" Why write a Bond/Cthulhu thriller?"

[pynchonoid]

 Why write a Bond/Cthulhu thriller?
Charlie "Jennifer Morgue" Stross was recently
interviewed by John "Old Man's War" Scalzi, explaining
his motives in writing a Bond-meets-Cthulhu
spy-thriller:

    The Jennifer Morgue is my latest novel, and it's
the second in a series that follow the misadventures
of a slashdot-reading sandal-wearing hacker-geek who's
fallen into the wrong universe and can't get out. We
first met "Bob Howard" (as he calls himself in these
stories) in The Atrocity Archives. It turns out that
magic exists; but it's a branch of applied
mathematics. Computers being gadgets that can be used
for theorem solving at high speed, Bob stumbled across
this the hard way at university -- and only just
survived long enough to be drafted by the Laundry, a
shadowy British government agency for defending us
from the scum of the multiverse.

    And by "scum", I mean "scum". Or ichor. Or
bubbling vile tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime.
We are in H. P. Lovecraft territory here, and the
horrid truth is that the stars are due to come right
in just another twelve yearsor so, at which point
we'll have Cthulhu to deal with. And Bob is expected
to deal with this on a civil service salary, with
matrix management and paperclip audits on top.

    In The Jennifer Morgue, Bob is pitched into a role
that he simply isn't suited for. He's a crap driver
(and knows it), doesn't know how to tie a bow tie
(he's more at home in a Linux t-shirt), and is just
barely competent enough with a handgun to avoid
shooting himself in the foot by accident.
Unfortunately for him, he is a competent computational
demonologist, which is why he's sent to the Caribbean
to deal with enigmatic billionaire Ellis Billington,
who is running the sort of caper that Her Majesty's
Government would usually send James Bond to deal with
(if being James Bond wasn't an automatic "do not hire"
flag these days). But there's a catch (in fact there
are several): Billington's occult defenses include a
geas that can only be penetrated by a certain famous
spy. So what's a hacker to do? 

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/06/why_write_a_bondcthu.html




 
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