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Boosted by jwz:
cstross@wandering.shop ("Charlie Stross") wrote:

"The Regicide Report", final novel in The Laundry Files, comes out in 11 days time! Here's a brief snippet from Chapter One (see alt text) …

Here is a necessarily incomplete list of important points that didn't occur to our departmental executive until it was much too late: * An avatar of an Elder God manifesting in the person of a politician might possibly have an agenda of his own and might be sufficiently competent at finding allies, or at least adoring cult members, to win the largest general election landslide victory since 1945 * The UK, as Lord Hailsham famously remarked in 1975, is an elective dictatorship * Consequently, such a politician might be a bit harder to control than a merely human Prime Minister * One of the most fundamental rules of Applied Computational Demonology is "do not summon up anything you can't put down in a hurry"; the avatar of an Elder God is pretty clearly something along those lines * This particular avatar of an Elder God turned out to be immune to; bell, book, and candle: bullets: blackmail: botulinum toxin: bribery: bombs: back-bench plots: banishment: and (worst of all) bureaucracy Not only are we unable to banish the Prime Minister, every entity we are aware of who might be able to do so is even worse