dissatisfaction
I've read nearly everything in Charles Stross's Laundry series (a semi-humorous melange of spy thriller and cosmic horror), and I have several of them on my shelves. But as time has passed, I've first grown less willing to spend physical shelf space on the series, and more recently grown reluctant to spend money on it at all; I've read library copies of the recent New Management offshoot series rather than Kindle versions.
There are several things that have been putting me off:
* One novel in the series, The Annihilation Score, had four people with different supernatural backgrounds teeming up as an official British superhero team-but Stross didn't manage to produce a satisfying parody of superheroes; I felt as if he had too little sympathy for the genre to do it right, and he would have done better to leave it alone.
* Several different novels featured American religious groups with agendas taken from Revelations; but although I've been an atheist as long as I've been anything, I've known people who are Biblical literalists, and what Stross envisioned was a grotesque distortion of them, not alleviated by any less satirical version.
* Worse than either of those has been the developing relationship between Bob Howard and his wife, Mo O'Brien. I don't mind that Stross shows them as having strains; both of them have careers with insane work requirements, including entanglement with supernatural horrors. But I've seen a story from Mo's viewpoint where she self-righteously condemns Bob's failings, while herself having an affair with a teammate, which she doesn't tell Bob about, even though they have only agreed to a temporary separation-while Bob remains devoted to her and thinks he's the one who's at fault. And the whole thing just left me with a nasty aftertaste.
There are still things in the series that appeal to me; I particularly liked the portrayal of the elves in The Nightmare Stacks, which I thought was more persuasive than Terry Pratchett's version of them (for example). So I'm continuing to read new volumes. But I have less confidence that they'll be rewarding.
There are several things that have been putting me off:
* One novel in the series, The Annihilation Score, had four people with different supernatural backgrounds teeming up as an official British superhero team-but Stross didn't manage to produce a satisfying parody of superheroes; I felt as if he had too little sympathy for the genre to do it right, and he would have done better to leave it alone.
* Several different novels featured American religious groups with agendas taken from Revelations; but although I've been an atheist as long as I've been anything, I've known people who are Biblical literalists, and what Stross envisioned was a grotesque distortion of them, not alleviated by any less satirical version.
* Worse than either of those has been the developing relationship between Bob Howard and his wife, Mo O'Brien. I don't mind that Stross shows them as having strains; both of them have careers with insane work requirements, including entanglement with supernatural horrors. But I've seen a story from Mo's viewpoint where she self-righteously condemns Bob's failings, while herself having an affair with a teammate, which she doesn't tell Bob about, even though they have only agreed to a temporary separation-while Bob remains devoted to her and thinks he's the one who's at fault. And the whole thing just left me with a nasty aftertaste.
There are still things in the series that appeal to me; I particularly liked the portrayal of the elves in The Nightmare Stacks, which I thought was more persuasive than Terry Pratchett's version of them (for example). So I'm continuing to read new volumes. But I have less confidence that they'll be rewarding.