★★★★☆ 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

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