The Laundry Files: How intelligence agencies don't work

[BiopunkOtrera]

ngl I like the Black Chamber. They're so evil it loops back to being insanely cool. Like the Laundry are comprised of like schlubs with math degrees doing their best not fucking up while their counterparts across the pond are building an empire of darkness made up of killer zombies and shit. Which sort of highlights the difference. The Laundry is written like a stale beer spy fiction milieu, Black Chamber gets the martini superweapons.

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The Laundry does sometimes come of as existing largely by accident, in that all the disasters that keep happening, somehow end up cancelling each other, instead of destroying The Laundry.
Black Chamber, in contrast, lack all the well meaning of Laundry, but do come of as scarily competent while also being incredibly evil.
They'd probably look less competent if looked up close, most organizations do.

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OOC, the thing with the laundry and the black chamber is that British spy agencies have been a lot better at covering up their malfesence than American ones, probably because most of it took place longer ago. Like, Britain lacks the capacity to do a lot of the coup/death list stuff on our own, so there's an assumption in Britain that the CIA's various operations are because they're evil rather than because that's the general business of an American intell agency.

That said, the Black Chamber are really cool. It's just ashame whatever original plot they had with them (as set up in Apocalypse Codex) was aborted by Brexit.

 

[Hollewanderer]

My exposure to the Laundry has been somewhat limited (I read some of the early short stories, then the Fuller Memorandum, and then I ran into Equoid like a sentence runs into full stop and really did not feel like reading any more), but what I'm getting from both this and various other past discussions is that Stross writes in dangerously trend-chasing manner, so rather than having a properly developed, coherent plan for the overall series you get wild swerves as he tries to write Topical Story of the Moment, be it superheroes, My Little Pony, Brexit etc. I'm not surprised that this approach is causing issues.

Also a very strange obsession with flesh-eating penises, given how they seem to have shown up multiple times in multiple different configurations.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

My exposure to the Laundry has been somewhat limited (I read some of the early short stories, then the Fuller Memorandum, and then I ran into Equoid like a sentence runs into full stop and really did not feel like reading any more), but what I'm getting from both this and various other past discussions is that Stross writes in dangerously trend-chasing manner, so rather than having a properly developed, coherent plan for the overall series you get wild swerves as he tries to write Topical Story of the Moment, be it superheroes, My Little Pony, Brexit etc. I'm not surprised that this approach is causing issues.

Also a very strange obsession with flesh-eating penises, given how they seem to have shown up multiple times in multiple different configurations.

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One of the things I think has become a bit of a problem with Stross is like, he's a trend chaser, but he lacks say, William Gibson's ability to figure out what trends will be.

As I said earlier, the universe handed him something absolutely perfect for his metaphysics with crypto, but there's no Laundry book on it. Like, imagine the laundry having to deal with a form of cryptocurrency whose proof of work computations are designed to attract attention from things from the beyond. That would be an absolutely perfect plot, it would let Mhari flex her muscles as a former financial industry person, and it would have been topical for years.

Instead, we've got Nylarthotep using the slogan "strong and stable" years after that stopped being topical because if there's two things Britain isn't right now it's strong and stable.

 

[Valmond]

Or NFT's

 

[Laplace]

One of the things I think has become a bit of a problem with Stross is like, he's a trend chaser, but he lacks say, William Gibson's ability to figure out what trends will be.

As I said earlier, the universe handed him something absolutely perfect for his metaphysics with crypto, but there's no Laundry book on it. Like, imagine the laundry having to deal with a form of crypto currency who's proof of work computations are designed to attract attention from things from the beyond. That would be an absolutely perfect plot, it would let Mhari flex her muscles as a former financial industry person, and it would have been topical for years.

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IMO this is at least in part of his computer science career ending sometime during the 00's. One thing I noticed is that after the iphone full of spells during Apocalypse Codex there wasn't anything new in regards to compsci parodies or clever applications of demonology. It wouldn't surprise me if he ignored the latest in the field to focus more on geopolitics but with elder gods.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

IMO this is at least in part of his computer science career ending sometime during the 00's. One thing I noticed is that after the iphone full of spells during Apocalypse Codex there wasn't anything new in regards to compsci parodies or clever applications of demonology. It wouldn't surprise me if he ignored the latest in the field to focus more on geopolitics but with elder gods.

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I mean, the issue is that because he decided to move directly to Nylarthotep running the shop on Brexit, there's not a lot of scope for actual parodies of current political and so on-trend because it so blew out normality. I think it would honestly have been a better parody of modernity if the laundry had been scrambling to put out one fire after another for years, while it's operatives slowly realise its systems are not fit for purpose and are in fact kind of evil, but like any good liberal Stross was super shocked by Brexit so that had to be the break point.

 

[Ben Who Devours]

This'll be short and generally not great bc I'm out and about right now, I'll come back to it later, but generally while there's a lot of interesting takes here, I strongly disagree with the idea that the Laundry were portrayed as good guys prior to Delirium Brief.

They really, really, really weren't.

In the very first novel they're shown to reanimate their own employees' corpses as security guards. Their bosses vanished mysteriously several decades ago. They bind witnesses of the supernatural with secrecy oaths that will kill them for disobedience, they accidentally killed Alan Turing, and Bob's boss is obviously, ludicrously sinister (and later turns out to be an eldritch monster in his own right). And that's just book one. Something like five of the early villains are insane or corrupt Laundry officers, including one who it later turned out was doing her job and only guilty of like…being sorta overly enthusiastic with her prototype god-summoning cult and later got brought back to be Nyarly's high priestess.

As in, an early villain who IIRC forced the blood of a newborn baby down Bob's throat and raised her daughter to be a sadistic cannibal (Fuller Memorandum was a while ago) later got released from prison, bought a whiskey and put into a position of power by the highest ranked character we've seen to date.

Then there's the whole thing in book 4 where the Laundry supposedly can't investigate their own government, so they hire "independent contractors" who can do what they like…except it turns out that was a bullshit cover story, the 'independents' are actually just as much a part of the British state as Bob is, the Laundry is just one front for the serious wizards that serves to divert attention from their magical hitmen, and the whole idea of the wizards having limits on their behaviour was a lie. Oh, and the higher ups knew about the cannibalistic serial killer vampires in book 5, too.

The idea was never that they were goodies until Nyarlathotep showed up. Nyarlathotep is when Stross yells in your face that they'd been scum from the getgo.

They're not always that competent, either. The Concrete Jungle is an obvious pisstake of the British government: Their super cool magitech defence grid program is just as leaky and glitchy as you'd expect from the country which left laptops containing sensitive material behind on public trains, and when it comes back in book 7 it's worse than useless to the point it kills countless innocents via AI trained bullshit, does nothing to the actual enemy, and then gets leaked to the internet. Book 7 itself is a story of both the Laundry and the Host fucking up utterly and getting saved, to a certain value of saved, by a pair of clueless kids. And again, something like four or five of the early villains are literally just Laundry people turning office politics lethal, which is hardly the sign of a functional organisation.

Maybe Bob the fictional character thought he was working for the white hats, but I don't think Charles Stross ever did.

 

[Destynova1]

Heh. It has always amazed me(Been reading EYES ONLY) that these frothing mad cultists are able to run super organizations like FATE despite being so low on the SAN scale, that they otta be howling from a hole in the ground and eating their own poo . I keep seeing Nyralathtep screaming at them to stop shoving the accounting sheets up their noses and instead use Hypergeometry to take over the stock market.

 

[stratigo]

The black chamber is the realistic version that FBH was talking about, and it is weird it exists next to the Laundry.

Except that Stross REALLY hated Bush. Like really hated.

 

[Avernus]

I actually found the Black Chamber to be too evil to be believable, and it's one reason I stopped reading. It just read like America-bashing; like Stross needed somebody to make the Laundry look reasonable, so he made an agency out of demonically evil Americans.

I wouldn't expect such an evil version of America to act like the real America, which would drastically alter the setting. I'd expect them to act more like a combination of Nazi Germany and Mordor.

 

[stratigo]

Stross has a series where one of the major plotpoints is america falling into fascism.

Which, hey, is realistic.

 

[Avernus]

Stross has a series where one of the major plotpoints is america falling into fascism.

Which, hey, is realistic.

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But that wouldn't look like "the real world with a secret supernatural aspect" like the Laundry series does. They wouldn't be talking about "secret Supreme Court rulings", they'd be talking about death camps, conquering armies and nuclear strikes. They'd likely be more afraid of Britain eating a few hundred American nuclear weapons than about the supernatural, which would make it an entirely different series.

 

[stratigo]

The different series is the merchant princes. There is a legitimate fear throughout of the US just nuking the shit out of everything. And, in fact, the US uses three nukes to blow up their enemies.

 

[Avernus]

The different series is the merchant princes. There is a legitimate fear throughout of the US just nuking the shit out of everything. And, in fact, the US uses three nukes to blow up their enemies.

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<shrug> I'd expect Black Chamber!America to at the very least depopulate Africa and South America with nuclear carpet bombing, as well as conquer Canada and exterminate the population. For starters, before the supernatural aspects even get involved. Less real world, more pre-Great-War Fallout America with Lovecraftian horror instead of retro-scifi tech.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

This'll be short and generally not great bc I'm out and about right now, I'll come back to it later, but generally while there's a lot of interesting takes here, I strongly disagree with the idea that the Laundry were portrayed as good guys prior to Delirium Brief.

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I'm not sure I buy it.

Like, yeah, they do bad stuff, but it's basically sympathetic bad stuff. They take out their own operatives but only after they try to do a coup. Until Delirum brief the series is presenting espionage fairly cynically, but just because you present your heroes cynically doesn't make them less heroes.

 

[stratigo]

<shrug> I'd expect Black Chamber!America to at the very least depopulate Africa and South America with nuclear carpet bombing, as well as conquer Canada and exterminate the population. For starters, before the supernatural aspects even get involved. Less real world, more pre-Great-War Fallout America with Lovecraftian horror instead of retro-scifi tech.

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Why?

I think you are missing the black chamber's inspiration. It isn't the frothing racism and bigotry of the trumpists. It's the bush era security state. The quiet need to dominate the world and extract all value and resources from it.

 

[Valmond]

There is a very important distinction between "they do bad stuff, and that's bad" and "they do bad stuff, but let me explain why that makes sense" and "they do bad stuff, because they had to".
The Laundry tends to fall somewhere between that later two, and Black Chamber seems fairly solidly in the first one.

 

[Avernus]

Why?

I think you are missing the black chamber's inspiration. It isn't the frothing racism and bigotry of the trumpists.

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Yes it is; I recall how they had a "secret Supreme Court decision" declaring that Americans with nonhuman ancestry had no civil rights. That's one step at most away from declaring black people, women and so on to have no rights. The Black Chamber had literal slaves.

What I would expect them to do is take over the government of the US; they have the supernatural assets, so they can do that. Then they'd exterminate or enslave everyone but white men, and go on a genocidal crusade against the world. Because that's the kind of thing the bigoted subculture of America has wanted to do for centuries, and they'd have the magic to make it happen.

 

[Ben Who Devours]

I think Stross could still do a crypto parody or something, in theory. I don't think it's likely, but he could.

I mean, he has set up other characters to do stories Bob isn't suited for, he's talked about writing short stories until he figures the next book out, etc. The series has had crazy stakes from the start (remember the Early Installment Weirdness of the universe eating ice giant thing?), and there's still zany low level nonsense going on now, so it wouldn't be out of place in the world that he's created.

After all, a lot of Index was street level brawling against Black Chamber vampire goons, baddies chasing the President, and American radio people reporting feral dragon attacks. And Stacks was basically "vampire and fairy tag-team a bunch of elfin knights and weirdass zombies on the World's Worst Meet The Parents Date".

<shrug> I'd expect Black Chamber!America to at the very least depopulate Africa and South America with nuclear carpet bombing, as well as conquer Canada and exterminate the population. For starters, before the supernatural aspects even get involved. Less real world, more pre-Great-War Fallout America with Lovecraftian horror instead of retro-scifi tech.

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They can't use nukes willy nilly in TLF any more, the stars coming right means there'll be huge necromantic energy surges from the deaths which'll spur on the worlds ending or something. It's in one of the early ones. Might be where Tamsyn Muir got the idea for the Locked Tomb series. Besides, their long term plan was to eat the whole world or something for their Singularitarian Wasp God or whatever, so I think they've left RL politics far behind. Which is a shame, really.

Anyway, the funny thing* about Laundry/Black Chamber comparisons is that Bob will tell you all about how historically, the Americans used to be reasonable but then something happened, they internally rearranged themselves a few decades ago and re-emerged as these cackling monsters who've been blatantly subverted by the powers they work with, not like us good old British folks, oh no…

And then he'll casually make jokes about how the Laundry's Board of Directors have vanished from the physical world and nobody's seen them in decades before walking past the zombified corpse of a guy he used to work with to give a report to his boss, the Eater of Souls.

I mean, by Labyrinth Index there's pretty blatantly no difference, though you could argue that was partly a descent into evil rather than a reveal. Mhari even has a We're Not so Different moment talking to a Black Chamber boss. And by that book our MCs are a would-be financial criminal turned member of the House of Lords and a cop from the same Metropolitan Police mentioned in the OP, which is just far too on the nose for me to think they're meant to be straight up heroes any more.

IMO this is at least in part of his computer science career ending sometime during the 00's. One thing I noticed is that after the iphone full of spells during Apocalypse Codex there wasn't anything new in regards to compsci parodies or clever applications of demonology. It wouldn't surprise me if he ignored the latest in the field to focus more on geopolitics but with elder gods.

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I've noticed that went away too. Mind, there's a bit in Nightmare Stacks here and there. Alex runs a sort of automated loop counter in his brain to counteract the vampiric salt-counting weakness, and later uses it to perform massive-scale demon summoning to slaughter one of the villains. There's also a thing about how they tried to give the CCTV basilisk guns automated targeting, only they train them on a corrupted dataset and can't identify the enemy, so then the fancy but untested AI overcorrects by just shooting at everything and gets a load of innocents killed.

But then Nightmare Stacks was very much a throwback to the early series. It even has a Nasty Ambitious Female Villain, though this time it's an alien dragon riding warlord swinging a power mace instead of a Shrewish Middle Manager Who Doesn't Code, so that was a nice upgrade.


* I tell a lie. We're all sleeping on the really funny thing about the Black Chamber, which is that they're literally the Deep State out to get the Real President and book 9 is about Mhari forming Qanon.

EDIT: Oops more people have posted since I started writing

 

[EBR]

For the record I loved the Nightmare Stacks. It was a fantastic take on the science v. magic trope, the whole "invasion from another universe" thing was really well done, the Laundry got hit with some major setbacks before finally winning, the masquerade got broken, ect, etc. Probably my favorite book of the series. Then it took as nosedive with the sequel.

This'll be short and generally not great bc I'm out and about right now, I'll come back to it later, but generally while there's a lot of interesting takes here, I strongly disagree with the idea that the Laundry were portrayed as good guys prior to Delirium Brief.

They really, really, really weren't.

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I like this as a fan theory, but I don't think it holds up. The Laundry's enemies are consistently presented as worse than the Laundry and when the elected government tries to dissolve it this is presented as a very bad thing, with the Prime Minister behind the dissolution depicted as a clueless dupe (at best!) who ends up with his penis being eaten. This suggests that, for all their villainy, the Laundry is intended by the author to be seen as a necessary lesser evil.

 

[Valmond]

I feel that if the protagonists are doing something bad, while seeking to accomplish something necessary or beneficial, and there is no better option presented, then the story almost inevitably ends up supporting the protagonists actions as justified.

 

[deadcrystal]

I'm not sure I buy it.

Like, yeah, they do bad stuff, but it's basically sympathetic bad stuff. They take out their own operatives but only after they try to do a coup. Until Delirum brief the series is presenting espionage fairly cynically, but just because you present your heroes cynically doesn't make them less heroes.

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Framing is the key.

As the joke goes, both Left and Right will portray cops the same way, breaking their own rules and the law, brutalising people, kidnapping, executing the accused, enforcing the law asymmetrically, etc. The only difference being that the Right will consider all of these to be good things.

I've not read the books myself, so I obviously can't speak to the framing in the series, but an organisation doing a bunch of evil stuff doesn't necessarily mean the author actually considers them to be in the wrong.