needs more demons?

Good golly, I love libraries. I was delighted to have a chance to read Stross’s Missile Gap, a novella published in a small print run without coughing up its hefty price tag. I enjoyed Missle Gap, but truth to tell, if I’d paid the asking price, I would have been kinda bummed.

Missile Gap shares much of the Lovecraft + Cold Warrior vibe of Stross’s fiction featuring Bob Howard, operative of supersecret supernatural spy organization “The Laundry.” I think Missile Gap would appeal to most aficianados of the Laundry stories, although it’s somewhat darker in tone. In fact, I suspect that Missle Gap may have started life as a Bob Howard novella, but Stross either decided that it didn’t fit the continuity he’d established, or (perhaps more likely) wanted to play without the rules imposed by a continuing series. I also suspect that he may have tired of Missile Gap’s conceit before he turned it into a “real” novel; it ends abruptly, and leaves any number of plot threads dangling (although, arguably, that’s part of the thematic point). But even if it’s thematically consistent, I found it less than completely satisfying. It struck me as an interesting but not entirely succesful experiment.

needs more demons? incredibly, yes.