★★★★☆ A story for Laundry insiders

A Conventional Boy

Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy is a novella set in Charles Stross's LaundryVerse. The Laundry Files is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series. My opinion of the Laundry Files is not universally shared. They're targeted at a particular subculture, a subculture of which I am a charter member. To wit: I have degrees in Biochemistry and Mathematics, have been programming computers since I was knee-high to a grasshopper*, and was at one time an enthusiastic player of Text-based computer games. Humanities-oriented fans of F&SF tend to find the Laundry Files daunting.

A Conventional Boy is the story of Derek Reilly, who readers of the Laundry Files met (under the name Derek Blacker, and also the handle the DM = the Dungeon Master) in The Labyrinth Index. "Derek ... has spent his entire adult life in prison for playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not his fault: it was 1984, the Satanic D&D panic was in full swing, and Mistakes Were Made (by the Laundry)." The prison is Camp Sunshine, which we previously heard of in The Delirium Brief. Derek still plays D&D -- he's a trusty at Camp Sunshine with the job of writing the camp newsletter, and has mail privileges, which he uses to run a Play By Mail D&D campaign. He also runs sandbox tabletop campaigns with inmates. Most inmates of Camp Sunshine are forbidden from communicating with the outside world in any way. Derek is not exactly lucky, but you will learn that the world tends to arrange itself improbably so that his plans work.

Derek has a set of D&D dice that he made himself from materials gathered around Camp Sunshine. Magic permeates Camp Sunshine, and Derek's dice are magic. They allow him to accomplish such feats as correctly guessing eight-digit serial numbers, and to design D&D campaigns whose backstories match highly classified Laundry codeword files. Using them he escapes Camp Sunshine and makes his way to a gaming convention, where he has adventures and comes to the more pointed attention of the Laundry, setting him up for his participation in The Nightmare Stacks and The Delirium Brief.

On his blog Stross has stated that A Conventional Boy is a standalone novella and suggested it could be used as an entry to the series. I personally think this would be a bad idea. A Conventional Boy contains many references to other LaundryVerse stories, even the recent New Management series. I believe that anyone who attempts A Conventional Boy as a standalone will miss many important points and be confused by the LaundryVerse. Indeed, I would recommand reading A Conventional Boy only after the previous twelve novels.

That said, it was fun, and I enjoyed it. It is not my favorite of the LaundryVerse stories, or even of the novellas, but it was good.

Tor bulked out the novella with two previously published Laundry Files stories, Overtime and Down on the Farm, which I will review separately.

*Not literally true

A Conventional Boy on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Alana in show-biz

Saga, Volume 4 Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator) If you're like me, your first question on seeing Saga, Volume 4 is, "Who is that woman on the cover?" That, my dear friend, is Alana. About halfway through Volume 3 Alana and Marko had a brief conversation about The Circuit, which is a performance venue of some kind that people can tune into with a virtual reality helmet. Before she became a soldier, Alana harbored ambitions of performing on the Circuit. Now that their lethal pursuit has been temporarily distracted or put out of commission, they're focused on making some kind of living. Marko encouraged her to audition. So now Alana is performing on the Circuit, and what you see on the cover is her bewigged with wings bound and hidden in order to perform. She's the family breadwinner. Marko is a househusband, staying home and taking care of Hazel. The Marko-Alana-Hazel story in this volume is a bit dull. Without giving away any spoilers, it's kin...

★★★☆☆ Lacking the common touch

100 Selected Poems: John Keats John Keats Well, that was disappointing. I am ready to admit that this is an "It's not you -- it's me," case. Since I suspect that some other readers, even readers who love poetry, may likewise find Keats disappointing, I will try to explain why he disappointed me. Thus you can judge whether you, too, might suffer the same fate. First thing to say is that the young John Keats was not really that great a poet. (By "young", I mean up to and including Endymion .) That, of course, is a judgment many readers will disagree with, but don't discount it! It was Keats 's own judgment. In his preface to Endymion , he says "I apologize for the lousy work, but I just had to get this out of my system." (Obviously I'm paraphrasing.) You may dismiss that as false modesty, but I am more inclined to accept it as the judgment of a man who knew what he was talking about, especially because the quality of his poetry abr...

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman , Steven Weinberg , and Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...

★★★★☆ Courage and principle, betrayed by history

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South Elizabeth R Varon My first knowledge of Confederate general James Longstreet came as a result of reading Michael Shaara 's splendid historical novel The Killer Angels , which Elizabeth Varon , in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South describes thus A finely grained fictional account of the Gettysburg campaign, the book conjured the strained relationship of Longstreet and Lee, casting Longstreet as a prescient pragmatist oriented toward the future, who symbolized modern warfare, and Lee as the prideful romantic, backward-looking and resigned to fate. Why had I never heard of Longstreet? Because the USA doesn't want to remember him. At the end of the Civil War, Longstreet, unlike the huge majority of Confederate officers, accepted defeat. Longstreet was a great friend of Union general Ulysses S Grant, and he was inspired by Grant's generosity in victory to behave in such a way as to d...

★☆☆☆☆ Petty Evil 101: Corporate edition

Power Jeffrey Pfeffer I read this eleven years ago (21-Sep-2011). At the time, I wrote this brief note to myself: Based on the first chapter or two, a singularly repulsive little book. It's basically "Petty Evil 101: Corporate edition". Amazon review Goodreads review

★★★☆☆ This what it feels like to do science

The Bone Wars Erin Evan Erin Evan is a gifted story-teller, but an inexperienced novelist. In The Bone Wars she has written a good book. It could be better, and I am confident that her future books will be. The Bone Wars is principally about four paleontologists, grad student Sarah Connell, her PhD advisor Sean Oliphant, her mentor Derek Farnsworth, and teenage intern Molly Wilder. The story is told in the first person by these four characters, but Molly is the central character. The first thing I loved about The Bone Wars was its feeling of authenticity. Evan is herself a fossil-hunter. Even if no one told you this, you would recognize it. I was captivated by Molly's account of a long day spent lying on her side, working patiently to free a fossil femur from the rock in which it is embedded. If you have ever done research, you will recognize the peculiar combination of tedium and excitement that accompanies most research. I would have cal...

★★★★☆ Fantasy of a corrupt golden age

The Familiar Leigh Bardugo The publisher describes Leigh Bardugo 's The Familiar as a "historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age". That description is accurate, but gives a misleading idea of the book. The Spanish Golden Age or Siglo de Oro is a name given to the period from 1492 - 1659, during which Spanish art, culture, and political power flourished. It was also the height of persecution of anyone suspected of heresy or Jewish ancestry. "Golden" is not the adjective that will come to mind as you read. The main point-of-view character is Luzia Cotado, a scullion in the household of Valentina and Marius Ordoño. Luzia is the orphan child or parents who were secretly Jewish. From her Jewish ancestors she inherits the ability to make "milagritos". ("Milagrito" is a diminutive of "milagro" -- miracle, thus "milagrito" is "little miracle". There is a lot of Spanish in The Familiar . You don't nee...

★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed Mira Grant **Spoilers for Feed follow ** (Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout , but I will protect those in spoiler tags. Fed is an alternative ending for Feed . It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella. When I reviewed Feed , I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel. I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing ar...

★★★★☆ Clothes make the Victorian girl

The Case of the Missing Marquess Nancy Springer The Case of the Missing Marquess is the first book in Nancy Springer 's Enola Holmes series . Thus, its main business is to tell us who and what kind of person Enola Holmes is. Mystery purists (I am not one) may be disappointed by the shallowness of the mystery of the Missing Marquess, which is less than half of the book and which Enola solves almost instantly simply by virtue of being a teenage kid herself (like the Marquess -- well, actually, he's 12, but close enough) and guessing correctly what he would do. The much bigger mystery, which is not solved here, concerns Enola's mother Lady Eudoria Holmes, who is also the widowed mother of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Lady Eudoria is known to associate with suffragettes, and to wear "rationals" -- that is, comfortable and practical clothing of a type that is widely considered inappropriate women's wear in Victorian society. On Enola's 14th birthday Lady Eud...

★★★☆☆ Good-bye Earl, or Small powers do great things

Nettle & Bone T Kingfisher I believe the first T. Kingfisher book I ever read was A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking , and the second Minor Mage . (I had, however, read some of her middle grade works published as Ursula Vernon , and I was aware that Kingfisher and Vernon are the same person.) Nettle & Bone feels to me very like those two novels, but with a little of the joy let out. Both A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (irresistible title!) and Minor Mage feature child wizards with very limited powers who are called on to do far more than anyone has a right to expect of them, and who rise to the challenge. The first quarter of Nettle & Bone is exceedingly grim. It's the all-too-familiar story of a wife suffering, as the publisher's summary says, "at the hands of a powerful and abusive" husband. She's a princess and he's a prince, but that matters only in that it accen...

Search This Blog