Forum Overview :: Dead Trees

The Laundry Files by Last 02/18/2013, 7:42am PST Laundry Files - me: It's British secret intelligence combating Cthulhu cultists. 10/10 stars for the setting, 3/10 stars for execution. I guess you could say the stars AREN'T right (heh). It's set in the modern day. The backstory is that Alan Turing developed a form of mathematics in WW2 where you can "cast spells" or "open gates" simply by solving certain equations. 2x + blah * bloo + blee * such-and-such / blahblah * x^something = something to the power of e over the topology of blahblah... You plug in different values for the variables, compute it and BANG, a Byakhee appears! Friend: that's a mistake! me: Or, you compute something else and it creates a cone of silence, or a bulletproof aura. The Laundry is the name of the British occult spy organization, which is KIND OF cute because they are usually cleaning up messes. The guys are half-mathematicians, half-wizards, 100% nerd. I mean they are 100% mathematicians but it's easier and more fun for them to refer to computation as "spellcasting". Someone will say "Cast a cone of silence on that phonebooth" and someone will scoff "CAST? A magic spell??" and the first guy says "Okay, fine, compute the eigenvector for Kurzc's Tube over 4-dimensional topology. Happy now? Luckily, there's computers so they don't have to compute stuff by hand. They program the calculations into phone apps or (for big spells) server apps so they can cast stuff by pressing a button. Mostly their job is to keep an eye on academia and snap up anyone that is close to deriving the Turing-Lovecraft principles on their own. They will hack into research institutes and look for anyone working on anything close to demonology combinatronics. If they notice a researcher getting close to discovering it, they will kidnap him or her and conscript them to work for The Laundry. This idea is pretty cool. Friend : there was a book (i think) my dad read me when I was little about a nerd that got sucked into fairy land. he could never get the hang of magicking, so he built a compiler to program spells with. these are cute ideas me: If the researcher refuses to join the Laundry, then they are killed. Usually people say yes because the Laundry guarantees a paycheck for life even if the researcher never contributes anything valuable. Friend: I sense your confusion. I meant "with which to program spells." me: They have a bunch of people whose job is literally to sit at their desk and do whatever they want, so long as they keep their dang mouth shut about magic math. "Congratulations, you may have been only five years away from deriving the Turing-Lovecraft equation. Now, you can continue to work on stuff for us, or you can wank all day, we don't care. However, if you ever tell anyone about us then we'll kill your family tree." It's pretty okay. I don't know exactly. Some parts are very awesome! But the protagonist is an arrogant IT jackass comic-book-guy Nick-your-company's-computer-guy. I don't know if the author thinks that kind of nerd is awesome or if he's making fun of that type. First of all they do a GREAT job of mixing Cthulhu cult horror with super boring red-tape bureaucracy time wasting office BS. The Laundry is a shadowy organization to combat Cthulhus but it's first-and-foremost a government bureaucracy. You need to fill out form 1007.8 in triplicate and attend mandatory sexual harassment classes from HR and drink bad coffee, etc. So there's a part where the employees have to take a refresher course on basic summoning protocols, and one guy is just an old dumb co-worker dead weight. The old dude that hasn't upgraded his skills and can't remember simple instruction and basically wastes time during meetings and such. Anyway, he messes up the summoning and is possessed instantly, so they have to fight him. Afterward, the protagonist asks the teacher "This was a training class, why did you let us even attempt something dangerous?" The teacher says "It was supposed to be harmless but we forgot that some other dimension's time moves much faster than ours. He was possessed by a single protozoa in the first picosecond and by the first millisecond they had evolved for thousands of generations and completely took over his brain functions. Oops!" I think that's a cool idea. Friend: so long, that sucker! me: Yeah, F him. Friend: isn't his job just to sit around beefing out? he's not a Cthulhu-discovering scientist, just a lab technician. The old dummy SHOULD have been left alone beefing at his desk, but somehow his name got on the list of people who are required to take the refresher course. me: The protagonist was a computer hacker who accessed certain Laundry data on accident. The old dummy probably had some interesting math ideas back in the 50s and hasn't done much since then. The old dummy was assigned to the course because of bureaucracy. One minor nitpick of this book. An agent is operating undercover but his cover is blown. Enemy agents are shooting at him. He needs to escape! So, he calls his handler and says "This is Bob, I need a laundry pickup immediately! Also, I cut myself shaving! Good-bye!" Then the author explains to the reader that this is a secret code! Laundry pickup means he needs to be picked up. He cut himself shaving which means he's been slightly wounded. THEN the author explains that this is an uncrackable code, like a one-time pad. The agent knows that enemies are surely tracing his call but have no way to know what the phrases mean. Then I say out loud "Are you high? I cracked that code in one second and I'm not even a spy." It reminds me of a FAQ for how to buy/sell drugs discreetly. Gallant calls his dealer and asks if he can come hang out. Goofus calls his dealer and asks for three "mushroom pizzas" and a "green sweater". It's a nitpick, is all. But the author thinks the enemy agents would be listening in on the phone calls of the dude they are currently shooting at and assume he's telling his dry cleaner that he cut himself shaving, like a normal person would do?? haha haha The Author page of the first Laundry files is as follows. "I started to write this book about British spy agency fighting Cthulhus because I like spy novels and I like Cthulhus. I felt that this was an extremely original idea and I knew I'd revolutionize the sci-fi genre. As soon as I dropped the first Laundry Files off at the publisher, my friend sent me a link to the novel Declare, which is about a British spy agency fighting Cthulhus that came out four years prior to mine. I read Declare and it coincidentally was nearly identical to my own story. My bad. When my brand new idea hit the stands, someone sent me a link to all the X-Files episodes where they fought Cthulhish elements while working for a government agency. I had heard of the show but never watched it before. Turns out it has very similar feel. Then, someone invited me to play a PnP RPG from the 1990s called Delta Green, which is about a government spy agency fighting Cthulhus. My characters Lucius, Von Morten, and Tom Greenworth are indeed very similar to the Delta Green characters Bosworth, Orkul, and Jim Browning." I was laughing. Because he felt SO proud of his idea and then spent months writing the same things that a bunch of other people already wrote. All in all, the Laundry Files protagonist is such a god-damn dweeb that it's impossible to like him. He's EXACTLY the kind of guy that sneers at his girlfriend for buying an iPhone instead of an open source GNU wireless handheld telecommunicator. "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, MORON! You act like Steve Jobs is your lord and savior. Have fun 'renting' that 'JesusPhone' that you don't even own. It owns YOU. PSH, sheeple." He's also the guy in his late 30s who wears a Yosemite Sam necktie to interviews because he isn't a part of your SYSTEM, man. He's damn good at Javascript and MSSQL and deserves special treatment. If you want him to wear a HANGMAN'S NOOSE, then by God it'll be one of his own choosing! In other words, he's every IT guy that's ever been. He's the IT-est of the IT. I don't know if I like this or not! Part of me wants a more likable protagonist, but another part of me enjoys how realistically horrible he is. I think a lesser author may have taken the easy route by making the dweeb somehow cool. Also his girlfriend/wife has a magic violin that is a weapon to defeat demons by playing scary sounds at them. I'm 99.9% sure that the author's real-life girlfriend plays violin and this is a big Mary Sue. I don't know, it's hard to tell, actually! Either the author is such a completely clueless nerd that even his self-insertion hero is an abhorrent IT a-hole. OR, the author is a normal dude and it's all a joke at the expense of IT assholes. The plots ARE pretty cool and pretty decent detective/Cthulhish stuff, though!! One story is about how they mapped out the minds of basilisks and gorgons to find out what part of the brain controls eyeblasts, and THEN they put that tech into traffic cameras, webcams, satellites, and everything. The only people with control of those are the secret agency, so nobody (very few people) are accidentally eyeblasted by satellites. The agency is primarily waiting for the stars to be right so that when Cthulhu surfaces they can blast him with their network of basilisk cameras. I thought it was pretty cool. It's exactly the kind of thing I want an occult government agency to be able to do.

The Laundry Files by Last 02/18/2013, 7:42am PST