{"id":27385,"date":"2014-08-17T10:06:25","date_gmt":"2014-08-17T15:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27385"},"modified":"2014-08-17T10:06:25","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T15:06:25","slug":"down-on-the-farm-by-charles-stross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/17\/down-on-the-farm-by-charles-stross\/","title":{"rendered":"“Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m quite a fan of the “Laundry” series of SF\/horror stories by Charles Stross. I thought I’d read all of them (well, all that have been released, anyway), but a discussion thread on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list<\/a> alerted me that I hadn’t read “Down on the Farm<\/a>“, which is available for free on the Tor.com<\/em> website:<\/p>\n

Ah, the joy of summer: here in the south-east of England it\u2019s the season of mosquitoes, sunburn, and water shortages. I\u2019m a city boy, so you can add stifling pollution to the list as a million outwardly mobile families start their Chelsea tractors and race to their holiday camps. And that\u2019s before we consider the hellish environs of the Tube (far more literally hellish than anyone realizes, unless they\u2019ve looked at a Transport for London journey planner and recognized the recondite geometry underlying the superimposed sigils of the underground map).<\/p>\n

But I digress…<\/p>\n

One morning, my deputy head of department wanders into my office. It\u2019s a cramped office, and I\u2019m busy practicing my Frisbee throw with a stack of beer mats and a dart-board decorated with various cabinet ministers. \u201cBob,\u201d Andy pauses to pluck a moist cardboard square out of the air as I sit up, guiltily: \u201ca job\u2019s just come up that you might like to look at\u2014I think it\u2019s right up your street.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first law of Bureaucracy is, show no curiosity outside your cubicle<\/em>. It\u2019s like the first rule of every army that\u2019s ever bashed a square: never volunteer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you ask questions (or volunteer) it will be taken as a sign of inactivity, and the devil, in the person of your line manager (or your sergeant) will find a task for your idle hands. What\u2019s more, you\u2019d better believe it\u2019ll be less appealing than whatever you were doing before (creatively idling, for instance), because inactivity is a crime against organization and must be punished. It goes double here in the Laundry, that branch of the British secret state tasked with defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse, using the tools of applied computational demonology: volunteer for the wrong job and you can end up with soul-sucking horrors from beyond spacetime using your brain for a midnight snack. But I don\u2019t think I could get away with feigning overwork right now, and besides: he\u2019s packaged it up as a mystery. Andy knows how to bait my hook, damn it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m quite a fan of the “Laundry” series of SF\/horror stories by Charles Stross. I thought I’d read all of them (well, all that have been released, anyway), but a discussion thread on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list alerted me that I hadn’t read “Down on the Farm“, which is available for free on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,8,57,28],"tags":[702,970,85],"class_list":["post-27385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-bureaucracy","category-humour","category-media","tag-nsfw","tag-occult","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-77H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27386,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385\/revisions\/27386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}