On Friday, I finally finished Charles Stross's Lovecraftian spy thriller "The Jennifer Morgue". It is the second book in the Bob Howard series that follows the former Unix system administrator as he undertakes cloak-and-dagger jobs as part of a secret British gov't organization called "The Laundry". For those not following along, in Bob Howard's world, Alan Turing completed a comptational-demonology theorem called "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning". This theorem (also called the Turing-Lovecraft theorem), creates breaches between universes using some spiffy computational mathematics that routinely attract the attention of big nasties on the other side of this reality's veil.
Because of the nasty things that "go bump in the night", Howard's secret organization is tasked with keeping the rest of us safe from these creatures. In "The Jennifer Morgue", we discover in the opening pages that Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer wasn't trying to recover just any sunken Soviet submarine, but a special one that was trying to phone in to a deceased but very active denizen of the depths. From the initial recovery mission in the 1960's, we readers are taken on a roller coaster ride consisting of spies, demons, and the occasional encounter with a drone from HR.
For an actual review done by someone who knows how to do reviews, read Stuart Carter's take on the book.
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Now that you're finished reading that, here's my take on the book: I really enjoyed it. It was schlocky in some places, but it was all done in good fun and in homage to Ian Fleming and the James Bond "mythos". I continue to appreciate Stross's use of the Lovercraft mythos. Rather than cast the creatures on one side or the other, Schloss is faithful to Lovecraft and largely keeps the creatures that be out of the affairs of the bald monkeys that they allow to exist on a small subset of the Earth's surface.
I also loved Stross's continued references back to the Lovecraft canon, including a repurposed Dunwich village, descendants of Innsmouth in the service of various world governments, and especially the repurposed Erich Zann violin. In an essay between "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue", Stross pens an insightful essay on how the Lovecraftian horror story and the Cold War spy novels are manifestations of the same thing, only with different faces. While "The Atrocity Archives" reads like a classic Robert Ludlum novel, "The Jennifer Morgue" completes the circle by simultaneously imitating and lampooning Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. (A significant portion of the actual plot of the story deals with the Bond archetypes applied in occult settings. How's that for meta?)
In short, I feel that if there were such a thing as custom created fiction, Stross's novels would be the one that the novel machine would spit out for me. It includes elements from some of my favorite kinds of novels, tied in to some of my other interests that I've randomly been picking off over the last few years (including a minor interest in one Howard Hughes). The in-jokes were great and some things introduced in the book (such as including zombie-creating PowerPoint slide transitions) will leave me looking at real-life with a more humorous lens.
In a letter to Robert E. Howard (Stross's protagonist's namesake?), Lovecraft addressed the great fun he was having when other people were claiming that he wasn't writing fiction, but was instead telling the truth:
Stross certainly adopted this technique in his own books and applies it with maximum effectiveness. Why write a spy/horror tale that takes place in some completely fictitious setting when one can repurpose plenty of colorful characters and events from our own history?Regarding the solemnly cited myth-cycle of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Nug, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.—let me confess that this is all a synthetic concotion of my own, like the populous and varied pantheon of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana... Long has alluded to the Necronomicon in some things of his - in fact, I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation. I ought, though, to write Mr. O’Neail and disabuse him of the idea that there is a large blind spot in his mythological erudition!
(By the way, I'm a huge fan of the cover art for this book. I'd love to see the Bond-esque opening credits of this book should it ever be adapted for the silver screen.)
I finally hit level 70 in the Outlands this weekand and as a reward, I bought my character this pimped-out hat. Gotta love the leopard-skin accents...
I made it out to Graham Cracker Comics yesterday to pick up a few comics that they have been holding for both me and Holly. While I was there, I took the plunge and spent $40 on Uncanny X-Men #266. This was the single issue that stood between me having a full run of Uncanny-X-Men from 150 to the present issue of #486. This represents a contiguous run of The Uncanny X-Men from 1983 to the present. It's hard for me to imagine that I have almost 25 years worth of X-Men sitting on my shelves in binders. (And that's not counting X-Men, Vol. 2 or any of the spin-offs.)
While that was a good deal on that comic, I was still a bit hesitant dropping $40 on a single issue. That's a lot, and it's primarily the reason that I haven't begun working back from 1983 (#150) to 1963 (#1). However, it filled a significant hole and I'm happy.
Today, I also received some karmic approval of my purchase. I headed out to Argo Tea to get some work done and I stopped by Borders to check out the bargain bin before heading home. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a pack of World of Warcraft cards from the comic store to see what the are looked like and so forth. (I used to collect Magic: The Gathering cards.) Then, I picked up a pack of the "Dark Portal" expansion and enjoyed seeing the "boomkin" druid in the pack. (This is the form my character takes when I'm solo'ing in WoW.)
Anyhow, on a whim, I picked up a pack of the "Heroes of Azeroth" expansion while in Borders. The cards were not cheap (15 / $3.99), but I enjoy these things. I was surprised to find that my random purchase included the infamous "Leeroy Jenkins" card. This is a fairly rare card and fetches between $25 to $40 on eBay.
I really don't have any plans to sell the card, but it was nice to find something valuable so serendipitously.
In both of these cases, the card and the comic are already in my binders I use for collecting these things. I've really enjoyed having an excuse to buy these things again. It may seem a bit adolescent, but I figure that I'm doing enough "adult" things during the rest of the time that I'm entitled to let the kid out once in a while.
A couple of years ago, I managed to get tickets to the Timeline Theatre Company's production of "Copenhagen". This seemed to be an interesting play and I was looking forward to seeing it.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. For some reason or other, I didn't make it out to the theatre and the two tickets that I purchased expired on my kitchen table that night. I was disappointed that I couldn't make the play, but I was also disappointed that the tickets went unused.
Well, all of that changes soon. For the past few weeks, I've been working with a small team of undergraduates on a site we're calling Chicago Stubs. Think of it as a local Craigslist devoted exclusively to tickets to events. Using Chicago Stubs, you can search for specific tickets, browse for tickets by time or place, and list your own unused tickets.
The fundamental difference between this site and other online ticket sites is that it is designed for both browsing and searching. Why does this matter? Picture this scenario:
It's Wednesday evening, and I still haven't figured out a good weekend outing for my mentee and myself. I know that we're both free on Saturday and Sunday and that I don't want to do something we've done before. I visit Chicago Stubs and browse the tickets for events on Saturday and Sunday. Most of the listings are for single tickets, but I find a pair of tickets being offered for a special event at the Field Museum that has been sold out for weeks. I see that the person offering the tickets is in my neighborhood, and I accept his offer. Accompanying my acceptance is a brief personal message suggesting that we make the swap at a local tea house.
A couple of hours, I get an e-mail informing me that he'd like to complete the offer and to meet him at the tea house to pick up the tickets after work. I go to the tea house and get the tickets. Saturday rolls around and my mentee and I visit the museum. We have a great time. When I get home, I log into the site and post positive feedback about the offering user. He gains reputation within the community and becomes someone who I might give priority to, should our roles be reversed in the future.
This is one potential scenario, and there are many more that I'm sure you could imagine (the season ticket holder trading unused Cubs tickets for musical performances, the local office swapping tickets among themselves, fledgling theatre companies listing unused tickets to fill the house, etc.). On a macro level, this site aims to reduce the amount of "ticket waste" in the local area. And I'm planning on using the technical resources at my disposal (including the web, e-mail, RSS, and text messaging) to solve this problem.
At the moment, the site is still being developed for a course in online communities I'm currently taking. However, I think that this idea has legs and I hope to get an actual functioning service up and running early this summer.
So, where do you come in? For this site to work, we need actual users posting actual tickets that other actual users can search and browse. We need a critical mass of users for this to take off. No users = no site.
At the moment, I'm putting the finishing touches on the alpha version of the site. I'll be ready for users/testers later in this week. So, if you're interested in helping us make this site as useful as possible, head on over to Chicago-Stubs.com and add yourself to the invitation list. I'll be sending out a limited number of invites for the alpha, and once we fix the inevitable
bugs and are ready for more users, we'll open up the site and invite the rest of you.
