This book collects one novella and two short stories, so, er, “A Laundry Files Novel”? Well, OK, perhaps Stross considers this to be a very short novel, and not a novella… Or perhaps the publishers think “novel” sells better than “novella”, and they should know.
As usual with Stross, his style is burbling — it’s hard not to envision a guy jumping up and down in front of his laptop while typing away, laughing maniacally at the sentences he manages to conjure up. It’s very charming, but sometimes you’ve read half a paragraph and you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, because he took a metaphorical route and followed it a bit too far, while dropping in three non sequitur jokes and nine Britishisms never committed to paper before.
It’s fun, but it’s exhausting.
He also has a tendency to explain everything about his universe in every piece, and since there’s three stories in here, we get some repetition. I mean, it’s fine — it’s all very amusing and quite exciting — but it’s a thing.
These stories are set before the current New Management books, and that’s kinda nice. I saw somebody describe the New Management books as not being totally “sound”, and I kinda get what they mean: Stross’ universe has diverged so much from ours by now (thirteen books in) that the most recent books are sometimes a bit “eh?” These stories don’t have that problem.
A Conventional Boy (2025) by Charles Stross (buy new, buy used, 4.28 on Goodreads)