The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross

As you can tell from my review of Casino Royale, I’ve been a James Bond fan for years. I’m also a fan of the subgenre of espionage fiction that involves the supernatural – ranging from Hellboy to Tim Powers’s brilliant Declare to Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives. I was thus quite delighted by Stross’s latest book – The Jennifer Morgue – a sequel to The Atrocity Archives and one that overtly plays off on not only the Lovecraftian mythos but also the James Bond mythos.

In the universe of The Jennifer Morgue, magic is tied to information science and algorithms can cause breaches between universes, allowing truly nasty creatures – including brain eating zombies – into our universe. Moreover, in true Lovecraftian fashion, there is a much older race (codenamed BLUE HADES) living beneath the sea, in a state of truce with humanity (lucky for us, since they could wipe us out) only as long as we leave the very deep sea to them and as long as we don’t wake some of the even more ancient evils that inhabit the universe. Various secret service organizations across the world secretly deal with the supernatural, including the British “Laundry,” for which Bob Howard works. Howard was a geek who had stumbled onto one of the algorithms that could cause a dimensional breach and was given a choice – come work for the laundry or be terminated; he chose the former.

In the prologue to The Jennifer Morgue, several human agencies tries to raise a sunken Soviet sub which had also been searching for a Cthulian artifact far beneath the sea. The attempt is stopped by BLUE HADES, who objects to humanity coming into their territory. Humanity smartly backs away, not wanting to risk a war that could kill everyone, until, years later, billionaire Ellis Billington attempts to recover the artifact. To protect himself, he has surrounded himself with a geas that causes any agents that approach him to fall into a Bond pattern – only an agent that can follow such a pattern can get close, and Billington controls – or thinks he controls – the geas.

The Laundry sends Bob Howard after Billington, but first mentally entagles him with an assassin from the US equivalent of the laundry, the Black Chamber, named Ramona Random, who isn’t fully human. Bob and Ramona must penetrate Billington’s operation, and as they do, the Bond geas gets stronger, making for plot twists and character actions right out of the Bond mythos, including a monologuing vilian and his pet cat.

As with The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue also has lots of amusing geekiness. This includes a look at the true dangers of PowerPoint (mind-eating zombies that break into our universe during certain slide presentations), various critiques of Windows, a hero who caries around Linux and lots of wonderful utilities on his disguised USB drive, etc. It’s well done and quite funny in parts. As in the previous book, Stross uses the geekiness as well as some pokes at the bureaucracy (though there is less of that in this book) to balance the more serious and often much nastier moments. The Jennifer Morgue is somewhat lighter than The Atrocity Archives – the Bond thread guarantees that – but there are some disturbing, sobering, and even somewhat frightening parts. It’s a worth successor, and I hope Stross writes more here.

The Jennifer Morgue also includes a minor but fun short story, “Pimpf,” in which Howard has to stop a threat within a virtual gaming world, as well as a good afterword on espionage fiction in general and the Bond series in particular.