Perhaps because of their own deskbound lives, many novelists have been able to find the outlandish stories filed away in the drabbest corners of modern life

There’s nothing wrong with being a bureaucrat. So you’re a tiny cog in a machine made of abstract rules, paperwork, and the broken dreams of those who do not understand either. So what? You’re just misunderstood. Without you, nobody would know where to file their TPS reports. Nobody would even know what a TPS report is.

But writers understand. As species of personality go, the writer and the bureaucrat are closely related: they’re deskbound creatures who enjoy the comfortable certainties of Microsoft Office and dazzling us with wordcraft, be it small-print legalese or the impenetrable prose of literary fiction. Of course, Kafka understood the true power of the bureaucrat because he was one – and thus portrayed bureaucracy as a looming, all-powerful presence. The wonderful Douglas Adams imagined an entire planet faking the apocalypse just to get all its middle managers to evacuate in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, while in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, hell itself is one endless system of bureaucratic red tape, where doomed souls are made to sit through every last codicil and sub-paragraph of the rules pertaining to Health and Safety – all 40,000 volumes of them.

Today’s fantasy authors are more empathetic to their managerial cousins. Paul Tsabo, the hero of Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz, is a “Bureaucramancer”: able to wield the mystical skills of office administration and harness the powers of human resources magic. In all of his books, Steinmetz imagines a world where all our geeky obsessions can lead to magic: a world filled with Videogamemancers, Origamimancers and Culinomancers. Steinmetz twists our traditional view of magic from something, the thing which surely stands apart from all things mundane, to a thing that stems instead from all that is most mundane.

What is Rule 34, you ask. Let Charles Stross explain Read more

Charles Stross’s Laundry Files novels have been blending the occult and the bureaucratic for more than a decade now, with the seventh and most recent volume The Nightmare Stacks published this summer. Bob Howard works for the Laundry: a top-secret section of the British security service dedicated to dealing with occult threats to the nation. Unlike James Bond, Bob spends as much time fighting the terrors of public-sector rules and regulations as he does the horrors of Stross’s beautifully imagined Lovecraftian universe.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley charts the humble life of Thaniel Steepleton in the vast bureaucracies of Victorian London. But Thaniel has the one thing that even the most lowly clerk secretly dreams of … power! His insignificant job as a telegraphist at the Home Office gives Thaniel information that can save the nation. Pulley perfectly captures the essence of the “portal fantasy”, where a most ordinary person is swept into a fabulous world. Show me a bureaucrat who does not secretly lust for that.

Why does the fantasy genre find inspiration in all things mundane? Perhaps, as Charles Stross argues, it’s because magic provides the perfect metaphor for modern technological life, in which we “might not have starships, but there’s a Palantír in every pocket” – an argument I certainly have a lot of time for. Or perhaps it’s because we’re all trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of our own making, and we’re desperate to escape it …