The Fuller Memorandum is the third book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series by Charles Stross. The series combines hard science-fiction, spy thriller, and Lovecraftian horror. The first two books are The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The book starts very strong, with a prologue titled “Losing My Religion” by Bob Howard, the main protagonist in the series. In this he writes that he started out as an atheist, and wished he could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism, but the nature of his work for the Laundry, Her Majesty’s occult secret service, as a computational demonologist have made him a believer of the One True Religion.

The Truth is that my God is coming back.
When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun.
And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

The story in this book takes place a couple years after The Jennifer Morgue, the second book in the series. Bob Howard is now the manager of the Laundry’s IT-department and married to Dominique “Mo” O’Brien. Like with any hard working couple work occasionally follows them home, but when work includes zombie assassins and minions of a mad god’s cult things are rapidly spinning out of control. On top of that his boss Angleton disappears and a top-secret dossier, the Fuller Memorandum, goes missing. What’s the connection and who or what is the Eater of Souls?

Rating:

I have some mixed feelings about this book. It’s still very good, but it’s not the same genre anymore as the first book in the series. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, the second book was already different from the first, but the differences weren’t as pronounced.
The first novel, The Atrocity Archives, is fast-paced, geeky, hard science-fiction with Lovecraftian horror and some elements from the archetypal British spy novel mixed with sarcasm, humor and satire. The third book, The Fuller Memorandum, is a Lovecraftian spy thriller. I don’t know if it can still be called science-fiction. A lot — but mind you not all — of the geekyness, wittiness, humor, satire and sarcasm have gone too. The characters have gained in depth and the storytelling has improved, but I liked the first novel of the series a lot more.

See my reviews on the The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The Jennifer Morgue is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series by Charles Stross. This review contains some minor spoilers.

Did you ever experience the feeling of being turned into a zombie while watching a PowerPoint presentation? Well, here it is for real, a PowerPoint presentation is used to turn people into zombies. After barely surviving this ordeal, Bob Howard, computer übergeek and demonology hacker extraordinaire in his Majesty’s occult secret service, must stop software billionaire Ellis Billington. Billington has managed to get his hand on a Soviet Cold War device that permits communication with the dead. He plans to use it to raise an eldritch horror, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, from the Stygian depths, in order to rule the world.

The Jennifer Morgue

The entire operation has been put under a specific geas by Ellis Billington, meaning that if the good guys want to win they have to play it by the rules of the archetypal British spy novel. So you have a huge yacht in the Caribbean, a very rich evil mastermind with a white cat, casinos, martinis (shaken, not stirred), and you also need a British secret agent. Don’t tell Bob, he’s not supposed to know.
And you’ve got to have girls — Bond girls. There is the gorgeous looking (at least glamor level 3) Ramona Random from the Black Chamber, who planted a demon on her in order to control her — not just any demon but a succubus. Every man she has ever slept with died horribly less than 24 hours later. Can she be trusted?  Is she even human? What will Bob’s girlfriend Dominique “Mo” O’Brien do? Lie back and think of England? Yeah right, when hell freezes over.
What is the role of the Laundry, Britain’s occult secret service? The Laundry wouldn’t be the Laundry if they played by the rules, at least to other people’s rules.

Rating:

Charles Stross did it again. This is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series, where hard science fiction is mixed with the British spy novel and Lovecraftian horror, and spiced with humor, sarcasm and satire. Not as geeky, fast-paced and witty as the first novel in the series, The Atrocity Archives, but still very good.
Click here for my review of the first novel.

It was called in as a robbery. So you can imagine Sergeant Sue Smith’s mood as she watches the video footage of the heist being carried out by a band of Orcs and a Dragon, and realizes that the robbery from an online game company is actually a robbery in an online game. Things aren’t to get any better for Sergeant Sue Smith as the consequences of this robbery start affecting the real world outside and bodies start showing up.

Review

Halting State

This is the second time I read this novel, but the first time I gave up after a couple of chapters. After I had read some other novels by Charles Stross from the Bob Howard – Laundry series and the Merchant Princes series, I decided to give Halting State another try. At first it is a bit confusing, because each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the 3 main protagonists, and there are lots of other characters as well. The story takes some time getting into, but it gets better and better as you continue reading. For example, halfway through the book, I decided to rate it 3 stars or 6/10, but I kept reevaluating my rating and by the end of the book I felt it earned an 8/10 or 4 stars.
The attractiveness of this novel lies in the near future setting and the near future technologies:

• the independent Republic of Scotland
• the European Union of 30 with Russia as potential member
• the 3 major powers in the world China, India and the EU; the USA needed a time out
• accessing the web via your glasses and virtual keyboards
• quantum computing
• …

Have you ever considered what could happen when your remotely controlled cab gets hacked? Charles Stross has.

Apparently some people dislike the Scottish accent that crops up in conversations, but I think it is, pardon my French, just couleur locale. Even as a non-native English speaker I had no trouble understanding it.

As this novel and those from the Bob Howard – Laundry series are fast-paced and contain lots of computer jargon (networking, cryptography, video games, virtual worlds, hacking, security, cyberwar, …) they may appeal more to geeks than to the average science-fiction enthusiast.

Conclusion

Rating: 8/10 or . This is science-fiction for geeks.