This week sees the release of THE COLDEST WAR (UK | ANZ) , the second novel in Ian Tregillis’s landmark series, the Milkweed Triptych. The trilogy began with BITTER SEEDS (UK | ANZ) and concludes with the forthcoming NECESSARY EVIL (UK | ANZ).
These novels feature a secret history of Twentieth Century conflicts in which scientifically-enhanced superhumans and dark magic collide. The result is described by Fantasy Faction as ‘oh-so compelling, fascinating and frighteningly convincing’ and by Cory Doctorow as, ‘some of the best – and most exciting – alternate history I’ve read. Bravo.’
Ian:
One of the things I enjoy most about the Laundry books is the way they juxtapose spy drama, Lovecraftian horror, and the banality of office politics. They combine the profound and the mundane to great effect. Does it work because the narrowness of the corporate mindset can be laughable, or because matrix management is merely a different kind of unspeakable horror?
Charlie:
I’m not certain. However, I will note that both horror and humour are tints that we can apply to a narrative; the same plot structure and characters could in principle be written into a horror story or a farce, purely depending on how we colour the narrative.
Ian:
Fiction writers aren’t alone in thinking the occult makes an attractive dance partner for intelligence services. The CIA infamously speBitter Seeds - the first novel in the Milweed Triptych, a fantasy series featuring superhumand and dark magic, and earning comparisons with Charles Stross's Laundry Files novelsnt millions of dollars on its remote-viewing program, Project Stargate. It has also been alleged the Soviet navy attempted to investigate telepathy as a means of secure communications with submarines.
But the Laundry contends with extraordinarily dangerous powers, as do the intelligence operatives of the Milkweed books. How much stock would you put in the notion that a real-world three-letter agency *wouldn’t* jump at the chance to commune with ravenous extra-dimensional beings?
Charlie:
None whatsoever! Which is why at least one of the Laundry’s foreign counterparts, the Black Chamber, is pretty clearly run by the many-angled ones, and the Laundry itself is full of archives documenting highly questionable compromises. In fact, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” could well serve as the overarching theme of the Laundry Files as a series (I have a long-term plot that is slowly unrolling) . . .
Back in 1997 when I began to explore this area, I started with a novelette titled “A Colder War”, which made it pretty explicit. ACW was set in the future of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” – a future in which Nazi Germany, the USSR, and the USA had all found their uses for the ancient alien technologies found by the Pabodie expedition to Antarctica. It all ends in tears (and a fate worse than global thermonuclear annihilation – the point of that story was to inject some horror back into Lovecraftiana by linking it implicitly to something truly horrifying, to anyone who grew up during the Cold War), but not before a Senator in a congressional hearing gets to utter the words, “Mister President, we cannot allow a Shoggoth Gap to emerge.”
Yes, if they got their hands on this stuff they’d use it. We have met the enemy, and we are doing our best to turn into them before they turn into us.
