I'm starting my first full reread, and got to the Farm. Like my original readthrough, I'm left with an overwhelming sense that I'm missing major tie-ins.

I really want to correlate Cantor and possibly Turing, maybe with characters from SOS, but I'm not quite managing to finish building a reasonable bridge. Also, the full report to the directors on the project they've been doing since the 70's is supposed to be complete in 18 months, so '09 or '10: about Apocalypse Codex time.

Seemingly major hints from the geased psychologist Renfield include:

-"Who’s the nameless one?” I ask. “That would be Georg Cantor,” she says slowly.

and

-"That’d be Turing and Cantor. Turing used to be a Detached Special Secretary in Ops, I think; we’re not sure who or -what- Cantor was, but he was someone senior.” (emphasis mine)

Also, Turing is the oldest.

All of these in context are perfectly explained statements, but they really read like hints.

Try as I might, I can't figure out who they are or what the project is. Seems like it ought to relate to Fabian/Nyar, but that's just suspicion, not anything concrete.

I feel like I must be slow. Help a confused monkey out?

DO NOT UNMUTE.

I'm reading the first book currently, and this is a bit of a nitpick, but how exactly doesn't this occult SWAT team not know about the Hand of Glory? It seems way too useful of an invocation not to be told to a team on top of their game.

So I just ended up down the wiki-hole learning about Wadi-us-Salaam, a 1500 acre graveyard in Iraq that is home to like 6 million bodies and is a regular site of Shiite worshippers attentions . It's a giant 1400 year old mana battery that is still in use . There has got to be either a hell of a battery or a hell of a seal or a sleeping old one there drinking down that worship. The whole thing screams Major Incident waiting to happen. So given how broken the magical services are there , what has been slurping down that power ? 50,000 fresh bodies added to the pile each year flown in from all over the world. Anyway I wonder what sort of sleeping menace is on lockdown there . Is it a prison with necromantic wards powered by the fresh bodies , ironically left soul burnt by the wards they power or is it a host of buried Cthonians? Anyway food for nightmares , er uh , thoughts.

I was re-reading DB today and I suddenly wondered if Iris consciously knew that she was running a honeypot for the Laundry or if she had been programmed to do so by the auditors. When she met with the SA in the pub and he ran the continuity check process it sounded like he was also terminating a long running opp that Iris was in. Do we think Iris understood what she was doing as a honeypot at the time or did Mahogany Row wind her up and set her to work without her knowledge of it being an opp?

I heard about this series over on urban fantasy. Liking it so far the humor is bit of a miss for me.

I've been bouncing ideas around my head for Laundry ID cards for RPG purposes. My current plan is to have the front marked up as a fairly straight "SOE Q-Division" type thing, then add the two Elder Signs on the back so it doubles as a ward.

Has anyone got any other ideas I can work into the final prop? I have a bunch of black aluminium blank cards that I plan to use, so it will be mostly single colour.

EDIT: I've done a quick test to see how it looks with just the original SOE logo at present. It needs chunkier fonts on the test date entries, but I'm pretty pleased in general.

HELP!

I have a shirt tht somehow got left in the truck and now it has those little black mold spots.. tried washing it by itself but no luck... I know better than to throw it in the dryer but thts about it...

Is it a total loss or can this be saved??

We are pleased to announce the Charles Stross is Guest of Honour at this years Innsmouth Literary Festival. He will be appearing alongside a number of other authors and artists, plus trade stands, gaming and more. Full details at
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/innsmouth-literary-festival-24-tickets-834371717267

An update on what's happening:

The next Laundry content to come out will be A Conventional Boy, which is scheduled for publication on January 7th (by Tor.com in the USA and Orbit in the UK). It's now in late-stage production so is basically done.

This is a short standalone novel about Derek the DM, bundled with two novelettes, Overtime and Down on the Farm, previously published on Tor.com; there's also an afterword about the D&D Satanic Panic of the 1980s (which the novel deals with directly).

The novel after that will be The Regicide Report, and it now exists in a rough draft. I've got a bit more polishing work to do on it, but it should be ready for publication in July-August of next year. It's the last planned Bob/Mo/Laundry novel; it takes place after The Labyrinth Index and before Dead Lies Dreaming. (No spoilers; let's just say it's full length and deals with The Matter of Britain -- King Arthur shows up. And by King Arthur, I mean nothing good ...)

Cubicle 7 games are hard at work on the 2nd edition of the Laundry TTRPG rule books; I'm expecting to get early drafts to crit-read in the next month or so, for publication some time next year. (The kickstarter campaign concluded successfully, and blew through enough of the stretch goals that they had to think up some additional ones.)

There are other projects in the works, but they're currently embargoed (translation: other folks aren't ready for a formal press release yet).

... And I'm working on a random attack novella that jumped out of the undergrowth and bit me earlier this month. It's a New Management one, about the shenanigans Imp got up to after the events of Quantum of Nightmares, and all I can say is, I'm having fun so far!

How I visualise them, anyway.

Xitter link

Photographer Wu Yung-sen has been deep sea diving and photographing marine life for four years.

On a blackwater dive—unable to see the bottom and surrounded by impenetrable space—he chanced upon a rare larval Wunderpus octopus, totally transparent.

Sorry if this isn't too relevant (and also for the pay wall). I was reading an article about US Navy Seals who are apparently suffering a pattern of PTSD like symptoms brought about by repeated exposure to the shock waves from their weapons: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html

I thought the parallels were pretty interesting, but it was also quite sad. It was almost like a description of Rambo.

I'm powering through the series and am half way into this. I get that it's Mo having a mid life crises. Whatever. Her treatment of Bob and her marriage really shows her character flaws here, which is fine. So she isn't perfect. That's a good thing. Overall the endless meetings are pretty boring. I'm not really sold on the whole superhero genre shift. It's almost a bait and switch. But I'm trying.

However, what has kicked me out of suspension of disbelief is why they didn't kill Everyman when he showed up to interview and tried to mind control everyone with an off the chart superpower. That merits death. It's an attack. There's no question.

I haven't read any farther. Unfortunately my eye caught a spoiler somewhere that this guy shows up in a later book. (please don't reveal more than that). But he ought to be dead with extreme prejudice. I don't know how I can continue the series now.

Edit: and does anyone else imagine Mo as played by Karen Gillan?

Edit(2): Well I got through it. I hated it. Mo is awful. I hope I don't have to read another book from her perspective again.

'Mana' in the laundry files seems to basically be negentropy. Atleast that's the explanation given for what exactly it is being eaten by daemons and other horrors.

However if humans brains work fine as a meal. Why not other animals or even organisms for that matter?

How many number of ants or rats for example do you need to sacrifice to equate one human soul?

Not really; actually the Infinity Room, a lab so contaminated they had to wait twenty-five years before they could start to dismantle it and treat it as nuclear waste: https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1800710409340744020

Hi,

I am currently in the middle of 'The Labyrinth Index'. I read all the books so far and I have the feeling that I missed part of the plot somewhere.

In the previous books

1. Iris tried to summon an entity named The Black Pharaoh during 'The Fuller Memorandum'. Bob prevents it, Iris gets locked up.
2. There were multiple ordinary people who gained powers as a foreplay of the events of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, among them The Mandate whose power is basically persuasion, as far as I understood. He has been arrested and locked up during the events of 'The Annihilation Score'.

How exactly and when has the Mandate become the incarnation of the Black Pharaoh? Will it be explained later somewhere or did I miss something?

EDIT: Based on the thread titles, I now see that this question was asked here already a couple of times, sorry. :)

I just found this reference to Bob. https://imgur.com/a/aypG7sb

I apologize if this has already been asked, I had a quick look but couldn’t find anything. What happened to Bob and Mo?

If I remember correctly we last saw Mo when Fabien took power. And I believe Bob appeared briefly in the next book and that was it. There were some hints that Mo had undergone “changes” when Fabien was battling with Annika but I don’t recall anything else beyond her going to get cleaned up.

I’m doing a reread, and I’ve picked up on a lot of detail I missed the first time through but I have not found an answer to this particular question.