Review: The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross

The Rhesus Chart, Charles Stross’ latest outing in “The Laundry Files”, came out on the 1st of July, and I’d devoured it by midnight on the 3rd.

Here’s the background, if you’re not a hopeless computer/Lovecraft geek. Bob Howard, once a budding British maths student, is now an employee of a shadowy British secret service office called “The Laundry”, whose task it is to preserve the British public from having their minds and other body parts devoured by Lovecraftian horrors from other dimensions. You see, it seems that mathematics simply is magic, and when you bring computers into the mix your chances of accidentally turning London into a suburb of R’Lyeh go way up. Part-Dilbert, part James Bond, Howard is an expert in computational demonology; you might call him the sysadmin from hell. (His wife, a combat epistemologist, plays an Erich Zann violin that simply to die for.)

Our Bob has dealt with all kinds of cosmic nasties over the years, but never that pet sparkly bugaboo of modern culture, the vampire. In this, the latest outing in the series, Stross rectifies that lack. Or rather, he would, if vampires existed. Because they don’t, you know. Everyone at the Laundry knows that, in fact is utterly sure of it. They couldn’t possibly exist.

Or could they?

The Rhesus Chart has the plusses and minuses of the previous entries in the series; on the plus side, it’s funny, clever, horrific, and funny, and on the minus side, Stross seems to have it in for religion. I say seems, because it’s always dangerous to infer an author’s views from a work of fiction; and then, it’s all first person narration and it’s quite clear that in Bob Howard’s world none of the great religions can possibly be true. If that’s going to bother you, look elsewhere.