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overthinking entertainment
Book: The Rhesus Chart
"Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo. "Everybody knows vampires don't exist."
MeFi's Own Charles Stross describes this novel as a good alternate entry point into the series and says: "The first Laundry Files stories recycled a bunch of personal experiences: my love for British cold war spy thrillers, and my experience in the IT business. But the cold war ended in 1991 (although I hear they're trying to restart it) and I last worked in IT as anything other than a peanut-gallery pundit around 2000. If you don't use a skill set you lose it, and my programming chops and workplace experience were over a decade out of date and ageing. Also, I'd run out of British spy thriller writers I really wanted to pastiche... So some time in 2012 I took the decision to switch to hitting on fantasy subgenres and tropes rather than spy thriller writers, on organizational dysfunction and politics as much as IT, to broaden my scope and use viewpoint characters other than Bob, and to work the series round slightly closer to the urban fantasy 'mainstream' in search of a broader audience. (Note that this doesn't mean I'm abandoning Bob, bureaucracy, and devops-related lunacy. It just means I'm targeting a bunch of new material and hopefully making the books more accessible to readers with less of a technical background as well.)"
Crib sheet for the novel The Rhesus Chart
posted by infinitewindow on Dec 01, 2025 at 7:52 PM
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This one is still my favorite of the series after over a decade. It was sold on the basis of the opening line quoted above and written almost as a straight shot in a few weeks, and it's hilarious, fun, horrifying and grim. For a book published in 2014, it very much captures the doomsday vibes of November 2016, if you're into that. Charlie has a knack for both predicting the future and being superseded by it in his Laundry series to an unnerving degree, almost like a real-life Forecasting Ops division.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:55 PM
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It's a fun entry in the series with a clever method of working vampires into the Laundry universe (which Stross continues to build on as the series goes on). There's also a good vein of horror in the depiction of the old vampires -- we've already seen that practitioners are often very careless with a) their power and b) human life, and when you can combine those two trends to get even more powerful... well, it's not going to be pretty. Also, the reactions of the blood-sucking capitalists when they realize that their feeding on the lives of workers is not only metaphorical is well done -- some are indifferent, some are appalled, but by that time they cannot change the system without extreme personal sacrifice, even if they wanted to.
It's also part of the articulation joint where Stross starts moving the series away from Bob as the central character. Which I think is for the best. While Bob is a great character with a solid voice, a wider range of potential protagonists makes the series much more flexible.
I do with the "if society realized vampires existed there would be mandatory nude daytime parades" line had only gotten used once in the series, but it's a small price to pay.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:24 PM
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