The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

I've been enjoying this series for a while now, although I'd like to knock a couple of broad criticisms out of the way first.  Many of them, especially the middle set, appear to have been first or 1.5 drafts, with all the fluff and plot holes that entails.  For some time, they also tended to rely on the whole "oh God there's a portal to somewhere gotta close it before the forces of evil get through" climax.  Some of the characterization were spotty, and they tended to end on anticlimaxes. 

This one may be the best yet, though.  I want to talk about why I enjoyed it so much, so I'll be discussing previous events freely; if you are somehow wanting to start a series on the ninth installment then maybe read no further, but also if that's the case then what is wrong with you?  Don't do that.  Although, in some sense, this is more of a reboot of the series than a continuation.

You might recall in the last Laundry Files book, the Laundry sort of . . . ended?  Faced with an invasion by the unspeakably evil Sleeper in the Pyramid, they decided that the only way to survive another day was to make a deal with the, er, speakably evil Fabian Everyman, the avatar of the Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep.  The Sleeper planned on using his brain-eating parasites to lobotomize and/or kill everybody in the UK; the Black Pharaoh, on the other hand, will only do that to some people, and has no particular problem with keeping humans around in general, as long as they aren't too annoying and worship him unquestionably.  Narrator Mhari states it best by pointing out that he's like a beekeeper who enjoys honey - he's not too interested in any individual bee but will keep the hive going so long as he's getting what he wants out of it.

Narratively, this was absolutely the right direction to take the series in, but it also means that it's practically a new series at this point.  The Laundry Files started out as more of a bleak office satire that contained supernatural elements.  The point was that an occult defense government agency was still a government agency, which meant annoyances about budgeting, paperwork, personnel management and other actual real life concerns.  For instance, in the fourth book, Bob Howard is surprisingly concerned that he won't be able to get approval for a rental car and a couple of take out pizzas without prior authorization while he's on a covert mission that ends up saving the entire world.  In this one, the protagonists end up running the sort of mission that you might see in any other occult/urban fantasy type of novel, the sort that costs tens of millions of pounds and involves a militarized Concorde jet, massive special operations and military deployment.  Not only would this have been impossible in any of the previous books, merely suggesting it would have been the subject of black humor in the office.

That said, it still works here because it fits in with the Black Pharaoh's overarching goals.  He's willing to expend that level of resources on this particular mission because it's important to him; other areas of the government are of less concern to him and he's deliberately keeping the UK on an austerity budget because he's got very little concern about whether the population is happy or not.  In the early section of the book I thought that Stross might be making some jokes about Trump/Johnson style buffoonish political figures based on some remarks that the Pharaoh makes about Jews, but it turns out that he's actually incredibly intelligent and goal focused.  (It's not clear if he's making the remarks based on genuine ignorance of merely human religious beliefs, if he's doing it on purpose to wind people up, or if he has some sort of other inscrutable reason for it.)

In any case, although the Black Pharaoh is one of the first to awaken and is at present one of the most powerful of the entities that the Laundry has been expecting since the very beginning of the series, he's not the only one.  In the last book, it was apparent that there was something in the United States so terrifying that the Sleeper in the Pyramid had been forced to flee.  It turns out . . . I mean, it's Cthulhu.  It's always Cthulhu.  Here she's portrayed as insectile rather than cephalopodian, but still lies not dead but dreaming and her followers are interested in waking her up fully.  To that end they'll probably have to disassemble most of the inner Solar System to get enough computing power, something familiar to readers of Stross' own Accelerando.  It's unclear if this is actually any sort of physical threat for the Black Pharaoh (I'd guess probably not, since he seems to be at least somewhat open to this plan at some point), but at least at the moment he wants to keep his stuff in the inner Solar System, and so he's interested in delaying or denying this event.  Further entangling this is the fact that these two entities are nominal allies against the truly apocalyptic Cold Ones, whatever the hell those are supposed to be.  Thus begins the Cold War between the New Management of the UK and the Cthulhu worshiping new OPA overlords of the US, as neither side wants the other to do just as they like but they can't openly attack each other, and they're also at least sort of on the same side anyway.

The premise of the Laundry books has always had an undercurrent of bleakness that's right out front and center here.  The Elder Gods are coming back, there's nothing we can do about it, the best we can hope for is that humanity doesn't go completely extinct, and even that might not actually be the worst possible outcome.  Nonetheless in the first couple of books they managed to forestall the inevitable for long enough that even now you can see that most of the characters can't see that it's over.  Mhari is a literal vampire, used as an execution method by her tyrannical overlord, and must obey him without question.  She'd probably kill herself, but the Audit Committee has let her in on their "Extended Continuity Operations" plan - not that any of that's explained, but apparently that's the only thing that is giving anyone reason to carry on at the moment.  It's also unclear if this intended to somehow defeat the New Management, to just survive it, or who knows what.

In form this book is most similar to the fourth book, as it involves a semi-covert operation into America and conflict with the agents and avatars of the more or less openly evil American occult agencies.  The key differences here are that the OPA is now running the country, and it's Mhari narrating the parts that need narration.

I wasn't sure this would work, but she turns out to be a compelling viewpoint character.  Bob's interactions with her have always been heavily influenced by their prior ill-fated love affair, but we saw some of the true hints of her character when she had more screentime in Rhesus Chart and she continues to be a focused executive with imposter syndrome about her own competence.  Some of the viewpoint characters who aren't Bob tend to be too Bob-like to be plausible, so this was a pleasant surprise.  Although, if I'm not mistaken, each novel has had increasing third-person chapters as well, and I tend to think at this point they're typically the strongest.  It may be time to just ditch the first-person narration and embrace omniscience; it's certainly thematic.

Mhari's mission is to find the President of the United States and return him to power if possible, and if not return him to the UK where he can lead a government in exile.  Why, you ask?  The OPA has mind-whammied the entire US to forget they have a President, and they've likewise controlled all members of Congress to unanimously enact whatever legislation they want.  Ostensibly this is because he's the focus for a lot of belief they'd prefer to use for themselves.  One might conceivably ask why they don't just mind-whammy the President as well rather than go through all this rigamarole, and there's sort of a fig leaf given about why they're doing it, and hey over there, look there's a distraction.

The President is in hiding, guarded by the last couple of loyal Secret Service agents, who have the small problem that whenever they fall asleep, the forgetting spell takes over again and they wake up not remembering who the President is or why they're protecting him until they get briefed and break the enchantment as long as they're awake.  The stuff about him is claustrophobic and horrible and honestly cool.  Mhari's extreme reluctance to go on what is a likely suicide mission but gritty determination to stick it out is great.  It's got your favorite non-Bob and non-Mo characters like Officer Friendly and Vicar Pete, also on the suicide mission and doing their very best.  It's got all the Stross body horror you've come to know and love, plus bullets that spread vampirism.  Oh, and it's got a vampiric elven mage on the autism spectrum.  Truly something for everyone.

The last book ended on a note of pure dread, since it appeared that there was no hope for the world with the Elder Gods taking over.  And that's still the case here - it appears that anything good is just a salve before the bandage gets ripped off for something even worse.  I'm still here for the ride though.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I knew next to nothing about this going in, except that Charlie Stross wrote the cover blurb which advertised "lesbian necromancers explore a haunted Gothic mansion in space", and I figured I was on board for it.  Synopsis like that you know it's at least going to be interesting, whether or not it's actually any good.

Imagine my surprise when it turns out that it not only lives up to the premise but sticks the landing, as it were.  This one's a rare bird and one of my favorites of the year; it's basically impossible to pigeonhole because it does what it wants, sort of like Gideon herself.  The tone is set right at the beginning as she makes her bed, grabs her stuff (which includes her sword and a couple of pornographic magazines), picks the security lock and tries to run away from home to join the space army.

But wait, you say, if they've got interplanetary space travel then why does she have a sword?  Shouldn't she have, like, a ray gun?  And why is paper treated like some sort of rare commodity?  And I'd give a serious response, but the real answer is that it sets the tone right off so you can just put it down if you're not into this stuff.  I've mentioned before that I have a soft spot for absurdist SF/F novels - stuff like Illuminatus! or Sewer, Gas & Electric or The Gone-Away World.  You've just got to accept going in that it doesn't necessarily make sense except on its own terms, and if you approach it in that spirit it's fine.  What I'm really getting at is that this isn't the sort of work you can nitpick.

Anyhow.  Cover blurb aside, Gideon's no necromancer, she's a swordswoman.  The space army she wants to join is the Cohort, which is the military arm of a necromantic interstellar empire headed up by the immortal God Emperor and Necrolord Divine.  They apparently fight pitched battles against humans and things worse than humans all over the cosmos, but the details aren't really gone into because Gideon doesn't really care about any of that stuff, she just wants to get out of the Ninth House, and there you have it.

Most of the book is told from Gideon's perspective and while she's not dumb by any means, she's also more interested in working out than opening textbooks, and a lot of her mental energy has been spent devoted to the sword (which she loves and would marry if she could).  Plus, she's been raised from birth in the weirdo cultish Ninth House and to the extent that she considers it odd, she also considers it old hat.  Therefore, the fact that she fails in her escape attempt due to a bunch of conjured skeleton warriors does upset her, but also does not come as a surprise exactly.

The skeletal warriors are courtesy of Harrowhark, who is a necromancer, and who's ostensibly the heir to the Ninth House but is really running it on account of her parents being secretly dead and being manipulated Weekend-At-Bernie's style by Harrowhark since she was still primary school aged.  This hardly counts as a spoiler since it's in the first couple of chapters, it only comes at you faster and more furiously from here.  Harrow's still just seventeen, and the only person in the Ninth House who is around Gideon's age, so naturally they hate each other.  Gideon appears to think she's a megalomaniac sociopath, and this is more or less borne out by her introduction, but one of the great things about this story is that it both turns out to be sort of true and also way more complicated than that.

Anyway, all the necromantic Houses have received a summons from the Emperor - they're all to send the first of their line to the Emperor's planet, accompanied only by their bodyguard cavaliers, to see if they're worthy of being selected as Lyctors, immortal servants of the Emperor and saints of the Empire.  Harrow's cavalier turns tail at this prospect, being more of a scholar than a warrior, and Harrowhark offers Gideon a choice - pretend to be her cavalier so she can become a Lyctor, and she'll allow Gideon to finally leave.  Gideon doesn't want to do this, for several reasons - first, cavaliers use little dinky rapiers as opposed to the big fuck-off infantry sword Gideon prefers, and she'll have to do a lot of training; second, she hates Harrowhark and doesn't want to do anything for her; third, she doesn't have any of the etiquette and formal training that are the other duties of cavaliers and doesn't really want to learn any of it; and lastly, she thinks that the promise will be broken somehow.  But it's the only game in town, really, so what the hell.

It's at this point that the book does actually stall a little bit, since they arrive at the planet along with the other seven House heirs and cavaliers (fifteen people in all, since one house sends twins) and introducing all of these people takes a while, plus that's so many characters that some of them by necessity get short shrift.  But they make it into the great hall, where the mysterious old monk who calls himself "Teacher" is sure to explain the nature of the tests they will face and the trials they must overcome.  All the necromancers, who on the whole are young overachievers, await instruction.

Except, no.  Teacher says that he's not a Lyctor and doesn't have any more idea about how to become one than they do.  He asks them to please not open any locked doors without permission, and then he just leaves them to it.  Gideon finds this hilarious, and Harrow tells her to pretend she's taken a vow of silence.  And it proceeds on from there.

At this point the story takes on elements of a locked room mystery, a procedural, an action adventure, a serial killer / cosmic horror story.  Just when you think you've figured out what's going on, there's usually another swerve coming.  Various actions are explained, people turn out to have been dead all along, or actually alive when they're supposed to be dead, Gideon and Harrow confront the truth about their past not entirely without hope, and it's just generally a rollicking good time.

I said at the beginning that nitpicking something like this is fruitless, so I'm not going to.  I will make two observations though.  First, one of the original rules of a fair play mystery is that magic or supernatural elements can't make an appearance in the story, or if they do, they have to be consistent and clearly spelled out.  This book is not interested in holding your hand, so at various points characters just come out with, Yeah, I knew X because of my supernatural powers which I never mentioned before now and you just gotta roll with it.  The other thing is, the Emperor presents himself as a pretty reasonable guy but his original plan was pretty dumb.  What did he think was going to happen when he stuck all these ambitious magicians together without any sense of clear direction?  Admittedly most of what happened can't be fairly said to be his fault, but I don't really think this exercise would have ended up that well even in the absence of sabotage.  What the hell, Emperor.

Stories like this often suffer from info dumps, so you have the fish-out-of-water character that needs to get explained to.  But here, all the characters are in an unusual situation and have to figure out what the hell is going on; and there's Gideon, who probably should have known some of this stuff already but was busy working out or reading pornos and didn't pay attention.  She's a great character.  This is maybe the most fun I've had reading anything all year.