The Jennifer Morgue
by Charles Stross · first published 2006
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Spy thriller mixing Cold War-style espionage with office comedy and occasional horror, drawing on real history like Project Azorian; readers praise its wit, pacing and inventive premise for fans of the Laundry series.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Bob Howard, geekish demonology hacker extraordinaire for "The Laundry," must stop ruthless billionaire Ellis Billington from unleashing an eldritch horror, codenamed "Jennifer Morgue," from the ocean's depths for the purpose of ruling the world...
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…that lets non-technical users image a system that at least has roughly the right inputs and outputs. I find that Charles Stross does this very well, particularly in Accelerando, Atrocity Archives, and Jennifer Morgue. From Atrocity Archives: "he'll have to enlist GCHQ and a scanning tunneling microscope to find it under all the 0xDEADBEEF spammed across the hard disk platters." Even without fully knowing about these…
on “Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.” ↗Most anything by Charles Stross, especially the Laundry series (Atrocity Archives, Jennifer Morgue, etc)
on “Ask HN: Sci-Fi novels?” ↗Project Azorian was also featured in Charles Stross's "The Jennifer Morgue", which takes this particular CIA mission and its cover, and wraps it in something supernatural. A+ read.
on “The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard” ↗I enjoyed the heck out of The Jennifer Morgue (like all the other Laundry Files books) but - until now - had no idea any part of it was based on something real. This is rather mind-blowing. Nice job by Mr. Stross, weaving in some interesting real-world…
on “The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard” ↗Ever since Accelerando blew my young mind, I've been a huge Stross fan. But I put off reading Laundry Files books (Jennifer Morgue being the second) thinking they weren't in genre for me, wouldn't be my thing. Wow was I wrong. The spy x demonologist x hacker combo just gives Stross more rope to play around with, and is full of fun…
on “Project AZORIAN” ↗…actually swig while languidly dictating to your busty secretary, if not dry martinis? Thanks for the hours of entertainment I derived from reading the Laundry novels, by the way. I especially loved The Jennifer Morgue. Accelerando was awesome too. More!
on “"So, what do you do?"” ↗His newer books (Jennifer Morgue etc) are better stories; with some of the hell of modern office work.
on “The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)” ↗> Project Azorian I first read about it in cstross's novel "The Jennifer Morgue"[0], from the Laundry series[1]. A very good read. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jennifer_Morgue [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#The_Laundry_File...
on “Brazil, Europe plan undersea cable to skirt U.S. spying” ↗…the book, is equally absorbing, and sets the scene for all short stories to come, as well as showing us a bit more of Angleton, and giving us introduction to MAGINOT BLUE STARS. The second novel, The Jennifer Morgue, is very good, and largely free of the problems you mentioned, but is very different from much of the rest of the series, for reasons which will become obvious when you read it. It's in the third book,…
on “Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis” ↗Stross will agree that some of his dead tree books (Jennifer Morgue in UK) are full of typos / errors. I'm baffled why the Kindle doesn't allow crowd-sourcing to mark these errors for fixing in later versions, and then allow people to download the new version over their…
on “E-books Are Not That Easy” ↗Yeah, I've got that one, but haven't gotten to it yet. The only other Stross I've read was, Halting State. But I have Accelerando, The Jennifer Morgue, Singularity Sky, and a couple of others, in the queue waiting to be read.
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...) Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".
on “The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris” ↗Yes, he mentioned this in his "crib sheets" - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/06/crib-she... it is an interesting read, but contains spoilers for his The Jennifer Morgue novel.
on “During Cold War, CIA Plucked Soviet Submarine from Ocean Floor Using Giant Claw” ↗…there. Well worth watching if you have any interest in this time period, submarines or Charlie Stross. ( The Charlie Stross reference comes from Project Azorian being the backdrop of his novel, The Jennifer Morgue https://search.worldcat.org/title/680284711 ).
on “Project AZORIAN” ↗…public, or to take the money and run, permanently install his company as in inescapable rent-extracting middle-man for modern life[2], or something else, I don't know.) 1. Credit to Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue 2. Thneed-style capitalism
on “OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO” ↗