I’ve been a fan of Charlie Stross’ Laundry Files for over a decade now. This has given me plenty of time to watch the series evolve. Like many other works that began as satire aimed at government bureaucracy, it has grown increasingly cynical as real life has become harder and harder to parody. In particular, there was a rough trilogy linked to the original Laundry Files stories under the title of Tales of the New Management that hit me as painfully cynical, to the point that it started to impact my enjoyment.*
A Conventional Boy is still a satire and still rather cynical, but compared to the last few books, it’s considerably scaled back. Additionally, the phenomena Stross is poking here is less recent—the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s. I guess there’s someone who is slightly too young to have lived through that, it doesn’t give me the same ‘satire exhaustion’ I experienced with evil news magnates and corrupt government leaders that belong to mal-aligned powers.
The distance helps.
If you’re familiar with the Laundry Files, you’ll know that ‘magic’ is actually a branch of advanced applied mathematics; a link that ties the worst kinds of magic to advances in computer science. In the world of the Laundry Files, as computational power has grown in line with Moore’s Law, so has the likelihood of summoning unstoppable Lovecraftian horrors. This has meant that the spooks focused on keeping magic hidden from the general public in the latter decades of the 20th century have spent a disproportionate amount of time dealing with a certain brand of people—nerds. So many nerds.
Poor Derek Reilly copped the short end of the stick on that one. As a young autistic bloke geeking out over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties, he caught the attention of the wrong people and ended up in Camp Sunshine, a compound owned by The Laundry that is used to contain and deprogram cult-followers. But Derek wasn’t really dangerous. Derek wasn’t even that memorable. Derek ended up forgotten.
Despite his confinement, Derek never loses his love of DnD, and for years he acts as DM for a massive mail-lead campaign with a dedicated following in the nerd-world. But when Derek learns that the DiceCon 16 convention is happening nearby—and that Camp Sunshine is being temporarily relocated—he does something that he’s only dreamed of in the last twenty five years: he slips out of the camp so he can attend. Unfortunately for Derek, he’s not the only one with a underground following in the role-playing world; The Omphalos Corporation’s marketing team is also in attendance with a game of their own, and their brand is far less “cult-following” and much more “we worship the horrors you’re all trying to avoid.”
So for the first time in decades, Derek finds himself making friends. But he also finds himself LARPing to save his life. Better keep those dice at the ready!
I really greatly enjoyed this one. I found Derek to be a very endearing kind of protagonist, and despite the horrors I knew he was about to face, I was too happy to see him start of come out of his shell and socialize. I also loved Stross’ portrayal of convention culture and its inherent weirdness. While I’ve never been deeply immersed in that world myself, many of my interests are tangential to it**, and I’ve noticed that these spaces can be quite odd—odd enough that I could easily believe they’d be fertile ground for a cult movement. Or other phenomena.
A Conventional Boy is a pretty quick read—more novella length than a full novel. I was able to get through it over the space of an evening***. It’s not quite Laundry Files at its peak, but again, it’s a hell of a lot less dreary and cynical than some of the other more recent entries, and I found that very refreshing.
