Interview: Charles Stross
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Today we’ve got an interview with award-winning science fiction author Charles Stross. His latest book, The Rhesus Chart, is the fifth volume in The Laundry Files, a series that blends spy thrillers, Lovecraftian horror, and workplace humor.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and his guests discuss various geeky topics.
Your new book is called The Rhesus Chart, and it’s the fifth book in the Laundry Files series. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the basic premise of the series?
Sure. The basic premise of the series is sort of a mash-up. It’s a humorous horror subsection spy thriller, where the British Secret Service are protecting us from Cthulhu and the Old Ones and other Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space-time. Part of its premise is that magic exists but is essentially a branch of applied mathematics. If you solve the right theorem, creatures elsewhere in the multiverse will hear and possibly obey, giving rise to a field known by its practitioners as applied computational demonology.
How did you first get the idea to combine spy thrillers and Lovecraftian horror?
Let me rewind to 1992, when I began writing a short story entitled “A Colder War,” which eventually surfaced in print around 1998. It’s one of the longest stories I’ve ever written. Now, “A Colder War” started when I was looking at At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which had some moments of sublime horror in it. It’s one of his classic stories.
However, Lovecraft’s horror has very much been devalued in recent decades. It’s reached a point where we have plush Cthulhu dolls and bedroom slippers, where it’s suitable subject matter for jokes or for comics. It lacks the level of cosmic horror it originally came with.
In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was trying to think: How do you put the horror back into H.P. Lovecraft? And I suddenly realized, you mate it with something that truly is horrifying. 1992 was just after the end of the Cold War, and if you were alive back then, you lived with the ever-present knowledge that vast intelligences thousands of miles away might at any moment be making decisions that would unleash the power of a thousand suns—basically, melt the skin from your face, and kill everybody around you, and destroy everything you hold dear, for entirely abstract reasons relating to an ideological struggle that never really touches you directly. There was something really terrifying about the Cold War that traumatized the generations that lived through it.
In “A Colder War,” I positioned it as a sort of a sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, in which a vast alien city is discovered, abandoned, in the Antarctic. I posited that, if this had actually happened, over the next decade or so, there would have been first an archeological race and then an arms race, as various global powers sought to steal alien supertechnology, the tools of an extinct race, and put them to use as weapons.
One thing leads to another, and it doesn’t end well. World War Three breaks out, Cthulhu himself is deployed as a weapon from the crypt in the Urals, everybody dies horribly, or worse, wishes they could die. This worked really, really well as a horror story. It’s still anthologized to this day on a regular basis. But, while I wanted to do more with this idea, I couldn’t do it in that particular setting. It was too dark.
Now, if you’re dealing with horror, one way of getting around the idea of it being horrifying—the subject material—is to add some snarky humor to it. We’ve noticed, for example, Jim Butcher do it with the Harry Dresden books. What I was doing with The Laundry Files was, I decided to go at it with situational humor. You take a setting, in this case, a somewhat grungy, down-at-heels, peeling-paint British government agency, dealing with something obscure and quite terrifying, and parachute into it somebody who is totally inappropriate, utterly unsuited to that sort of office culture.
In this case, Bob Howard is sort of a sandal-wearing, slashdot-reading hacker-geek, circa late-1990s dot-com startup culture. He’s been conscripted, effectively, into a branch of the British Secret Service protecting us from the scum of the multiverse. Almost a Men In Black scenario, except very, very different, in MacGuffin, as to what is going on and how it’s run.
He’s flailing around, gradually trying to figure out what is going on and what his role is in all this, as he becomes aware that the shadows are lengthening and some very, very nasty things are on their way to make life hellish all around for everybody.
A large part of the plot armature that the series revolves around is an eventuality that the British government had codenamed “Case Nightmare Green.” The stars are coming into correct alignment for the return of the Elder Gods—H.P. Lovecraft’s alien super-civilization of eons past, who previously owned and occupied this planet and are now returning, and will drive us all insane or kill us, or just sweep us from their halls like the vermin we are. The Laundry’s job is to defend the realm, keep the public from becoming too panicked over what’s going on, and try to find a solution to what is probably the end of the world that is heading towards them like the onrushing lights of a train at the end of a tunnel.
I first became acquainted with your work through your Accelerando stories, which go from before the singularity to after the singularity, and tell what it’s like to live through that period. And it occurred to me, with The Laundry Files, it seems like a similar thing, with the Cthulhu reign, where it seems like, with Case Nightmare Green, this is going to be a story that starts out before Cthulhu comes and ends after Cthulhu has come. Do you see any similarities there?
Quite possibly. The key similarity here is they’re both science fiction, and they’re both written in that form of science fiction that is the literature of disruption. In many forms of literature, it’s against a setting which is essentially unchanged, but a story—your classic “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” story in any random genre, be it romance, or historical, or just a mainstream novel—doesn’t necessarily change the universe it’s set in, whereas, there’s a particular flavor of science fiction where nothing is ever the same after the climax of the story that is narrated within it.
The Lord of the Rings is a classic example of fantasy literature where there is this return to the status quo ante after the huge events. My way of thinking is: Much of science fiction assumes that there will never be a return to status quo ante after the events of the story. There is that in common between Accelerando and The Laundry Series. Although I am still quite a long way from getting to the end of The Laundry Series, and I’m not sure whether it’s technically the same genre as Accelerando. I do more than one type of fiction, and it does actually feel very different to me.
Did you plot out the whole series ahead of time? At what stage did you plot out the various books, and how far ahead are you currently plotted?
When I began writing it, circa 1999, I wrote a short novel called Atrocity Archive. Around 2000, I acquired a literary agent and sold my first novel, Singularity Sky, which came out from Ace in 2003. My agent and I were getting to know each other and I sent her the Accelerando stories and I also sent her Atrocity Archive. And her immediate reaction to Atrocity Archive was, “This is great fun, but it’s commercially not viable. It’s impossible to sell. Nobody will publish it. They won’t know what genre it is, to begin with. Is it horror? Is it humor? Is it a spy thriller? Is it SF? Is it fantasy?” So, for a while, it looked like it wasn’t actually going to be published at all. I managed to get it serialized in a short-lived, obscure Scottish SF magazine around 2002.
In 2003, a small American publisher, Golden Griffin, approached me for a book, and they wanted a bit more than just this short novel. So, I had a novella called “The Concrete Jungle,” and they published them together as The Atrocity Archives, the first book in the series. It looked for a while as if it was just going to be a one-off.<
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Then, something really, really weird happened. “The Concrete Jungle” got shortlisted for a Hugo award. And then it won a Hugo award. Now, when that happened, my agent got interested suddenly and realized that there was a market for this. So we sorted out a deal whereby I would write a sequel to it. From there, it sort of snowballed.
Now, when you’ve written a paranormal spy thriller in the style of Len Deighton, if you want to do a sequel, there’s only one place to go, and that’s Ian Fleming. And I’m afraid I burned my brain out on Bond movies. I went through them back-to-back—about sixteen of them in four weeks—also rereading a bunch of the Bond novels and biographies of Ian Fleming. I actually had flow charts of the structure of the opening sequence in each Bond movie. At this point, I sort of dropped Case Nightmare Green in as a throwaway in “The Concrete Jungle,” the second novella of the series. I gradually began realizing that there has to be more than this.
So, the next book deal out, there’s a contract with another Laundry novel in it, and that one begins to riff off Case Nightmare Green explicitly. That was The Fuller Memorandum. By the time I’d got through The Fuller Memorandum, I knew what the next novel would be. By the time I got through The Apocalypse Codex, I knew a fair bit about The Rhesus Chart, and I’m now actually plotting about three or four books ahead. With an overall backbone to the series of, maybe, eight or nine central novels and a number of side branches off the tree, which, for something that was originally going to be a short novel on its own, and then at best maybe a trilogy, has just been growing.
What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way? I saw you posted on your Reddit Ask Me Anything—you said “I was staring down the barrel of a gun loaded with ‘How about we just cancel the series right now?’ and the quickest way to dodge the bullet was to write the next novel a year early.
Well, that’s one way to dodge the bullet. The reason for that cancellation was because, being a bit burned out at the time, I decided I needed a year away from having to write a novel. I’d been trying to write two novels a year for several years, and you will just burn out if you try and do that.
So, I brought together a short story collection called Wireless, and, as with any short story collection, the readers who’ve already read all your stories need an added incentive to look at it. So I sat down and began writing a novella, which was titled “Palimpsest,” about the time patrol police, because I hadn’t read a good time patrol novella in years and thought, “Well, hey! Nobody’s doing it, so why don’t I?” Anyway, because this was the one story in the collection that hadn’t been sold before, or published, or edited, I thought I should run it past my agent. Her reaction to it was pretty much electric. She said, “This is brilliant! It’s the first part of a novel. How about you write the rest of this novel, and I can send it in instead of that Laundry novel you were going to write, and you can cancel it?” And that’s when I sat down and wrote the Laundry novel in four weeks—four weeks at fourteen hours a day—because at that point I realized I was committed to the series. I hadn’t quite realized how serious I was about it before. And the irony is, “Palimpsest” won a Hugo award as well, and, sooner or later, I’m actually going to finish the novel of which it’s the first third. There’s another timeline in which I did finish the novel of “Palimpsest,” and the other Laundry novel never got written.
That brings us to the newest Laundry novel, which is The Rhesus Chart. Do you want to tell us about that?
Sure. I got bored doing tribute novels to British spy thriller authors. I’d gone through Len Deighton and Ian Fleming, Anthony Price and Peter O’Donnell, and I decided it was time to actually stop going after individual authors and go after themes. So, the next few Laundry novels are all about urban fantasy subgenres.
I’ve done a novella about unicorns—that’s “Equoid,” which is on the Hugo shortlist. The Rhesus Chart is a vampire novel. By way of background, I should mention that our narrator, Bob, is married. He’s about fortyish at this point in the series. He’s been aging one year for every year through the course of writing the books. And he’s married to Mo—Dominique O’Brian—whose job description is Combat Epistemologist. They’re out having dinner at a restaurant, and the book opens “‘Don’t be silly, Bob,’ said Mo, ‘Everybody knows vampires don’t exist.’” Well, yeah, you might think everybody knows vampires don’t exist, and we can be pretty sure they don’t—we don’t see big piles of dead bodies everywhere. But if vampires don’t exist, why are we all so certain they don’t exist? Could it be that there are vampires, there’s just very, very few of them and they’re very, very careful about covering up their tracks? The premise of The Rhesus Chart is, in the universe of the Laundry novels, there are various very, very quiet supernatural beings doing their best to keep out of the public gaze. Everybody around Bob is so convinced that vampires don’t exist, that Bob, being a contrarian, decides to go and prove that they don’t exist, or at least, set up an experiment whereby he will get five sigma accuracy to lack of signal for vampires. And, much to his surprise and gradual horror, he discovers that, unfortunately, he’s wrong.
It’s funny, because, in this book, Bob gets assigned—he has to do research on vampires, which consists of reading Brian Lumley, Anne Rice, Jim Butcher, and Laurell K. Hamilton. What’s your take on the state of vampire fiction, and those authors in particular?
Well, it did come out of a certain creeping affection, but the thing is, there’s been such a huge boom in vampire fiction. Now, it’s probably unfair for me to single them out, because … Let me rewind a little bit. Arguably, the modern vampire book dates to the late 1970s, An Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice. That was a classic of its form. Prior to that, there were isolated vampire novels, things like Salem’s Lot by Steven King, but they’re all very much in the tradition of a vampire as the adversary or monster. Interview with a Vampire was arguably the first one to get under the vampire’s skin and use the vampire as a sympathetic protagonist.
Then, we move forward a decade, and Laurell K. Hamilton pretty much single-handedly drags the vampire story, kicking and screaming, into what is now recognizable as the subgenre of paranormal romance. Here, the psycho-sexual symbolism of a vampire is changed, and rather than being a metaphor for disease or for rape, it’s used as a vehicle for exploring issues of consent, domination, and BDSM practices.
I decided to go in an entirely different direction in the Laundry books, which is epidemiology and parasitology. Although, to be fair, a similar field is being plowed by Mira Grant, or Seanan McGuire, as she’s really called, who’s been doing zombies and is now doing other parasites as a horror format, using much the same approach—let’s look at it from a medical standpoint … What was the question again?
Just Brian Lumley, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher.
Yeah. The reason these authors get mentioned explicitly in The Rhesus Chart is because Bob has just been assigned a bunch of background reading by a committee, because, let’s face it, the first thing a civil service department does on discovering a hitherto unstudied phenomenon is establish a committee to investigate it, determine what is known about it, set standards for dealing with it. And, of course, vampires don’t exist, everybody knows vampires don’t exist, everybody is absolutely certain vampires don’t exist, and the people on the committee … Bob is the only one on the committee cleared for knowledge that vampires do, in fact, exist. It is considered secret at this point, and the others don’t take it terribly seriously, including the chair of the committee, who assigns him his reading matter, his homework, mostly to shut him up.
One thing that I thought was interesting about this book is that vampirism is not spread by being bitten or something like that, but by an epiphany, or something that you come to understand.
Actually, that’s a side effect of the way magic works in the Laundry universe. In this instance, I mentioned magic is a branch of mathematics. There are some people who are very talented practitioners or very effective math
ematicians, who can actually carry out magical operations in their brains.
Most people, Bob included, usually go about it using a computer and setting up various bits of software applications to do the job for them. You really don’t want to go around messing with the apps on Bob’s smartphone if it falls into your possession. But in the case of the vampires in The Rhesus Chart, they’re part of a fairly high-powered programming scheme working on high-frequency trading algorithms within an investment bank. One of their members comes across an interesting visualization tool.
Now, I mentioned there are Lovecraftian horrors in this series. There’s a whole bunch of creatures out there who love nothing better than to chow down on an unprotected human brain. Think the wrong thoughts, and you can attract them. Vampirism is not so much an epiphany as something that latches onto you after you experience that epiphany. Let’s just say, vampirism is a particularly parasitic disease. Most sane people who succumb to vampirism just kill themselves, which is one reason why everyone knows vampires don’t exist. The only people who are willing to be a vampire and stay with the deal are pretty much psychopaths.
Speaking of that, there’s a character in this book, Oscar, who’s a corporate guy. He’s described as being an “apex predator sociopath.” I thought it was really interesting—I’ve heard you talk about how you predicted, in your Halting State series, that corporations would start intentionally recruiting sociopaths to work for them, and that actually has started to happen.
Well, I wouldn’t take Oscar too seriously, but I was doing a bit of reading at the time about the sociology of the high-end investment banking culture in the city of London, and it’s really quite terrifying. These are not people who should be trusted with a pair of scissors, frankly. Personality-wise, they’re very, very driven, very, very competitive, reasonably bright, fairly well-socialized for men brought up in a single-sex boarding school culture. They’re shoved into a pressure cooker, and they’re set to play a game for sixteen hours a day where the point scoring system they get is measured in how many millions of pounds their bonus payment is. And these people are running our economy! They’ve got so much money floating around the hedge funds that they operate that governments provide them with the playing field they desire, because they’re too terrified of scaring them away. Currently, the British revenue base—we still have an industrial sector, we still make satellites and cars and all sorts of stuff, but the investment banking sector accounts for a bigger share of GDP than manufacturing. I believe it’s the same in the United States. There is something very, very wrong when what is essentially a parasitic function, namely investment, becomes the largest component of the economy. And we’re back to parasites again.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54 Page 26