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Blood-sucking bankers! Sometimes you think that Charles Stross is just too damn clever for his own good, too hip and caught up in the hyper-reality of the superficial technology and buzz-word obsessed world we live in, but the truth is that what he writes about is relevant and bang up-to-date. There's a recognition that things tend to go badly wrong when the real world doesn't quite manage to keep up-to-date with the speed of change in the new, and not just badly wrong, but hilariously wrong. The Rhesus Chart , the latest Laundry Files novel (no previous reading required) is an outstanding example of just how funny and clever this writer can be. Stross's Laundry novels are a satire of the handling of regulations and procedures that have to be navigated when a secret department set up to protect the world from aliens, zombies, demons and otherworld threats run up against government bureaucracy, business processes, tech-speak and good old-fashioned British character traits. I

Not the End of the World John Ironmonger takes an unusually quirky and optimistic outlook on the traditional apocalypse genre in Not Forgetting the Whale . It's an approach that is radically different from any number of recent novels ( The Road , California , The Dog Stars , The Passage ) that anticipate the possibility/likelihood of a complete breakdown of society and a return to barbarism after an epidemic/disaster in the near future. Were it not for J.G. Ballard's bleak exploration of various disaster scenarios, I'd say that Ironmonger takes a more British attitude of calmly just getting on with things. Here, it might be the apocalypse, but that doesn't mean it's the end of the world... ...though it might well be. It's an economic crisis that brings investment banker Joe Haak out of the City and washed up naked on a beach in Cornwall on the back of a whale, but Joe has seen the signs, or at least a computer programme he has developed has predicted an even big