{"id":33775,"date":"2015-11-30T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33775"},"modified":"2015-11-29T12:15:39","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T17:15:39","slug":"charles-stross-cover-reveal-for-the-nightmare-stacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/30\/charles-stross-cover-reveal-for-the-nightmare-stacks\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Stross cover reveal for The Nightmare Stacks<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The

The Nightmare Stacks<\/em> (UK edition)<\/p><\/div>

\"The

The Nightmare Stacks<\/em> (North American edition)<\/p><\/div>The next book in the Charles Stross “Laundry Files” series will be The Nightmare Stacks<\/em>, to be released in June, 2016. There are two versions of the cover because Charles has different publishers for the UK and North American markets. This novel will not feature either Bob Howard or Mo (who featured in the most recent book The Annihilation Score<\/em>), as Charles explains in the interview linked below. If you haven’t discovered the “Laundry” series, you’re missing a treat. Start with The Atrocity Archives<\/em> and discover what happens when you mix secret agents and espionage with mind-numbing horrors from the Cthulhu mythos. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

Charlie Jane Anders<\/a> talked to Charles about the book and the series:<\/p>\n

How has the Laundry Files series changed and evolved in the dozen years or so that you\u2019ve been writing it? Are there elements that you\u2019re still surprised became so prominent?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been writing the Laundry Files series for 16 years at this point. When I began, I intended the short novel \u201cThe Atrocity Archive\u201d (published with \u201cThe Concrete Jungle\u201d in the book The Atrocity Archives<\/em> \u2014 note the plural!) as a one-shot. It was only a few years later, when people began asking for more, that I had any idea of writing a sequel, and only with the third book, 8 years in, that I realized I needed a Plan. And because the book\u2019s narrator, Bob, had been aging in line with the real world as I wrote the first three books, the most obvious plan was: track Bob\u2019s career as he grows older, more senior, and more cynical.<\/p>\n

This turned out to be a really fortuitous choice. It allowed me to fix some minor inconsistencies in the earlier books; because they\u2019re Bob\u2019s workplace memoir, he often gets the wrong end of the stick at first then learns better about some aspect of the job over time. It also allowed me to deepen him as a character, adding complexity to the narrative as he ages and possibly becomes more self-aware (although he doesn\u2019t really have to grow up until books 8 or 9).<\/p>\n

What I really wasn\u2019t expecting was that Bob\u2019s life would take over \u2014 and that the most important events in it would end up taking place off-screen, so far off-screen that I needed to pick new narrative voices! His wife Mo, for example, exhibits a very unvarnished perspective on Bob\u2019s seemingly bottomless reserves of self-delusion in The Annihilation Score<\/em>, and demonstrates that the series is very much about the Laundry as an organization, rather than just being Tales of Bob. And in The Nightmare Stacks<\/em> I had to leave Bob behind entirely in order to give a worm\u2019s eye view of the start of events that will give rise (eventually) to the climax of the series.<\/p>\n

This book features a new character, Alex, instead of Bob. What\u2019s the reason for switching focus?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In The Atrocity Archives<\/em> Bob starts out as a twenty-something tech support guy who has blundered into a Len Deighton spy thriller (with added tentacles). By the start of The Rhesus Chart<\/em>, Bob has leveled up so far that he can wade into a nest of vampires \u2014 admittedly rather inexperienced vampires \u2014 and escape with mildly damaged dignity and a stack of paperwork. Power-ups are a constant problem for any multi-book series that riffs off the Hero\u2019s Journey: how do you engage with the underdog when your protagonist has risen from Midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet?<\/p>\n

Alex is in some ways not dissimilar to Bob in his early incarnation. There are drastic differences: Alex has powers of his own \u2014 although they come at a drastic price. But Alex takes us back to the guy who gets sent to fix the cabling rather than spending all his time in policy meetings. And he\u2019s got a young guy\u2019s problems and social anxieties, unlike Bob (who by this point is in his early forties).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next book in the Charles Stross “Laundry Files” series will be The Nightmare Stacks, to be released in June, 2016. There are two versions of the cover because Charles has different publishers for the UK and North American markets. This novel will not feature either Bob Howard or Mo (who featured in the most […]<\/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":[32,4,57],"tags":[85],"class_list":["post-33775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-humour","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8ML","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33775","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=33775"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33781,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33775\/revisions\/33781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}