The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [1]
“This is Stross’s take on the James Bond mythos, a wryly updated undermining of everything Ian Fleming held dear—and it’s great fun!—a Fleming-Lovecraft mash-up, blending the two incompatible universes into one contradictory whole! Superspy versus supernatural horrors . . . The Jennifer Morgue is a rip-roaringly entertaining homage, a highly intelligent high adventure bursting with geek humor and a love for the spy genre.” —SF Site
“The Jennifer Morgue is a work of metafiction, a playful, knowing, and openly self-confessed deconstruction of James Bond novel and movie plots, mocking them and reveling in them at the same time . . . Bob’s innate cynicism comes through in the first-person narration, which deflects the outright silliness of the ideas into the realm of tragic comedy and farce, and avoids the snake pit of superficial spoof . . . It’s a fun book. And it’s funny, too.” —Vector
“A delirious collision of the archetypal hero adventure, our modern obsession with flashy technology, and our perpetual fear of the unspeakable unknown. Stross wraps his reverent irreverence with a not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek warning: Not all our monsters are inhuman soul suckers or tentacle-faced alien overlords; some are auditors.” —Strange Horizons
“This is Charles Stross delivering totally enjoyable reading on all levels . . . The real delight in this book is to see Stross undertake a dead-on cybergeek-Lovecraftian version of a James Bond novel. Stross has a corporate-aged sense of humor, and his jokes are laugh-out-loud funny while his scares are shiver-your-spine scary. And don’t think that Stross has left out his vicious satirical jabs at the political shenanigans that governments keep getting up to . . . Stross delivers big-time. Monsters. Sarcasm. Computer in-jokes. Geek humor. Lovecraft—H. P. Lovecraft. This is to die for.”
—The Agony Column
PRAISE FOR
THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES
A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Recommended Book
A Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book of 2004
One of Locus Online’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
Books of 2004
One of Chronicle’s Best Science Fiction Books of the Year
Includes the Hugo Award-winning “The Concrete Jungle”
“TRULY WEIRD . . . WONDERFUL FUN.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It’s science fiction’s most pleasant surprise of the year . . . Much of the action is completely nuts, but Stross manages to ground it in believability through his protagonist’s deadpan reactions to both insane office politics and supernatural mayhem.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A very breezy, fun, and imaginative novel . . . great fun . . . snappily written and clever throughout . . . recommended.”
—SF Site
“If this keeps up, ‘Strossian’ is going to become a sci-fi adjective . . . Charles Stross writes with intelligence and enjoys lifting the rock to show you what’s crawling underneath . . . The clever results will bring a smile to your face.”
—The Kansas City Star
“A bizarre yet effective yoking of the spy and horror genres . . . In The Atrocity Archives, Stross’s genius lies in devoting fully as much time to the bureaucratic shenanigans of the Laundry as he does to its thaumaturgic mission. What with all the persnickety time charts and useless meetings Howard has to deal with, it’s a wonder the world gets saved at all.”
—Paul Di Filippo, The Washington Post Book World
“Stross shows his versatility with this one, a playful cross between espionage fiction in the manner of Len Deighton and supernatural horror in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft . . . Bob is a thoroughly entertaining protagonist, and his suspension between the highest of high-tech worlds and the almost anachronistic Lovecraftian pantheon makes for a heady blend of fictional treats.”
—Asimov’s Science Fiction
“With often hilarious results, the author mixes the occult and the mundane, the truly weird and the petty . . . The world he creates is wonderful fun.” —Publishers Weekly
“One of the most compelling and intellectually engaging narrative sequences in the SF canon, the logics of demonology and physics in astounding