★★★★★ The Fairy Princess and the Vampire Sorcerer

The Nightmare Stacks

Charles Stross, Gideon Emery (narrator)

You already know the vampire sorcerer -- you met him in The Rhesus Chart. He is Dr Alex Schwartz, who, until he caught a wee case of vampirism, worked in a quantitative analysis group at a major bank in the City of London. Since then he's become an agent of Her Majesty's Occult Secret Services, AKA The Laundry, where he has been learning about computational demonology -- sorcery. The Fairy Princess is not yet familiar to you. She is Agent First of Spies and Liars of the Morningstar Empire, but we will just call her Cassie. (Actually, Cassie and Agent First are not quite the same person, but it would spoil too much to explain. Read it!)

Charles Stross's Laundry Files is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series, and The Nightmare Stacks might be my favorite novel in the series (difficult choice, that). This novel is the first real "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment in the series. On his blog Stross has argued that any Fantasy/Science Fiction Series that deals with big events must eventually abandon the position of being different only secretly from our reality and break out into a frankly divergent alternative history. (I suspect that he was thinking of Harry Potter when he wrote this, but that may be my imagination.) Arguably that happened already in The Annihilation Score, but The Nightmare Stacks is the novel in which the Laundry is exposed to the public at large.

Alex and Cassie turn out to be really entertaining characters. They're both surprisingly badass. Alex, as a skilled mathematician and programmer, turns out to be a truly dangerous sorcerer. Indeed, there is a funny point where he views the much more experienced magi of the Morningstar Empire with contempt because of the crudity of their methods.

The alfär are stupidly wasteful, throwing raw thaum currents at each other as if they don’t understand the elegant mathematical underpinnings of magic: How inelegant, his inner detached observer thinks scornfully as the new macro he triggered begins to count up from zero.

Cassie, too, is a lovely character. She has a weakness that she turns into a strength.

And there is indeed a romance. It's an unconventional romance. OK -- obviously it's unconventional -- there are no fairy princesses or vampire sorcerers in real life. (At least, that is my fervent conviction.) But there *ARE* fairy princesses and vampires in fiction, and you will find, I think, that Alex and Cassie defy any expectations you may have formed based on that fiction. Although I find most romance novels tedious, this one appealed to me.

The Nightmare Stacks is a big story with great characters. One of the best, if not the best, of the Laundry Files novels.

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