★★★★☆ Season of Skulls, by Charles Stross
Together again: The New Management rejoins the Laundry Files
Season of Skulls
Charles Stross
Together again: The New Management rejoins the Laundry Files
Season of Skulls is the third book in Charles Stross' New Management series. The New Management series is a spin-off from Stross's longer Laundry Files series, which consists of nine full-length novels (not counting those of the New Management series), as well as a bunch of stories and novellas. On his blog, Stross has made it clear that he considers the New Management to be a separate series from the Laundry Files, even though it shares the same universe. I mention all this because Season of Skulls is, in my opinion, both a New Management and a Laundry Files novel.
The central character is Eve Starkey, a New Management character we know well from the first two books. At the end of Quantum of Nightmares she had just realized that she was in deep trouble -- her boss Rupert Bigge had bamboozled her into a trap that was worse than death. But Season of Skulls begins when Eve, trying to figure out how to wiggle out, is visited by "an emissary of the Prime Minister", as the publisher's blurb says. Fans of the Laundry Files will be delighted (as I was) to see an old friend -- Persephone Hazard, whom we know as Laundry asset BASHFUL INCENDIARY, accompanied by her equally familiar bodyguard Johnny McTavish.
In attempting to free herself from Rupert's trap, Eve ends up in a time and place that reminded me forcefully of R.F. Kuang's Babel: An Arcane History. It would be too much of a spoiler to explain how the two novels are similar. However, I think it is not giving too much away to say that, in his Acknowledgements, Stross says, "in Season of Skulls I was attempting to write outside my genre comfort zone." In particular, he's taking aim at the Regency gothic romance.
But what surprised me was how it connected up to the Laundry Files. Besides Seph and Johnny, at least one other important Laundry Files character shows up. Also, we learn more about the background of the Laundry. And the world and magic feel more like the Laundry Files. For instance, Eve has thoughts like this
“The only question,” Eve mused aloud, “is whether time travel via the dream roads is call by value or call by reference.”
That is a very Laundry Files-type thought.
Well, it was tons of fun. I don't think you need to have read the Laundry Files to enjoy Season of Skulls, but if you have, you will get an extra little fillip of joy from it.