The Jennifer Morgue
I was just reading the happy news over at Charlie’s diary that he’s finished writing The Fuller Memorandum, the third book in the series beginning with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. Which reminds me, I forgot to write up my thoughts on The Jennifer Morgue which I finished last week during the ADSL outage at our place (we were changing over to iiNet Naked ADSL so the lines were dead for a few days and the ADSL had to be killed off for a period of two weeks before that due to some insane bureaucratic rituals that Telstra has).
So The Jennifer Morgue was a great read. Pretty much everything I said about The Atrocity Archives applies. Just a fresh, exciting, funny, clever adventure / spy / fantasy novel set in a world where magic is real and it’s the government’s job to keep it a secret. I really don’t want to spoil this book too much because I think you should all just read it.
For those of you who have read The Atrocity Archives, this book is more of the same but with new villains (obviously) and just generally ramping up the fun a bit. There’s plenty to explore in the “magic is real and it’s the by-product of certain types of maths” universe(s) that Stross has created and he gives us plenty of ideas to think on in this book.
If I have one criticism: If you think too hard about the kinds of things that are being achieved with magic in this book, then it gets absurd very quickly. Yes, that’s part of the comedy but sometimes it can go too far and you might just stop trying to expect any logic at all from the book which then might make you just think “this is rubbish” and put it down. This book goes close to that line but manages not to cross it, for me at least.
[tags]books, charles stross, the jennifer morgue[/tags]
