★★★★★ This changes everything

The Delirium Brief

Charles Stross

Bob is back. As of 26-Feb-2024, The Delirium Brief is the last novel in Charles Stross's Laundry Files narrated by Bob Howard. To be sure, the conceit that these novels are the work diaries of Laundry operatives wears thin in this particular one. Some of it is told from points of view that Bob is fairly unlikely to know about, particularly those of Mo, Seph, Iris Carpenter (you have forgotten who she is, haven't you?), Mhari Murphy, and others. Yes, the gang's all here! Just think of it as a multiple point-of-view novel, a common format in science fiction, rather than someone's work diary.

The Case Nightmare Rainbow suite of catastrophes is breaking the world as we know it. Case Nightmare Green -- the weakening of the magical walls of the world by all the thinking we and our computers are doing, which began to show up in the form of superheroes popping up all over in The Annihilation Score -- is proceeding apace. The consequences of Case Nightmare Red, the invasion of Leeds by an Alfar host in The Nightmare Stacks are still very much with us. Thanks to those events the Laundry is exposed, and very unpopular, being held to blame for the Leeds catastrophe. Even worse, Raymond Schiller and Global Promise Ministries are somehow back -- still trying to open the way for the Sleeper in the Pyramid.

It's a disaster -- literally. Mahogany Row, AKA The Invisible College, must make some difficult bargains to allow Britain to survive in some form. The Senior Auditor, Michael Armstrong, is the main face of this wheeling and dealing.

If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire (and who isn't?), you might think of The Delirium Brief as the novel that contains the Red Wedding. No, I'm not telling you that any of your heroes dies -- nothing that specific. I'm telling you that everyone's plot armor is gone. All the usual certainties you expect to have in book eight of a series are now in doubt, except for those that are completely gone. The Delirium Brief is the essential prolog to The New Management.

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