★★★★☆ The Regicide Report, by Charles Stross
More in fulfilment of an obligation than a labor of love
The Regicide Report
Charles Stross
More in fulfilment of an obligation than a labor of love
The Regicide Report is the grand finale1 of my very favorite science fiction series, Charles Stross‘s Laundry Files. (You could also call it Urban Fantasy, but the feel is, to my mind, much more science fiction.) Stross leaves no doubt that this is the end. In his acknowledgments he writes, “This book marks the end of a twenty-five-year-long project.” Hardcore Stross fans (by which, I mean those who follow his blog) have long known this was coming, and we mostly knew how it was going to end.
The Regicide Report‘s main jobs are two. First, it has to finish the story of Bob Howard and his wife Dominique O’Brien, who are, at this point in the series, powerful sorcerers. Second it completes (more or less) the story of Senior Auditor Michael Armstrong’s plot to save Britain from the onslaught of elder gods known as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. In The Delirium Brief Armstrong betrayed England into the grip of Fabian Everyman, who is an avatar of The Black Pharaoh. He had a plan to wrest it away, and in The Regicide Report we see the culmination of that plan. It goes something like this
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. It only means that if it occurs it will result from a process that is not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully predictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control.
--TC Schelling
...except that the Armageddon in question is of an entirely different flavor than the one Schelling was exercised by.
It all starts when someone poisons the queen with a slow-acting poison. Stross, who has a degree in Pharmacy, makes this part convincing. (The Regicide Report is set in 2015 in an alternative timeline, so Elizabeth II is still alive and queen.) The queen, being the focus of attention and belief of hundreds of millions of humans, is a powerful source of mana (magical oomph).
Stross took his job here seriously, and the result makes a good, rousing story. Still, it seems fairly clear that the joy has gone out of the series for him. It feels like Sisyphus finishing that job that he was never supposed to be able to finish. It is a triumph when he finally places that giant stone atop the unclimbable hill. But one still feels the effort.
Let’s be real: if you’ve read the previous nine novels of the Laundry Files, you’re going to read this one. I have and I did, and I was not disappointed. I am sorry, of course, that my all-time favorite science fiction series has reached its end. But I understand why Stross would want his freedom.
I look forward to seeing what he does with it. Since he has also concluded his other major series, the Merchant Princes Universe series, ... Well, who knows where he goes next?
Just to get this out of the way: Stross has had an ongoing misunderstanding with his American publishers about the Laundry Files series and how to number it. There are ten full-length novels in Laundry Files proper. They are the ones numbered 1-9 and 14 in the Goodreads listing of the series. They all have titles of the form “The [noun] [document].” Thus The Regicide Report is a formula Laundry Files title.
There is also a separate derivative series, the New Management. It currently consists of three short novels, which are numbers 1-3 in the Goodreads listing. These take place after the events of The Regicide Report.
A Conventional Boy, which GR counts both as #13 in the Laundry Files and #4 in the New Management, is actually a novella in the Laundry Files, perhaps #9.5, and doesn’t belong in the New Management at all.
This is all based on my understanding from keeping up with Stross’s blog. Here is his post for The Regicide Report. (Be patient -- it’s a very slow web server.)