I'm a big fan of Charles Stross' The Laundry series. It's mish-mash of science fiction, fantasy, Lovecraftian horror, and spy thriller has been pulled off brilliantly in a series that is now up to three books.
The latest is The Fuller Memorandum, in which our hero Bob Howard has come to believe in God. Or, more, precisely, Gods. The old gods. The hungry and bad-tempered gods who yearn to pull humainty into their slavering maws. As Bob says in the introduction, he's come to believe in "God," he's waiting for him with a shotgun, and he's saving the last shell for himself.
Ernest Lilley gave it a very positive review at The SF Site:
Though the story is told in first person retrospective, under the guise of Bob having been directed to catch up on report filing from his missions, things get so dicey for him that it's easy to forget that this is a dead giveaway that he's bound to survive. Actually, there are points in the book where it's not at all clear that he will, even if he does wind up writing that report. Stross is that clever.Indeed, he is that clever.
The premise of the series is that what we consider magic is the result of forces conjured up by certain forms of computation, which makes magic a branch of what is normally highly theoretical mathematics, but which turns out to have practical, if not pleasant, applications. The Laundry gets most of its staff by co-opting them as an alternative to killing them off for accidentally discovering the power of mathematics to open doorways to other universes, ones where very hungry beasties wait wondering from where their next bite of soul (preferably human) food is going to come. Mo came in through that door in the first book, The Atrocity Archives, when a group of terrorists tried to use her to channel a demon to do their bidding. Bob saved her in true Bond fashion, even going so far as to disable a nuclear weapon in the bargain. In the second book, The Jennifer Morgue, things get really Bondian, when Bob and Mo find themselves fighting bad guys and a compulsion to act out the Bond plot formula. You think you know what's bound to happen, and then you realize you don't even know who's who. Really, it's brilliant.
Speaking of who's who, Stross pays tribute to a different master spy author with each book. For his first, it was Len Deighton, the second, Ian Fleming, and now Anthony Price, whose historian turned agent is a good fit for Stross' co-opted hacker character. The series also serves as a starting point for anyone who hasn't read the authors whose idiom it employs, which is a fine thing as well.
Bob had come into the firm via a different door than academics like Mo. A hacker trying to do something clever, he came close to inadvertently leveling the city he lived in, which brought him to the firm's attention. The result is that Bob's neither an academic, nor was he born and bred a civil servant. He's a bit of a loose cannon, like all our favorite secret agents, and is lucky, unlucky, and clever in equal measures. It's a combination that ensures that he'll live in interesting times, to our benefit if not his.
Highly recommended.
