Charlie "Jennifer Morgue" Stross was recently interviewed by John "Old Man's War" Scalzi, explaining his motives in writing a Bond-meets-Cthulhu spy-thriller:
The Jennifer Morgue is my latest novel, and it's the second in a series that follow the misadventures of a slashdot-reading sandal-wearing hacker-geek who's fallen into the wrong universe and can't get out. We first met "Bob Howard" (as he calls himself in these stories) in The Atrocity Archives. It turns out that magic exists; but it's a branch of applied mathematics. Computers being gadgets that can be used for theorem solving at high speed, Bob stumbled across this the hard way at university — and only just survived long enough to be drafted by the Laundry, a shadowy British government agency for defending us from the scum of the multiverse.
And by "scum", I mean "scum". Or ichor. Or bubbling vile tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime. We are in H. P. Lovecraft territory here, and the horrid truth is that the stars are due to come right in just another twelve yearsor so, at which point we'll have Cthulhu to deal with. And Bob is expected to deal with this on a civil service salary, with matrix management and paperclip audits on top.
In The Jennifer Morgue, Bob is pitched into a role that he simply isn't suited for. He's a crap driver (and knows it), doesn't know how to tie a bow tie (he's more at home in a Linux t-shirt), and is just barely competent enough with a handgun to avoid shooting himself in the foot by accident. Unfortunately for him, he is a competent computational demonologist, which is why he's sent to the Caribbean to deal with enigmatic billionaire Ellis Billington, who is running the sort of caper that Her Majesty's Government would usually send James Bond to deal with (if being James Bond wasn't an automatic "do not hire" flag these days). But there's a catch (in fact there are several): Billington's occult defenses include a geas that can only be penetrated by a certain famous spy. So what's a hacker to do?
