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    The Delirium Brief
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    The Delirium Brief
    Unavailable
    The Delirium Brief
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Delirium Brief

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Jack Hawkins

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Shortlisted for the Locus Award 2018.

    Bob Howard's career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from the supernatural, has involved brilliant hacking, ancient magic and combat with creatures of pure evil.

    Now the Laundry's existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about eleven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organisation has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a government looking for public services to privatise. There are things in the Laundry's assets that big business would simply love to get its hands on....

    Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

    Previous titles in this series:

    The Atrocity Archives

    The Jennifer Morgue

    The Fuller Memorandum

    The Apocalypse Codex

    The Rhesus Chart

    The Annihilation Score

    The Nightmare Stacks

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLittle, Brown (Hachette UK) Audio
    Release dateJul 13, 2017
    ISBN9781405538596
    Unavailable
    The Delirium Brief
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for The Delirium Brief

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    • 5/5
      "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being EarnestIt may be useful to remember, from time to time, that fiction is not defined in terms of the alignment of the moral character of the main actors with the outcome. Tragedy is not the decline of the good, nor comedy their triumph. They are defined by formal traits - not quite as simple as "the main characters get married" or "the main character dies", much as those can stand in place when watching Shakespeare - and the moral character of the protagonists can vary all the way along the spectrum.The detective story, in its classic form, is purely comic - the story begins with an invasion by chaotic forces in the form of violent crime; it chronicles the restoration of order by the agency of the détective, and ends with the murderer exposed and imprisoned or executed, safely unable to disrupt society further.In Fryeian Romance, moral character correlates with both centrality and eventual success, and in Fryeian Irony, there tend to be just shades of grey, and stories end with no clear "success".Modern spy fiction tends towards the ironic from this point of view, from Conrad through Le Carré to Deighton, although a thriller where the protagonist/agent overcomes all opposition and triumphs, so that we leave him (usually, but not always, him) with a drink in one hand and the sovereign's thanks either received or at least deserved, would fit a comic shape. Urban fantasy can sit in various places around the wheel, from a romance model (good Slayer, evil vampires, continuing adventures) through to the ironic, but in common with much popular SF it tends towards the comic, introduced by derivation from the detective story.Up until now, Stross's Laundry books have had their alliances principally with the comic form, especially that taken by the detective novel. With The Delirium Brief those alliances shift, firmly, into the ironic. There are no good guys left; in many ways it is becoming clear that there never were any in the first place. There are lighter shades of grey and much darker shades of grey, and somewhere over the horizon there are shades which can only be described as light-annihilating (assuming that this volume's villains count as black). Some of the villains from four of the past five novels end up as allies. (Although in one case, the PHANGS, this has been a done deal for a while.)And after this book there is not even an apparent return to a status quo ante.It's quite enough to confirm that Peter Watts may have been onto something when he described Charlie as having a bleaker outlook on life than he does.It is, however, still, in the colloquial sense, sometimes comic: perhaps more funny as the humour becomes blacker. The reader's enhanced view of what is going on supplies a steady flow of dramatic irony in depicting the expectations of the characters.Charlie's interests have always lain on the spectrum of economic power / governance / policing, not only in the latter part of the Laundry series but also in the Halting State books and the world walker books. (The Laundry starts out as an extension of hacker humour combined with the mild satire of Yes, Minister, and it takes a little while to get more serious.)Responding to Brexit, which is the nadir of government refusing to govern, pretty much requires that its objective correlative be something like the complete evacuation of the governing figures in favour of something like the Black Pharaoh; a simple critique of slightly stupid authoritarianism of the Cameronian variety, as on display in the last book, was no longer up to the challenge. (When real life news leaders suggest, however jokingly, that the PM is a robot engaged in failing the Turing Test, you know you've passed into unknown territory.)Very well worth reading, though definitely not an entry point into the series.
    • 4/5
      I have very little to add to the first few reviews posted except to note that it's becoming clearer just how desperate the existential threat Stross posited at the start at this series has become and just how desperate the measures the leadership of the Laundry are prepared to embrace when the chips are really down and the British government is on the verge of being subverted by just the sort of menace the Stross's paranormal intelligence operation was created to contest. Long-term followers of the series will enjoy the return of Bob Howard and Mo O'Brien to center stage. Actually, I might also note that there is a great deal of sexualized body horror in this installment, even as compared to other entries in the series such as "Equoid" and "The Apocalypse Codex."
    • 3/5
      Things get really bad when the organization that keeps the demon shit at bay is disbanded as part of a hostile takeover. We are now officially the monsters! But there are worse ones. The dissolution of a protective agency plot is certainly timely in a way that induces true horror.
    • 5/5
      The further adventures of Bob Howard, now the Eater of Souls. The elf incursion has exposed magic to the public, and the natural response of the British government is to blame the agency that used to deal with magic and destroy it with privatization. Unfortunately, the private company they choose is a front for the Sleeper in the Temple, which is making a play to take over the country (and fleeing from something even worse than itself in the US). Bureaucratic wrangling and dark magic ensues; this volume definitely ramps up the occult happenings, and gets us a lot closer to the horrible fate that Howard has been talking about since the beginning of the series. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
    • 4/5
      And we are back to Bob being the main focus of this story for this one. This might also be the one you want to reread the earlier books because some things from them are coming to light in this one. The world now knows about the Laundry or as the press derisively calls them “The Ministry of Magic” because of what happened in the previous book. The book has the Laundry being shut down and privatized and is it greed or something else behind the government’s push for this to happen. I don’t’ want to get into the plot but everything moves quickly in the story and it wraps u up what they are doing but this series really doesn’t give you the happy warm fuzzy endings. This isn’t the book to start reading the series. It is the payoff of reading all the previous books and it isn’t the end of the series but definitely finishing a story arc and starting a new one.

      Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley
    • 5/5
      Easily the best installment in the series so far.