Comments on: Charles Stross open thread

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:11:52 +0000

20: “I’m not planning on doing a John le Carre Laundry novel”

Well dang. Can we do one instead?

By: ajay

ajay — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:34:09 +0000

“Alien” was cheerful compared to “Blindsight”… I remember reading an interview with Iain Banks in which he said that someone had asked “I’ve just finished reading [title redacted due to spoilers] – does every Banks novel finish with all the characters getting killed except one?” to which he had replied “No, sometimes they all get killed.”
Peter Watts makes Banks look like PG Wodehouse. (“No, they all die, and so does EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. PAINFULLY and HOPELESSLY.”)

By: Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:33:30 +0000

Peter Wilkinson: I am metaphorically sitting on a proposal for a sequel to “Glasshouse”, set some 140-200 years later (when the starship everyone is stranded on reaches its destination). Won’t be ready to begin writing it before 2011 at the earliest, however, and “happy ever after” doesn’t begin to describe it. (Think more along the lines of a mashup between “Alien” and Peter Watts’ “Blindsight”.)

I’m not planning on doing a John le Carre Laundry novel, any more than I could do a Graham Greene Laundry novel; it’s too much like hard work. (I’m lazy, me … and I don’t think I’ve got the stylistic chops to go after them, either.) It’s an interesting idea, though.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:42:50 +0000

Or when he’s a grand old man of SF and due for a Heinleinesque freakout, he could write The Looking Glasshouse Merchants’ War, crossing all three settings…

By: Jacob Freeze

Jacob Freeze — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:48:00 +0000

Shouldn’t there be a little faint praise mixed in with this Festival for CT Stross:

The “ideas” in all these books are sickeningly shallow, but at least there are lots of them!

Lots of books!

Lots of sickeningly shallow “ideas!”

And now for a faint…

Hurrah!

By: Peter Wilkinson

Peter Wilkinson — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:49:03 +0000

I wonder if I was supposed to find the end of Glasshouse somewhat worrying. In early to middle Heinlein, I would have read it as standard “happy ever after” – but it being Stross, it started me speculating about what was being hidden.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:54:27 +0000

Hey, if Charlie wrote it, it would be the LOOKING GLASS war. Which was roughly what “Missile Gap” was anyway.

By: ajay

ajay — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:42:38 +0000

“The Secret Pilgrim” is also pretty Laundry-ish. How about “Absolute Fiends”? Or “The Constant Reaper”?

By: LizardBreath

LizardBreath — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:32:35 +0000

11: You expected me to blow the kicker?

and 13: I love “The Looking Glass War” as a Laundry title.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:24:58 +0000

Would it be too obvious for the LeCarré tribute in the Laundry set to be titled The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold? Call for the Dead is already a JLeC title, as are The Looking Glass War and The Night Manager, all of which could be Laundry tales. Alternatively: Tinker, Tailor, Sorcerer, Spy; Smiley’s Creatures; The R’Lyeh House.

More?

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:36:16 +0000

It did get me wondering how well I’d remembered the story.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:32:41 +0000

Holmes is investigating the murder of one of the Old Ones, and accepts that they’re the legitimate rulers.

I guess it would be a spoiler to comment on the accuracy of this statement.

By: LizardBreath

LizardBreath — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:35:19 +0000

A Le Carre Laundry novel, I think, would have to be set after CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the Old Ones have not only returned but have successfully taken over.

Neil Gaiman’s written this as a Sherlock Holmes story—“A Study In Emerald”. Holmes is investigating the murder of one of the Old Ones, and accepts that they’re the legitimate rulers.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:31:18 +0000

This arose on Charlie’s blog, specifically regarding a book in which Cthulhu returns from beyond time, and everyone keeps going to work and watching baseball, but the police force is now made up of shoggoths.

Which is, of course, precisely what happened in the great worst-case scenarios of the 20th century; the worst happened and kept happening, but none of your friends seemed to notice that the city had become the bombed-out capital of a totalitarian slave state that was literally burning people by the million…

This is of course the true horror of tyranny. Doesn’t everyone else notice? How can they stand it? I am alone…

By: ajay

ajay — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:45:22 +0000

7: that’s not quite what I meant by the lid coming off – the plot unfolds in an unexpected direction, sure, but the characters are all in the secret world of defectors and intelligence officers from the start.
There is a certain horror-story element to a lot of accounts of Eastern Bloc life, to be honest. You can live a relatively normal life most of the time, with the same mundane concerns that most readers in the West would have – kids, family, job, money, house – but if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, the secret police appear in the middle of the night and take you away… somewhere. Somewhere horrible. And the best you can hope for is a tiny temporary victory before They catch up with you and you either vanish, or are driven mad (psikuska rather than cosmic horror, though the effect is much the same), or are killed with strange and horrible poisons.

A Le Carre Laundry novel, I think, would have to be set after CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the Old Ones have not only returned but have successfully taken over.