Royce's Random Thoughts

Summary: Bob Howard, government IT specialist with a license to exorcise, is sent out once again by the Laundry, Britain's primary defence against Things Man Was Not Meant to Know (But Screws With Anyway) to defend The Realm. This time around he's sent out to stop the plans of a billionaire megalomaniac determined to bring up a Deep Ones artifact from the ocean floor, using Howard Hughes' resurrected Glomar Explorer, before it's Too Late.

Now if he could just figure out why vodka martinis taste like shit.

( Spoilers under the cut )

Summary: Some hundred and fifty odd years after humanity breathed its last, their mechanized helpers are still going strong, carrying out the last of their late masters' orders and creating a stratified society of nobles/administrators that have effectively enslaved the remaining 90% of the population.

Unfortunately, that leaves Freya, a barely free humanoid sexbot with an active sex drive and no "pink replicators" to practice her profession on, with few options to support herself. At least until she runs afoul of a noble and her minions, and finds herself drawn into a conspiracy to bring their human masters back from the dead.

( Life can be so unnerving/For a servant who isn't serving )

Summary: In Charles autopope Stross' novel set Twenty minutes (more like ten to twenty years) into the future, Constable Sue Smith, just your average happily married lesbian Edinburgh beat cop in the recently independent Republic of Scotland, gets called in to investigate a bank robbery. Nothing new there, except that the "bank" is completely virtual, set in a Warcraft-like MMO and the bank robbers were a platoon of orcs run by Pakistani gold farmers backed up by a dragon.

That's weird.

When Elaine, a forensic accountant with a love of broadswords, and Jack, a burned out games programmer whose whole life is literally online are called in by the MMO's insurance firm to investigate, things get Political very fast and the line between the games people play and the Games governments play start blurring rapidly together.

That's scary.


( It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand )