it's that Pete might have his own ethical objections to suicide in the first place, at least for himself (which bear out OGH's objection to writing about it in a way that supports it as an option). Doing some form of duty that may lead to a widow's pension that isn't a form of direct self harm is a way to go around that, which is totally psychologically plausible for such a character but also a bit of a cop out (for both character and for author).
FWIW I think that it wouldn't need to be strictly Christian evangelising, hence my emphasis on how pro-social and ecumenical Pete presents as in TRC and TNS. The thing that always strikes me about religious communities is that they are usually communities first, and religious after that - so it's only when the religion is actively anti-social that there's a problem. This is something that the more ecumenical vicars generally seem to be aware of, and this prompts them to be up to date on ethics and sociology. So Pete could just as easily be leaning into Singer as anything, and it's much more likely than Aquinas (for instance).
The bit in TNS where Pete prompts Alex to start coding in Enochian to make his life easier can be read a couple of ways (although I'll probably have to go back and read it again now I mention it). It might be meant to be a naive suggestion, but it could also just be the emerging tip of underlying natural talent, or at least a conceptual confidence with the abstractions involved.
Sorry, probably gone much further down that path than appropriate now, but anyhow.
Not getting a widow's pension after suicide used to be common in my youth and may still be in some cases. But I agree that ethical objections are more consistent, as is simply not accepting blood and dying of the V-parasites.
CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land (exoworlds).
This does seem to suggest that when something like the Prime Minister takes control over a world, it will be worthwhile to create gates to Elsewhere and export breeding populations of mortals to places where something useful might happen later. In the New Management’s case, this might be “secure prisons” for criminals or the politically undesirable, or “relocation camps” for immigrants from even worse places, or “isolated training facilities” for government minions.
Truly long term thinkers might drop packages of anaerobic bacteria on previously lifeless worlds.
So, rather than there being a steady stream of new worlds to conquer, there's a boom, then a bust.
That seems to be the way the really big fish experience the universe in the original Lovecraft (etc) stories. Mortal races rise, encounter gods, and eventually die out. The gods then “die” and slumber away the eons until something worth noticing arises.
Meanwhile moderately advanced races such as Blue Hades tick along nicely for millions of years, having figured out ways to avoid either catastrophic growth or decline.
We probably won’t get to see much about what Blue Hades is up to at home. I’d like to see more about Deep Seven too but TLLN is not at all the right story for getting into that; I’m amused by the idea that they’re busy with their own stuff and are slow to notice that humans even exist.
those wrecked worlds -- unless stripped onto bare rock -- will have enough of a basic ecology for oxygen and thus basis for life-as-we-know-it (LAWKI)... so yeah each world could become a 'seed corn' colony but just first read land reclaimers such as Zionists/sabras of 1880s Jewish Palestine... they turned sand into soil, soil into farms... took generations and blood and sweat... so we got better tech and more science but the problem with terraforming if you cannot genocide the bacteria is left/right handness of proteins and sugars... four combos and only one of four is non-toxic to LAWKI... as much as I like the notion of a Laundryverse spinoff into deep time where humanity is spread amongst dozens of struggling 'seed corn' colonies it will not be as successful as merely handwaving about it... but still offers lots of ruins to dig through and do up sequels 'n remakes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Oh-My-God-That-Is-Horrid... great setting for D&D 'grail quests'... alien ruins under the crowded skies of faltering spaced-based megastructures and populated by dozens of species each the remnants of a mostly-dead homeworld
Obligatory footnote: there are a couple of hard lines I won't cross in my fiction. They include anything that might push an unstable or impressionable reader towards serious criminal acts (eg. child abuse, assault) or suicide. Note that this isn't the same as depicting child abuse or suicide in fiction -- but potentially encouraging such acts is a hard nope. Which limits some of the things I can write, but not in a way that I miss.
i was thinking more of a Captain Oates-style sacrifice.
I'm almost certainly not your target audience, though. I don't really like horror. I started reading the Laundry series when it was black humour about bureaucracy and technology in a horror setting, and as the humour's leaked out (or become too subtle for me to notice) I'm less inclined to read the books. I've got the New Management books sitting in my to-read pile; they've been there since they were published, but I haven't felt the urge to actually read them.
The Stross book I really want to read is something like Glasshouse: science fiction exploring mind-stretching concepts, that stands up to repeated rereading.
»CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land«
Sorry, does not follow:
The Elder Gods is sufficient to explain away the postulated "Fermi Paradox".
»So I should probably re-read as much Penrose as my brain can handle«
In the Laundryverse it is surely not accidental that the famous aperiodic "Penrose" tiling has a five-fold rotational symmetry.
Sorry, does not follow:The Elder Gods is sufficient to explain away the postulated "Fermi Paradox".
Okay, here's the math.
Earth has about 7-8 e9 years' worth of heat to make plate tectonics work. This isn't relevant to us, because the Sun won't stay friendly that long. It will matter at the end of this rant.
Earth is something like 4.54e9 years old. It didn't have eukaryotic, multicellular life on land for at least the first 4.37e9 years. Important things like forests showed up ca. 3e8 years ago. And Earth has another ca. 1e9 years from now in which it might support humans.
We'll define CASE NIGHTMARE class (CNc) worlds as ones where there are 2-10e9 human or human-equivalent beings on the planet. My best guess is that a population that size lasts for a few centuries at most. In that time, humans at least will burn through about 300 million years worth of accumulated mineral resources, from groundwater to oil and coal (cf forests above) to top soil, phosphorus, mineralized nitrogen, copper, iron, sand...etc. After these slowly renewable resources are exhausted, the population will fall (well) below 1e9 people and stay at low levels for a long time thereafter, or go extinct.
Under ludicrously ideal circumstances, it would take ca. 1e8 years for enough biogeochemistry to take place to refill a good chunk of the fossil fuel, groundwater, and useful mineral inventory. If humans hang out that long, they'll be able to hit CNc in another hundred million years or more. Yes, realistically, it's between 300 million years and never, but I'm giving the optimistic argument.
So, for Earth's ca. 6e9 (6 billion year) history, it gets maybe 10 CNc events, each lasting a few hundred (say 6e2) years optimally.
That's the target the elder gods are aiming for, that 1 in 10 million time when a life-bearing world can support them. And each planet at best only has a handful of CNcs during its lifespan,
CNcs are considerably rarer than grass, or even sauropod browse. Gods moving between star systems have to spend almost all of their resources finding and colonizing the next CNc world, or plan on dying for a few hundred million years in order to live for a few centuries widely separated in time.
While CNcs could explain the Fermi paradox in an FTL system like the Laundryverse, the more likely explanation is that most life-bearing worlds have only unicellular life on them, or are incapable of supporting CNc and gods.
But wait, you say, red dwarf stars last much longer. And they do. But planetary crusts thicken as worlds cool. No plate tectonics, and the carbon cycle sputters out. No atmospheric carbon, and photosynthesis stops producing oxygen. Dead world, even if it is warm enough.*
And if your dying-planet protagonists are white men, they'd better be really shiny white men, not albinos.
Or something like Saharan silver ants…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_silver_ant
I saw them on Planet Earth (I think, something BBC with those production values, anyway). I liked the 'making of' segment about them, where you watched the camera crew get punchy from the heat and saw the discussion about 'how do we film this shot without injuring ourselves'.
I'll second the call for more black humor and less current-events-based horror. Black humor's how people on the front lines classically cope with shit, anyway.
Speaking of black humor, has anyone ever subjected the idea of disassembling a planet to make a Matrioshka Brain to the same level of scrutiny we gave to generation ships, back in the "canned monkeys don't ship well" days?
To put it gently, I don't think it'll work. Molten lava is not a good rocket launchpad, IMHO.
And if Laundryverse Cthulhu knows this, then it might be interesting to find out what they actually are planning to do under the cover of building a Matrioshka Brain. Is it all just a grift, a system for finding more hosts/suckers before the current ones die?
And if your dying-planet protagonists are white men, they'd better be really shiny white men, not albinos. Or something like Saharan silver ants…
Great minds think alike. The clip is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCaVvHeI8jU
This includes the "making of" segments. It's from Planet Earth: Africa, 2013.
Tying this back to the Laundryverse? Yeah, I'll try. Anyway, the future's so bright, shades won't help you. I suppose it's okay if the dying world is orbiting a red dwarf, but if it's dying planets around stars exiting the main sequence, those black pyramids are going to get awfully hot out those deserts, and those dead cities on the plateaus are going to be dealing with a lot of wind-blown sand. And it'll be too hot for the shoggoths to keep them clean, too. Oh well.
»Okay, here's the math.«
I wouldn't trust any our our cosmology to apply to the Laundryverse, and least of our measurements on this universe and rickety theorizing that follows about how the universe was packed in it's original shipping carton.
What are the possibilities of CNc Events on a neutron star, like in Forward's Dragon's Egg? Very fast overclocked Elder Gods might be able to harvest brain activity from such creatures but would the many ancient Gods, vast and slow even be able to detect those mayfly intelligences? The Black Hole Universe 10e100 years from now has energy and possible intelligences lurking behind the cloak of the event horizon but if the Elder Gods penetrate that veil to gorge themselves could they ever escape or would they be trapped on a barren "world" depleted of sustenance, waiting until the black hole evaporates?
I'll just toss out another use gods might have for orbital factories: it's the gravedust system from the Jennifer Morgue. It ran on special vacuum tubes that were made in orbit, and its purpose was to talk with the dead.
So if a god's planning on being inhumed in a mile-high pyramid somewhere, and they have the goal of talking to outsiders and eventually being resurrected, it's possible that the White Courtesy Phone to god and the Apparatus of the Resurrection both have components that require really good vacuum, and systems that maintain that vacuum intact for a very long time indeed.
As we all know, space has a lot of high quality vacuum, there for the taking. So orbital factories might be necessary to harvest that vacuum during tomb construction. Once the god is
encystedentombed, the mortuary factories can be abandoned, as the surviving cultists, if any, go off to figure out the survival of their god's memes until the next coming.So if Cthulhu wants factories built in orbit...
Why assume an Elder God would tolerate the taste of human minds, except for the narrativium thing? They might touch our minds and react like a Vogon troopship to Marvin's philosophy of existence. Or like the vampire in Andy Warhol's Dracula. It particularly amuses me to think of one contacting the mind of a devotee of the alt right "Firehose of fertilizer".
just promise me you wouldn't let Twitter be bought by Darth Elon
...it's the gravedust system from the Jennifer Morgue. It ran on special vacuum tubes that were made in orbit, and its purpose was to talk with the dead...
Ooh, that's a new idea. Making vacuum tube electronics is one thing, but making them with million year MTBFs is...challenging.
Offhand I can't think of any material I'd trust not to have gas migration through the structure over those time periods. The tubes' inner chambers would have to be of something that doesn't outgas. It might be less impractical to store the gravedust system 'mothballed' with a mechanism to recreate a vacuum when it's ready to be used but even making the support system stable over geologic time sounds difficult.
Maybe the gravedust systems could be stored in deep space, optionally with a delivery system when mortals are sophisticated enough to radio for delivery or come pick it up on site?
Thinking about this does offer some explanation of why so much pre-human technology appears as giant slabs of rock.
it's the gravedust system from the Jennifer Morgue. It ran on special vacuum tubes that were made in orbit, and its purpose was to talk with the dead.
I'd totally forgotten that!
GRAVEDUST probably plays a pivotal role in the climax of TLLF, although I need to go back and re-read so I can work out how to deploy it.
If not ... there'll be a New Management cameo in which fearless journalists from the Daily Express get their hands on a GRAVEDUST machine and try to use it to interview the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales (because they would), only to discover they've gotten the wrong Diana, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt (and precursor to the watered-down Roman Diana) is angry ...
»Making vacuum tube electronics is one thing, but making them with million year MTBFs is...challenging. «
I would say that it is physically impossible.
The closest we have come are probably the "6P12" vacuum tubes designed for the first transatlantic telephone cable (https://archive.org/details/bstj36-1-163): None of the 390 tubes failed in the 22 years TAT-1 was in operation, which depending on your math indicates a MTBF north of 100M hours, not taking wear-out into account. (All the tubes lived simultaneously)
The main wear-out mechanism is cathodes loosing activity with consequent reduction of S/N, nothing you can do but replace the cathode material.
The secondary wear-out mechanism is vacuum leakage.
You can "solve" the vacuum leakage problem by operating your tubes in space, but that exposes them to a host of other degradation mechanisms, from micrometeorites to noise from ionizing radiation.
The only mechanism we know that keep working on 100Myr timescales are free-fall orbits.
Which raises a very interesting question: Are there any Turing-complete N-body constellations ?
Which raises an even more interesting question. Could humanity then recruit Dave "Cinzano Bianco" Lister to solve Case Nightmare Green with a trick shot?
It probably is impossible, ...
... nevertheless, the old-timers amongst the engineering staff at Manchester reckoned that you could get more life out of vacuum valves than most people realised.
And that became obvious when they worked at Bletchley Park. The key is that what causes valves to fail is the thermal stress involved in switching on and off the heating coils. Thus on Colossus failed valves were replaced "live", with no down time.
Our old-time engineers had a habit of walking around with the left hand very firmly tucked into the back of the trousers or belt and only ever using their right hand. With a single hand you'd never get a mains shock across your heart.
You do remember that Laundryverse magic allows for stasis fields powered by electricity? I’ll leave it to the engineers reading this to figure out if putting the stasis circuit inside or outside the tube makes more sense, although sense is probably the wrong assessment metric in this case.
Still, engineering on those time scales makes the Clock of the Long Now look like a typical Apple product. Keeping things in working order for millions of years is a hard problem, even with magic.
The bigger point is that keeping a dead god fit for resurrection after millions of years is hard. I mean, in a literary work it can be handwaved with a magical holocaust of hundreds of millions sacrificed and a shiny new pyramid standing in the resulting wasteland, but that’s cheating. Cheating, in this case, means that actually contemplating the details might make for a better story.
As a biologist, I’m used to stories of seeds lasting millennia, tardigrades lasting centuries, and the like, and I know enough to know that we don’t know how to create such systems from scratch. I think it’s fair to say that gods who choose to die periodically invest a huge amount of effort in trying to insure that they’ll come back again.
So that’s one strategy: wait out the bad times and hustle to CNc times when they happen.
The other class of strategies for gods is to be giant nomads. Think CNc world is to krill swarm as nomadic god is to blue whale. The problem for these gods is finding the next CNc world to target. This strategy avoids the deep time engineering problem, but finding new CNc worlds is probably challenging.
These strategies aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but preparing to either move or hibernate simultaneously is even trickier. Feeling a little sympathy for the devils yet?
A third strategy is to promote civilization wherever possible, in hopes of cultivating a CNc world and consuming it before other gods find it. Casting an elder god as a culture hero may creep some people out, but the god’s trying to survive in a brutal and unforgiving universe, just like the rest of us. And if the god enables billions of us to live, with the suffering and dying only when the god has to forage, is that a bad thing…?
You wrote: "-If gods used to be civilized humans who hacked themselves into ascending to godhood, Orion's Arm style, then most likely they have human scale planning horizons, even if they've lived for centuries."
Why on earth (or elsewhere) would former people who "hacked" themself to godhood still think in human terms? They're defined as "not human" any more. Part of the hacking would require different views and timescales. See my 11,000 Years for a variety of that "hacked themselves to godhood"
Several thoughts for Pete: for one... the V-parasites. Wouldn't something more interesting attract them away from whoever they're feeding on? And would an AI attract them?
Why, yes, now I'm thinking of an AI-run robot Maria, allowing the parasites to suck on her until daylight (cue end of Nosferatu).
makes the Clock of the Long Now look like a typical Apple product
Make that Samsung, Asus, or one of the me-too Android cloners from China: Apple generally delivers double the useful support life of the equivalent PC/Android machine, which is not insignificant in a market driven by built-in obsolescence.
"Noise reduction system" - see General Semantics, and the "Structural differential".
Sorry, off-topic, but Doc Smith, in the Lensmen series, protected the Solar System from attacks by planets by turning the asteroid belt into cathodes, and used the Sun as an the anode....
Could the Elder Gods be interested in such a weapon?
Post WWII it was figured out a major life limiter of vacuum tubes was silicon contamination of the filaments. Once that was fixed life times went up dramatically. (found that out when reading about the history of Whirlwind)
The Clock of the Long Now is designed to run for 10,000 years. Most consumer electronics are designed for a decade or less. So when we're talking about Dead God-scale engineering, I'm thinking in terms of 10-100,000,000 years. Same ratio, roughly.
So Apple or Asus doesn't really matter. And yes, I have an Apple phone, and I wasn't trying to insult them.
10 years or less? Sorry, I thought it was five years or less - certainly, all of them, including Apple, put out new versions every two-three years.
Actually... is that a hint? We haven't seen anything under the NM that looks like it's intended to last.
Former humans thinking in human timescales….
Here’s an example: if Donald Trump became immortal, do you think he’d spontaneously be able to do long range planning?
Bootstrapped immortals almost certainly have to learn how to live in the long term the hard way. Since they’re competing with their peers, it’s unlikely that anyone will mentor them. I’d guess that the survival rate for new gods is pretty low, especially on the century time scale.
This is probably even more true if a god is trying the deep time resurrection gambit. First there’s the problem of successfully resurrecting, then there’s the problem that the newly resurrected god likely only has a few centuries of lived experience, much of which might be irrelevant millions of years later. And a good chunk of that lived experience might well be about preparing to die and be resurrected. It’s kind of a bizarre way to live, if you think about it.
So I figure that there is only a small time window left in the New Management series story line until the Black Pharaoh takes over the rest of the world? Having killed his opponents in the US and domestically and added Napoleon to his team? Will the laundryverse world even make it to 2023 before either Fabian Everyman has eaten everyone or the Deep Ones decide to shake him (and humanity) off Earth's surface?
Within the classic Laundryverse, I really hope for the Senior Auditor to get a novella on his own.
Bootstrapped immortals almost certainly have to learn how to live in the long term the hard way. Since they’re competing with their peers, it’s unlikely that anyone will mentor them. I’d guess that the survival rate for new gods is pretty low, especially on the century time scale.
S.M. Stirling must have recognized this fact in "Draka" series. At one point Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, who is 440 years old by then, mentions that the median lifespan of Homo drakensis is just over a century, and their primary cause of death are other drakensis. Usually much older ones, such as herself. Those who make it to 150 years or so, find their actuarial lifespan increase enormously.
Scott Sanford 380 & Charlie Stross 381:
from a thaumaturgical perspective what's the distinction between mixing GRAVEDUST into neutronium-based CPUs versus use in vacuum tubes?
Heteromeles 385:
instead of random luck 'n hoping... so of a JohnyAppleSeed thing... there's a team of ultra zealots doing the advance work of preparing new planets with colonies of 10^9 individual sapients a couple thousand years in advance of an Elder God's migration...?
so tempting to make jokes about real estate developers building loathsome suburbs outside of Phoenix, AZ or other such horrid things as Neom planned by Saudi Arabia... which would be an ideal locale for an Elder God to drop in for a snack on His way to a full sized colony further onwards...
from the first time I read about Neom it had that icky greasy feel of a place where peasants went in but never came out... uh... disassembled into spare parts for those ageing billionaires...?
So I figure that there is only a small time window left in the New Management series story line until the Black Pharaoh takes over the rest of the world?
Nope: he's facing stiff opposition from the other horrors, and none of them make it to full immanent godhood because CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is gridlocked after mid-2015 (and there isn't enough available mana to bring through an entire god -- just a tentacle or two).
Within the classic Laundryverse, I really hope for the Senior Auditor to get a novella on his own.
It was planned but it was going to be nightmarishly depressing. So it's rolled into TLLF, which overall is less depressing.
GRAVEDUST probably plays a pivotal role in the climax of TLLF, although I need to go back and re-read so I can work out how to deploy it.
I was mildly disappointed to discover that the Laundry wiki doesn't even have a page on Gravedust, since it plays an important role in The Jennifer Morgue. (In the novel it's Gravedust, capitalized as a proper noun but not all uppercase as code names are styled.) But then, I feel the whole wiki should be better; I've edited a few things in the last few days but I doubt I'm up to doing the whole thing myself.
Since the very expensive vacuum tubes of the original Soviet design aren't necessary for short range calls, it seems reasonable that the Laundry would have a use for being able to chat up the recently dead. I am sure that the Black Chamber has many uses for Gravedust systems, very few of them nice.
GRAVEDUST probably plays a pivotal role in the climax of TLLF, although I need to go back and re-read so I can work out how to deploy it.
If not ... there'll be a New Management cameo in which fearless journalists from the Daily Express get their hands on a GRAVEDUST machine and try to use it to interview the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales (because they would), only to discover they've gotten the wrong Diana, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt (and precursor to the watered-down Roman Diana) is angry ...
Isn't that one of the main plot strands of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward?
Also, your version of Cthulhu is much more powerful than the original. If I remember correctly, in The Call of Cthulhu Johansen gets away from Cthulhu by ramming it with a steamboat.
How well would you cope with an ant rolling a marble under your foot when you'd just gotten out of bed? :-)
That "(because they would)" category contains other possibilities also. Never mind mobile phones; "British tabloid press hacking the minds of murdered children" is another application awaiting only the technology.
It seems to be an accepted convention for everyone's Cthulhu to be much more powerful than the original. That escape came over as unfeasibly straightforward to me, because I came to it primed with impressions from other writers under which ramming it with a steamboat would be a disastrously unwise move.
Well that's the spoiler to end all spoilers!
Anyway, back to your suggestion that we are looking at a predator-prey system in #333:
Without going into the differential equations, we can describe predator-prey systems as follows: there'll be an optimal number of prey and predation will keep the system at that point. However if the predator is too efficient they'll eat everything and then starve -- zero predators and zero prey being a very stable solution! Alternatively, if the predator is hopeless, they die out, prey numbers explode consuming all resources, and then the prey dies out. -- zero-zero again.
Finally, consider what happens if there are environmental disturbances to the system. When that happens -- an ice-age perhaps -- the number of prey supported by the environment may decline, causing a decline in the number of predators. Think mammoths being tipped into extinction in North America 20,000 years ago by climate change and human predation; this then caused the extinction of sabre-toothed tigers.
All-in-all, you have to work quite hard not to get to a zero-zero solution.
And one way that might happen is if there's intelligence and cooperation involved, i.e. Suppose that our Elder Gods were farmers and not hunters.
Now they'll need to cooperate over who owns which piece of farm land -- or do what the ancient Irish (and Anglo-Saxons) did and go on cattle-raids. If they're sensible they'll ensure enough breeding stock for their future needs, and looking to provide fodder to tide the stock over winter.
I'm sure our resident ecologist, Heteromeles, can fill you in on further details...
It seems to be an accepted convention for everyone's Cthulhu to be much more powerful than the original. That escape came over as unfeasibly straightforward to me, because I came to it primed with impressions from other writers under which ramming it with a steamboat would be a disastrously unwise move.
It was different for me. I read all that was available of Lovecraft when I was a teenager, and came upon derivative works much later. The one book with a Cthulhu close to the original (though it includes no Lovecraftian terminology) is John Brunner's The atlantic abomination
Perhaps the word we are looking for is "squegging"? :)
Well that's the spoiler to end all spoilers!
(Eye roll) The New Management books are all set 1-2 years after the Last Laundry Files Story. It's basically filling in background at this point. (But hopefully in a surprising manner.)
I love it - "oh, look, a tasty world! Mine!!!" shout all the Elder Gods....
I'm sure our resident ecologist, Heteromeles, can fill you in on further details...
See 371 and 385 above.
Oh, it's worth noting that Persephone Hazard is very concerned about either K-syndrome or some other side effect of ritual magic in The Apocalypse Codex; at one point she casts a spell and is like "this will take a year off my life, but whatever fuck it." She's also sort of ignorant about computational magic, Bob teaches her a few things. At some point some things must have happened to get her to where she is in The Delirium Brief.
If not ... there'll be a New Management cameo in which fearless journalists from the Daily Express get their hands on a GRAVEDUST machine and try to use it to interview the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales (because they would), only to discover they've gotten the wrong Diana, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt (and precursor to the watered-down Roman Diana) is angry .
Here's some wish fulfillment. They raise Diana PoW's ghost. She obligingly spends hours dishing dirt, then slaps them with a comprehensive and gruesome non-disclosure geas and curses them to spend the rest of their lives volunteering for humanitarian demining operations.
The next crew to try GRAVEDUSTing Diana fares even worse.
The Windsors have no comment.
At some point some things must have happened to get her to where she is in The Delirium Brief.
There are at least 4-5 years of in-universe time between those two books. And of course, Bob would never be suckered in by a woman (r a male friend, for that matter) allowing him to draw his preferred conclusions ...
Without going into the differential equations, we can describe predator-prey systems
I assume you wrote that just so that someone else could point out the Lotka-Volterra equations, a nice example of (simplistic) modeling.
Well I had harboured the illusion you were writing an epic tale, a sort of Iliad or Beowulf if you will, rather than a romantic folk tale (".. and then they all lived happily ever after").
But reading comments here indicates I am in a minority of one in hoping that all the protagonists die.
As was observed long ago -- about Hercules -- the alternative to having heroes die when they have performed their function is that they become monsters themselves which then need slaying by still stronger heroes.
It seems to be an accepted convention for everyone's Cthulhu to be much more powerful than the original. That escape came over as unfeasibly straightforward to me, because I came to it primed with impressions from other writers under which ramming it with a steamboat would be a disastrously unwise move.
To me, Cthulhu's the most misrepresented being in the Mythos. Since HPL's stories are online, it's easy to search them. Cthulhu's the elder-priest of a race of interstellar invaders, related to the Great Old Ones or Great Old Ones themselves.
The Great Old Ones aren't Elder Gods, not are they the Elder Things (which HPL normally called Old Ones, reserving Elder Thing for the "Flying Polyps" from the Shadow Out of Time. Confused yet?)
Cthulhu's star spawn (to use the gaming term again) were terrestrial, invaded Earth in the Mesozoic, fought with the Yithians and the Elder Things (who they drove into the ocean), and ultimately perished when their city sunk and the stars went wrong on them.
Anyway, Cthulhu's rep as a sea god isn't supported by HPL. Too many lazy writers saw octopoid and thought aquatic, saw worship and thought god.
So I wasn't surprised by a dude getting past Cthulhu by ramming him. I was surprised that the steamboat was left, hot, with a full head of steam, entirely unmanned while they explored Ryleh. That was weird to me.
Not that this has anything to do with the Laundryverse.
Back to the request. This post prompted me to go back and start rereading the entire thing from the start. I'd like to see some sort of resolution or nod to the other races that share this planet..Deep Ones and Blue Hades. How do they react to the surface being disturbed by the advent of Something Awful.
I also would like to get some hint or resolution towards the possible unborn child of Bob and Mo. It's very clear the both of them have somewhat transcended base humanity. Even if they don't quite realize that yet. Mo' transcendence remains somewhat unclear...help me out here. humanBob has been gone quite some time and is only now realizing it. But there's more than any friends that there is a features involved and that fetus was part of a gigantic battle outside a certain manor house. What gives....
Robert J. Sawyer in his novel Quantum Night plays with that idea. Our reader's group just did it and everyone liked it. It's solid meat and potatoes SF.
It postulates that there are 3 quantum entangles electrons in each neuron. If only one is entangled, you are philosophical zombie, a person who goes through the motions with no internal life. If two are entangled, you are a sociopath and all three make you an empathic person with an inner life. And they have found a way to switch you from one state to another.
Slight spoiler. Sociopaths do not like being upgraded and suddenly finding they have a conscience.
I'd like to see some sort of resolution or nod to the other races that share this planet..Deep Ones and Blue Hades. How do they react to the surface being disturbed by the advent of Something Awful.
Good question!
BLUE HADES, the Deep Ones, have mentioned they have plans for this; indeed, they seem to have been through similar times before. What their plans actually are they didn't share with Bob. Suggestions include warding pentagrams big enough to contain cities, some variation of Angleton's stasis bubble, and evacuating everyone through gates into other universes until Earth is fit for habitation again - but all of these are just humans wanking about possibilities.
DEEP SEVEN, the Chthonians, have said even less. It's not clear they talk to humans at all. While BLUE HADES has the occasional aquatic version of Jane Goodall who's willing to leave civilization and ook at the primates, DEEP SEVEN shows no particular interest in what's outer space to them. We have no clue what they're planning to do.
"We know very little about DEEP SEVEN except that they appear to be polymorphous, occupy areas of the upper crust near the polar regions, and BLUE HADES are terrified of them." - Angleton, in The Jennifer Morgue
If not ... there'll be a New Management cameo in which fearless journalists from the Daily Express get their hands on a GRAVEDUST machine and try to use it to interview the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales (because they would), only to discover they've gotten the wrong Diana, and Artemis, goddess of the hunt (and precursor to the watered-down Roman Diana) is angry ...
Oh, please, please, PLEASE.
Diana is well known for turning Actaeon into a deer, when he accidentally sees her naked, so that he would be killed by his own hunting dogs. I'm sure you can come up with an analogy.
[It's in Ovid's Metamorphoses, so "Diana" is correct here.]
I'd like to see some sort of resolution or nod to the other races that share this planet..Deep Ones and Blue Hades. How do they react to the surface being disturbed by the advent of Something Awful.
There's likely a cost-benefit tradeoff involved.
The critical point is that Charlie just said that the gods are constrained from fully manifesting due to a lack of human mana. Considering that we're near Peak Humanity as forecast by the UN, this implies that the gods can't fully manifest. Perhaps one god could, but not three of them.
So anything that can kill a billion humans or more can be used to negotiate with the gods.
The Deep Ones, in The Jennifer Morgue, were said to be capable of triggering giant landslides from mid-ocean shield volcanoes. The resulting tsunamis would can devastate coasts and harbors throughout entire ocean basins. Since billions of humans live close to the coast and even more depend on international trade, that's an effective threat to the gods.
On the other side, there don't appear to be billions of Deep Ones (the abyssal plane is huge, but it's a nutrient desert, and I'd expect the Deep OneS to cluster at the equivalent of oases), so they're probably not a great resource for a god to conquer. And they're willing to stay neutral in surface affairs. Add the threat and the benefit up, and they're not worth bothering with. The gods get more benefit from staying on the surface and domesticating humans.
The same argument applies to the Cthonians. Aside from their Elon Musk types (Jennifer Morgue again), they have no use even for the sea floor. They can readily attack humans with things like earthquakes and volcanoes, but humans can't even reach where they live, except possibly with magic.
What can they do, potentially? For one example of many, simultaneous quakes in the Salton Sea (southern San Andreas) and near New Madrid (Mississippi River) would cripple the US for months to years, and lead to millions if not billions of deaths, depriving gods of their prey. They probably can also trigger volcanoes to do giant tsunamis and year-without-a-summer class eruptions, and possibly can ignite large igneous provinces (see Deccan Traps or Siberian Traps) if they get really riled.
So, like the Deep Ones, the Cthonians can effectively retaliate. Are there billions of them in the mantle? Possibly, and if so they have their own separate CASE NIGHTMARE MAGMA to deal with (and if that's the case, why are the gods attacking humans?). More likely they're like the Deep Ones, more trouble than they're worth and better left alone.
The presence of these two species is yet another reason why I think Cthulhu's stated plan to process the Earth into a Matrioshka Brain is vaporware and at best a cover for some other space-based project.
The Mandate, at least Delirium Brief on, appears to be post-singularity smart but that doesn't necessarily mean all the Elder Gods are. Dread Cthulhu could just be a dumbass.
About the Mandate... one thing that just hit me: is he vulnerable to the K-syndrome parasites, or does his indweller keep them away/kill them?
Is there a Labour party under the New Management? How about the Greens and Sinn Fein?
Wish-fulfillment fantasy time again...
It might be fun if the Great Race of Yith turns up in the final New Management book, and it would be even more fun if it turns out that the Ghost Roads are their version of an archive of deep time, as advanced beyond our current Wayback Machine as that is beyond a library of books.
And maybe they decide to do something about a bookworm infestation corrupting the system right when they want a really good record of what happened?
Anyway, the reason I'd find it a satisfying ending is that HPL's Yithians were politically national socialists, so we're talking about time traveling Nazis. That makes the ghost roads their equivalent of the Atrocity Archive from the first story, and that would form the whole oeuvre into a strange loop of sorts. What better place to leave it?
In another timeline finding the local Cthonian equivalents city of Callastheon didn't end well for the surface dwellers.
I've just realised that I was probably wrong to describe the Elder Gods as farmers.
Now we get an interesting situation where they cannot resolve their disagreements peacefully. Perhaps they are Libertarians -- precisely because they refuse to cooperate.
Perhaps there are enough people to incarnate all of the Elder Gods, but they have got themselves stuck by squabbling over the foodstock and having a shoot out with high-level weapons like feeders that only feed on God-level entities?
As was observed long ago -- about Hercules -- the alternative to having heroes die when they have performed their function is that they become monsters themselves which then need slaying by still stronger heroes
Nah, they go off and raise bees. Or they become parents. Both of these endings are still possible, I'll note.
Now we get an interesting situation where they cannot resolve their disagreements peacefully. Perhaps they are Libertarians -- precisely because they refuse to cooperate.
That fits. I mean, you've got a point; if there's nobody to tell them not to feed the bears they can do whatever they want, and will. It's cheaper to run a planet like the Texas power grid, and when something awful happens the gods can fly away to Cancun or Carcosa.
Others could have a more stable strategy, akin to farmers. It seems plausible that "Dagon" and "Hydra" are happily watching over BLUE HADES and have no interest in burning billions of human souls just to boost this quarter's income figures.
Nyarlahotep doesn't love us, he just wants us for our tasty emotions. If Dagon and Hydra actually have some affection for their people then BLUE HADES is in much better shape than humanity... I think the 'happy' ending in the Laundryverse is that humanity ends up with a god who actually feels that the relationship is mutual.
Deep Seven has been said to be in the same or better weight class as the Elder Gods and is perfectly happy to leave us completely alone. Getting that relationship from neutral to allied would be nice, except that humanity uas absolutely nothing to offer that they want.
OGH hasn't said much about that, but Lumley made it clear that the Cthonians were a powerful race, but not deities, and that they both served and were aligned with the Elder Gods.
Troutwaxer @ 429:
Nyarlahotep doesn't love us, he just wants us for our tasty emotions. If Dagon and Hydra actually have some affection for their people then BLUE HADES is in much better shape than humanity... I think the 'happy' ending in the Laundryverse is that humanity ends up with a god who actually feels that the relationship is mutual.
I'm not expecting a "happy ending" (much as I wish the "good guys" would win in the end). I am hoping for some lesser degree of unhappy ending.
Whatever Bob, Mo, Alex, Mhari ... have become, I hope they can remember when they were human & cherish that memory ... and that something resembling humanity will survive; not just as honeybees in Nyarlathotep's garden.
Ranching s a form of farming, and ranchers are every bit as territorial as arable farmers. Indeed, hunters are nearly as territorial.
I think the 'happy' ending in the Laundryverse is that humanity ends up with a god who actually feels that the relationship is mutual.
If by "mutual" you mean that the Elder God feels it has some responsibility toward humans, the way ranchers have toward cattle, that's somewhat plausible. Actual affection for humanity... an Elder God who perceives humans the way we perceive raccoons, perhaps? A source of frivolous amusement, worth feeding occasionally and even building a highway crossing if spare capacity exists, but not worth active farming.
Completely a side note, but I was re-reading The Jennifer Morgue and got to the flashback of Ramona's briefing: "This part of west Texas, between Sonora and San Angelo, is just way too far inland for Ramona's taste... She doesn't much like arid, dusty landscapes with no water."
I'd imagined it as dry God-forsaken desert, like much of Nevada. But I got a surprise when on a whim I dropped down into Google Street View. While certainly drier than most places, and probably everywhere in the British Isles, that stretch of Texas is... not as bad as I'd imagined. Okay, there's not exactly a lot of lush greenery I'm used to, and there's no open water to speak of, but there are worse places.
It does offer miles and miles of absolutely fuck all, so someone wanting a secret hideout with no neighbors might well find it agreeable.
Thanks for that article about Libertarian Bears, Scott.
Libertaria (in New Hampshire, at least) works exactly as well as I imagined it would!
And that was precisely the point I was trying to make, although I got side-tracked by the corollary, which is: how are those territorial disputes resolved?
Dave Lester @ 436
I assume that *Libertarian IN "NH"/USA fell apart because of petty faction-fights & "MAH_Rights! & zero consideration for balancing "Obligations", yes?
Charlie, with all the discussion of god ecology, and other things, I was just struck by several worldbuilding issues that need to be resolved.
1. At what population size to superpowers start to appear, and is it just population size, or also "the stars come right"? I mean, almost sixty years ago we hit 3billion humans. Would it have started then, but the stars weren't right?
2. What (approximately) is the number of humans needed for minimal deity manifestation? Are 7 billion enough for one, two, or three? (if three, see #1).
3. K-syndrome. Is this the universe's parasites that prevent manifestation? I mean, anyone attacked by it is not going to have a long lifespan, and these are the ones providing primary mana for the deities, yes? Enough of them, and the population will drop below manifestibility.
4. As I mentioned yesterday, are the deities vulnerable to K-syndrome? Is it possible they are, and when there are too many of the parasites is when they "die", and wait to be rearise, the k-parasites having died off, or at least down to a reasonable level?
Apropos of the unfortunately Real New Management...
The UK passed something called an Online Safety Bill (e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66854618 ). Aside from snide comments about how wealthy/powerful/connected someone has to be for this law doesn't apply to them, I have questions.
The big question is how the law will affect Charlie and this site. Will links to and discussion of Equoid have to come down, for instance?
Greg Tingey #438
Read the link in Scott Sandford's comment #428 (labelled "don't feed the bears") and weep ...
... with laughter!
H @ 440
Prediction ...
The proposals & "law" in the "Online Safety Bill will last, up & until someone hacks in, as a result of inadequate data-protection & encryption & LARGE a mounts of guvmint money goes missing.
AT which point, there will, suddenly be a "re-evaluation" & the law will be changed, with much bullshit about how it isn't really a change, right?
an Elder God who perceives humans the way we perceive raccoons, perhaps?
the "cat" niche is presumably the one to be aiming for - what is there to lose (apart from one's gonads)?
an Elder God who perceives humans the way we perceive raccoons, perhaps?
A good source of fur for coats and caps?
An invasive pest that keeps getting places where it isn't wanted, overbreeding, damaging ecosystems and destroying property? Ranging from the irritating like spreading garbage over the streets to the serious like destroying ancient temples…
https://www.mygreenworld.org/blog/how-a-cartoon-instigated-an-army-invasion-of-raccoons-in-japan
the "cat" niche is presumably the one to be aiming for
Obviously. Humans could continue for millions of years if they evolved to produce sufficiently humorous pictures for posting to OuterGodNet.
Scott Sanford @ 435:
Completely a side note, but I was re-reading The Jennifer Morgue and got to the flashback of Ramona's briefing: "This part of west Texas, between Sonora and San Angelo, is just way too far inland for Ramona's taste... She doesn't much like arid, dusty landscapes with no water."
I'd imagined it as dry God-forsaken desert, like much of Nevada. But I got a surprise when on a whim I dropped down into Google Street View. While certainly drier than most places, and probably everywhere in the British Isles, that stretch of Texas is... not as bad as I'd imagined. Okay, there's not exactly a lot of lush greenery I'm used to, and there's no open water to speak of, but there are worse places.
It does offer miles and miles of absolutely fuck all, so someone wanting a secret hideout with no neighbors might well find it agreeable.
I haven't driven US 277 from Sonora to San Angelo, but I've passed through both cities ... westbound on US 67 through San Angelo in April 2005 and eastbound on I-10 through (past?) Sonora in January 2013.
They're both on the eastern edge of Texas's Permian Basin (oil fields). My impression was they're fairly green winter & spring, although a bit dusty, but the grass turns brown in the summer. The scrub bushes & trees do stay fairly green year round (from what I can see in Google Street View).
The primary use of the area appears to be cattle ranching, wind & solar power and oil wells, if the price per barrel goes high enough - these are mostly OLD wells so it's more in the interest of the owners of the mineral rights to leave the oil in the ground.
Also Texas Bluebells which is what got me off the interstate and driving down US 67 back in April 2005. Texas hill country gets many wild flowers in the spring.
Despite the Permian Basin being an ancient sea bed, I didn't see any aquatic mammals along the way. But somewhere between Stephenville & San Angelo I looked to my left (south of US 67) and saw giraffes, zebras and rhinoceroses).
Never been able to find what that was on Google maps. Maybe someday.
Greg Tingey @ 438:
Dave Lester @ 436
I assume that *Libertarian IN "NH"/USA fell apart because of petty faction-fights & "MAH_Rights! & zero consideration for balancing "Obligations", yes?
Yeah, pretty much. In all my experience dealing with "Libertarians" they never acknowledge any kind of obligations; especially any kind of obligation to the surrounding society.
That's somebody else's job, but they will complain bitterly when that "somebody else" doesn't do the job to their satisfaction.
and returning to the main theme of this thread: mashing up magic and technology
what of 3-D printers of magic items?
spellcasts prepared within a self-contained bespoke CPU/pentagram?
bespoke elf armor? with full wards and clever stealthing? embedded inside layerings of kevlar?
dwarfen swords with custom crafted grips and a nano-edging of synthetic diamond capable of smiting with each swing a blistering 53-D6 hit points
god-slaying by way of squadrons of cheap drones (thank you Ukraine) deploying mass produced but precisely customized widgets... "give me all variants of spellcasts between 0.00600 and 0.0069 for deployment on a Tuesday night comma moonless against a squid deity massing 19,000 tons"
Did Johnny McTavish lose his knives at the end of The Apocalypse Codex? Did he ever get new ones? Persephone still keeps a yawara in her hair.
I'm less concerned about Big Plot Elements (though they interest me) than on the resolution of certain characters' stories. And it's a short list:
So long as the story of Bob and Mo is resolved – maybe not happily, but given some sense of closure – then I'll be happy. Anything else is gravy.
This is late, but I'm most interested in the fate of the human race. If the combination of increasing human population (slowing down, but probably not enough) and increasing computation (not slowing down a bit unless malign forces are affecting that part of the economy) makes us look very tasty to the Powers That Shouldn't Be, what's the way out?
when Charles Stross made mention of colonizing the dream roads... what I got to thinking was flash-frozen fish fillets from untouched oceans... and wild game... millions 'n millions of pounds of unpolluted foodstuffs... right up and until some local deity does to open a can of oh-shit-it-burns-my-soul on the humans harvesting for export
Re "the stars coming right", the obvious and not very satisfying meaning would be that the distance to somewhere else also potentially with a CN problem becomes small enough to arrive/escape. I'm thinking escape, personally, since there is a definite possibility that the food source will soon be massively depleted.
I guess some alignment for the Godlike equivalent of a gravity slingshot would work - presumably around somewhere with a magic-capable population.
Hm. Maybe it means "you apes are the energy supply for this particular slingshot"?
"The presence of these two species is yet another reason why I think Cthulhu's stated plan to process the Earth into a Matrioshka Brain is vaporware and at best a cover for some other space-based project."
Or perhaps the presence of those two species may be exactly the reason the Matrioshka has to be built using the Moon - their (sensor?) reach just doesn't extend that far.
when Charles Stross made mention of colonizing the dream roads... what I got to thinking was flash-frozen fish fillets from untouched oceans... and wild game... millions 'n millions of pounds of unpolluted foodstuffs...
Somewhere in the New Management world there will be a climate activist with more charisma and energy than mathematical ability promoting the idea of fighting global warming by importing already frozen blocks of ice from parallel worlds. A TEU sized block of ice could be plopped down in any open space in London and people would immediately notice it. And the annoyingly hot Tube tunnels have rail links; just plop down a TEU of ice onto a flatcar and roll it into any overheated station with a siding! Entire train loads of ice blocks could be delivered to deserts, providing both coldness and water.
Surely there would be a market for lumber once the dead trees were defrosted a bit, too.
The bad ideas are endless!
Rereading Apocalypse Codex ...who is Officer Green, who got owned by the senior auditor "I don't work for you anymore Michael" officer Green quavered "not this century you bastard" ??? From subsequent context that appears to be an officer who betrayed their roath of office and survived
"who is Officer Green"
Already answered above, comment 291 and preceding.
JHomes
there's gonna be an appendix to that next book, right?
all manner of fictitious reference works
"Dummy's Guide to Fighting Elder Gods" by John Doe
"Bad As It Is, Could Be Worse: Jewish Wisdom and Wit For Surviving Yet Another Apocalyptic Shitstorm" by Rabbi Zvi ben-Yisrael
"Necrotelicomnicon: Guide To Contacting Gods and Supernatural Entities" by Sir Terry Pratchett
"H.P. Lovecraft's the Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers" by R. J. Ivankovic
"Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis" by Robert Bloch
"Liber Paginarum Fulvarum" annually published by Barbarus Magicis Communicationis
("Book of Yellowish Pages" by Barbarian Magical Communications AKA British Telecom)
"C Is for Cthulhu: The Lovecraft Alphabet Book" by Jason Ciaramella
"Mediterranean Magical Leftover Dishes: 120 Bold and Healthy Recipes For Unicorn, Dragon, Elf, and Whatever Other Incidental Roadkill You Run Across Post-Singularity"
something from an ancient episode of CSI just lit off a light bulb...
ShotSpotter for magickal 'incidents'
something from an ancient episode of CSI just lit off a light bulb...
ShotSpotter for magickal 'incidents'
and a mage-based means of actually getting ShotSpotter to work effectively in identifying gun play fast enough to arrest thugs
Sorry to say, I've just found out about this post - I tend to read blogs in batches whenever I remember.
I might add more but, as far as I can remember now, some questions occur to me. One was more-less answered, I was curious about the ruins of orbital factories floating around the world where the Sleeper lies, but there's a few others.
I already know we won't be getting anything actually set there, but of course I'm quite interested at what's going on in Eastern Europe with the vague mention of a cult of Chernobog? How does he fit into the cosmology that's being described here? (what with St. Ppilimtec and other elder gods)
I can't recall if I mentioned it in my comments but the keyword-initiated checkup by auditors intrigues me. What would be the circumstances where an operative actually fails a self-check i.e. "subjective tampering" mentioned. Who employs such methods?
Related to point 1 - admittedly, it has been to some extent my quiet headcanon that since NATO has extensive relations with BLUE HADES, there might have been efforts by Soviet leadership to contact DEEP SEVEN , and that the Darvaza burning crater as well as several soviet deep-drilling projects were related to this. Will they make more appearances? (As well as ANNING BLUE SKULL, the race that generated shoggoths and left ruins all over the polar caps)
There's a passage in Nightmare Stacks where the 'elven' scout reports the dire state of their neighbouring kingdoms not involved in the war, some of the menaces being identifiable (the sleeper at least if I recall right. I can elaborate when I get at home and get the book in hand.), others, not so easily... will this be relevant in our world's future too?
If I remember anything else, I'll mention it! And of course I fully expect the answers to my questions might be banal.
Best regards!