The Rhesus Chart - Charles Stross

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. In The Rhesus Chart, the threat comes from an outbreak of vampirism in a banking group (something to do with stumbling across a suggestive algorithm in some quantitive trading analysis - magic being a side effect of computation). In some sectors this might be seen as a problem, but in banking this is seen as a benefit that "constitutes a net benefit that would add to our core skills matrix for all personnel".

The city bankers don't immediately all start donning opera capes and cultivate widow's peaks, which makes them difficult to track down, but Bob Howard, a secret intelligence working for the Laundry is more concerned that about the official policy on vampires in his department, which seem to go through "the five stages of bureaucratic grieving" - "denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating and coverup." Bob is to discover however that there worse things than blood-sucking banking vampires, and that's blood-sucking scary ex-girlfriends. That gives you a flavour of Stross's satire and it's to his credit that he makes all procedural bureaucracy and meeting ennui even more scary than the creatures that the Laundry deal with. Stross is on top form here.

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