Caledfwlch
I am not a Geek, I am a Level 22 Warrior!
Hello!
Is anyone else into the Laundry series of books by the British Author Charles Stross?
They are set in the modern day/near future, but the concept is of a cold war style spy thriller, but in a world where magic and "demons" are real. And they are also very much in the Horror genre with a good dose of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bob Howard of the Laundry is one of those charged with protecting Great Britain from the Scum of the Multiverse!
Basically, demons and so on are simply creatures from other dimensions in the multiverse, and they love to get into our reality where they generally possess people and cause chaos if summoned.
Bob Howard is an expert in "Computation Demonology" Magic is real, but the way to access, and communicate with entities and locations in the multiverse is using computers, lasers, computer generated fractals and circuit boards. Plus the odd bit of blood.
The Laundry is beyond top secret, and is known simply as the Laundry, as when founded in the 1920's it was a tiny office above a Laundry shop in London. Bob whilst still an IT Student at Birmingham University discovered some weird and interesting stuff to do with fractals on his PC, not realising what he was messing with, however, Angleton his soon to be new Boss managed to stop him just before he accidentaly summoned a horrific entity that would have flattened the West Midlands of the UK. In the Laundry's because the terrifying truth is top secret and hidden from the World, if you get involved and come into knowledge of the reality, even when like Bob accidently, then you are press ganged into working for the Laundry, even if only as a basic HR or Admin Drone.
Luckily for Both he is an IT expert, a brilliant coder, and has a knack for Computational Demonology, and is slowly being trained up by Angleton.
In this world, The Elder Gods of Lovecraftian Myth are very real, but thankfully asleep. There is another race of immigrated Aliens, the Deep Ones, some sort of human hybrid that live under water, some groups who are more human live in shallow coastal waters and maintain friendly contact with organisations such as the Laundry's and the US version the "Black Chamber" however the Black Chamber make the CIA look like pussycats and there are strong hints that they may be either bad guys, or at least totally unethical and unprincipled in their approach to using and abusing magic and so on to further the US's political interests.
The more distant "Deep Ones" codenamed "Blue Hades" live as the name suggests below the seafloor in the deepest part of the oceans whilst in other parts of the oceans, below the seafloor live another mysterious race, the Chthonians codenamed "Deep Seven".
The Blue Hades are absolutely terrified of the the Deep Sevens for some reason, but between Blue Hades, the Deep Sevens and the Human Race, there exists the "Benthic Treatys" a peace pact between the three, basically we, Humans agree to keep the bloody hell away from the sea floor in the deepest oceans and thus either race doesn't click its highly advanced alien/hybrid fingers and exterminate us in 2 seconds. A lot of the summoning, to open access to a dimension habitable to humans for example takes a huge amount of power, versus a small piece of magic such as a Geas to cloud a persons memory running on a small charm and a drop of blood.
As often in a good horror, its humans and what humans do that provides the worst horror of all, yeah unknowable Brain Eating Alien entitiies are scary, but in this world, the purpose of the Nazi's Extermination Camps was to power massive Batteries fueled by Souls, to power experiments with sending Armoured Panzer Divisions and troops into Britain, the US etc in a total surprise attack by shortcutting through another dimension in the Multiverse. I wont say anything about "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN" an event very soon to become a major problem for Earth in the series.
I absolutely love this series as you can tell, and love getting people into it! Stross's Halting State 2 book series is worth reading too, a near future thriller set in a Scottish Republic, where technology such as "google goggles" has hugely changed the world and how it works.
Stross is a fab writer.
Is anyone else into the Laundry series of books by the British Author Charles Stross?
They are set in the modern day/near future, but the concept is of a cold war style spy thriller, but in a world where magic and "demons" are real. And they are also very much in the Horror genre with a good dose of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bob Howard of the Laundry is one of those charged with protecting Great Britain from the Scum of the Multiverse!
Basically, demons and so on are simply creatures from other dimensions in the multiverse, and they love to get into our reality where they generally possess people and cause chaos if summoned.
Bob Howard is an expert in "Computation Demonology" Magic is real, but the way to access, and communicate with entities and locations in the multiverse is using computers, lasers, computer generated fractals and circuit boards. Plus the odd bit of blood.
The Laundry is beyond top secret, and is known simply as the Laundry, as when founded in the 1920's it was a tiny office above a Laundry shop in London. Bob whilst still an IT Student at Birmingham University discovered some weird and interesting stuff to do with fractals on his PC, not realising what he was messing with, however, Angleton his soon to be new Boss managed to stop him just before he accidentaly summoned a horrific entity that would have flattened the West Midlands of the UK. In the Laundry's because the terrifying truth is top secret and hidden from the World, if you get involved and come into knowledge of the reality, even when like Bob accidently, then you are press ganged into working for the Laundry, even if only as a basic HR or Admin Drone.
Luckily for Both he is an IT expert, a brilliant coder, and has a knack for Computational Demonology, and is slowly being trained up by Angleton.
In this world, The Elder Gods of Lovecraftian Myth are very real, but thankfully asleep. There is another race of immigrated Aliens, the Deep Ones, some sort of human hybrid that live under water, some groups who are more human live in shallow coastal waters and maintain friendly contact with organisations such as the Laundry's and the US version the "Black Chamber" however the Black Chamber make the CIA look like pussycats and there are strong hints that they may be either bad guys, or at least totally unethical and unprincipled in their approach to using and abusing magic and so on to further the US's political interests.
The more distant "Deep Ones" codenamed "Blue Hades" live as the name suggests below the seafloor in the deepest part of the oceans whilst in other parts of the oceans, below the seafloor live another mysterious race, the Chthonians codenamed "Deep Seven".
The Blue Hades are absolutely terrified of the the Deep Sevens for some reason, but between Blue Hades, the Deep Sevens and the Human Race, there exists the "Benthic Treatys" a peace pact between the three, basically we, Humans agree to keep the bloody hell away from the sea floor in the deepest oceans and thus either race doesn't click its highly advanced alien/hybrid fingers and exterminate us in 2 seconds. A lot of the summoning, to open access to a dimension habitable to humans for example takes a huge amount of power, versus a small piece of magic such as a Geas to cloud a persons memory running on a small charm and a drop of blood.
As often in a good horror, its humans and what humans do that provides the worst horror of all, yeah unknowable Brain Eating Alien entitiies are scary, but in this world, the purpose of the Nazi's Extermination Camps was to power massive Batteries fueled by Souls, to power experiments with sending Armoured Panzer Divisions and troops into Britain, the US etc in a total surprise attack by shortcutting through another dimension in the Multiverse. I wont say anything about "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN" an event very soon to become a major problem for Earth in the series.
I absolutely love this series as you can tell, and love getting people into it!
Stross's Halting State 2 book series is worth reading too, a near future thriller set in a Scottish Republic, where technology such as "google goggles" has hugely changed the world and how it works.Stross is a fab writer.
