"The Nightmare Stacks" takes place in March-May 2014, and is the story of how the continually escallating threats faced by the Laundry finally overcame the agency's ability to suppress and contain incursions without public notice, and is the first half of a two-book pivot point in the series (the ongoing consequences of the disaster in Leeds continue to the inevitable conclusion in "The Delirium Brief"); it's the beginning of the tumble over the cliff-edge leading down to the Lovecraftian Singularity.

It should be fairly obvious by now that, although initially the stories were set in the same year as publication, the Laundry universe has now dropped behind the real world calendar and diverged drastically from our own history. "The Annihilation Score" was set during the summer of 2013, in a UK suffering from a surplus of superheroes (or at least extradimensional brain-eater afflicted humans experiencing outbreaks of eldritch powers before their heads exploded: some of whom assumed that donning skin tight lycra and committing vigilante crimes was a sensible reaction to being parasitized). It reached a conclusive and grisly climax in the massacre at the Last Night of the Proms , an annual British cultural event; a horrible event the true nature of which was, nevertheless, suppressed and presented to the public as a terrorist incident not unlike the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002. At the end of "The Annihilation Score" the Laundry's cordon of secrecy was in tatters but plausible deniability had been maintained—barely.

The Nightmare Stacks has been reissued in paperback in the UK and as a lower cost ebook in the USA , and The Delirium Brief is nearly upon us, so it's about time for me to write my usual crib sheet essay about the seventh Laundry Files novel!

Many readers commented on the absence of Bob from "The Annihilation Score" and "The Nightmare Stacks". Bob is back as the primary (but not the only) viewpoint in "The Delirium Brief", but we've reached a point in the series where he has to be deployed with extreme parsimony. After fourteen years in the Laundry Bob is, despite his ongoing self-deception, not entirely human: watch what he does, not what he says. In "The Rhesus Chart" he walked into a nest of vampires and came out with his hair mussed but basically intact. You can't use a guy like that routinely in an ongoing series without either sacrificing the sense of jeopardy (will our hero survive?) or escallating the threats he faces drastically. So Bob took a break for "The Nightmare Stacks" and was replaced by a plausible Bob 2.0—a young PHANG called Alex Schwartz, introduced as a minor character in "The Rhesus Chart".

Alex in 2014 is not a million miles away from Bob in 2002, when the first novel is set. He's bright, under-socialized, has crippling social self-doubt, and is obsessed with some of the more recondite corners of computer science and/or mathematics (predisposing him towards a career in the Laundry). Unlike 2002-era Bob, Alex is a PHANG—not exactly a vampire, but not a long way away from one. He's got the super-speed and strength and the whole bursting into flames in sunlight shtick. He's also got the OCD that goes with certain vampire traditions. He's bright enough to recognize that PHANG syndrome is not a gift, it's a nasty parasitic infection that can only be held at bay by extremely unpleasant means and may well be sexually transmissible—a paranormal equivalent of HIV. Unlike most classic vampires, Alex also has a family: mum, dad, irritating younger sister, and middle class parental expectations to deal with. They're loosely modelled on the family of a long-ago friend: that particular suburb has changed a bit, but the sort of people who live there? Not so much.

I'm not going to recap the plot of "The Nightmare Stacks" other than to say that there are two classic novel structures in train here—a romance novel overlapping with an alien invasion story (subtype: horror). Farah Mendlesohn theorises that romance and horror share common structural underpinnings: both forms rely for tension on an irresistible intrusion that threatens to disrupt (or end) the life of the protagonist, and can only be resolved by coming to some sort of accommodation with a new post-intrusion reality. "The Nightmare Stacks" turns out to be a worked example of this theory, albeit unintentionally: we'll be seeing more of both the Alex/Cassie romance and the invading Host in "The Delirium Brief". (As for the personality of Cassie ... let's just say that I find Manic Pixie Dream Girls much less insipid when we insert an a, making her a maniac pixie etcetera.)

About the setting:

I grew up in Leeds and as is traditional I had to destroy my home city sooner or later. The setting more or less wrote itself: pretty much everything I wrote about Quarry House is true (I have friends who worked there). See for yourself:

The Royal Armouries Museum is real, too, and well worth an afternoon's visit to boggle at one of the world's finest collections of murder cutlery.

Even more interestingly, the former Enfield Pattern Room, now the British nation's reference collection of firearms, really is held by the National Firearms Centre on a site close by the Armouries museum. (No, I haven't been there: it's a closed collection and getting an invitation is non-trivial.) Situating the Nightmare Stacks in the NFC seemed logical in context ...

The annual cartoon and anime festival is also a real thing, although I took significant liberties with the timing (I moved it about five months) and it doesn't really cause the city centre to be overrun by cosplayers—it's nothing like as large as San Diego Comicon. (If Leeds did ever feature a major Comicon event it would probably be held at the Leeds Arena which is inconveniently over a mile away from Quarry House.)

The Bunker out past the ring road is, to the best of my knowledge, a real thing. Its location puts it around the 5psi overpressure circle for a 250Kt nuclear explosion over the city centre. However, I've never been there—my description is very loosely based on the contemporaneous ROTOR installations that were built elsewhere in the UK, including the Secret Bunker in Fife (a local tourist attraction). I confined myself to adding an extra floor.

Some notes about elves:

"The Nightmare Stacks" is the last of four Laundry novellas and novels that pastiche specific urban fantasy subgenres rather than British spy thriller writers. ("The Delirium Brief" isn't a homage to anyone in particular; it's its own thing.) "Equoid" was the unicorn novella; "The Rhesus Chart" was the vampire novel: "The Annihilation Score" was the superhero yarn: and "The Nightmare Stacks" is all about gracile pointy-eared hominid magic users—elves.

We know from earlier books (right back to "The Atrocity Archives") that the Laundryverse is a multiverse, with parallel universes where history has taken some rather odd turns. The Host belong to another subspecies of gracile hominin, genus homo, and are about as closely related to us as we are to H. Neanderthalensis.

The big difference in their history—the point of divergence—occured about 100,000-250,000 years ago: the point mutation that caused the H. Sapiens version of the FOXP2 gene to diverge from chimps and other hominids occurred much later in elves. FOXP2 is expressed as a transcription factor that permits the development of spoken language. Neanderthals shared our mutant version: we've had the capability for language (a modified hyoid bone and larynx) for somewhere between a quarter and a million years. The ancestors of the elves didn't get it until much more recently.

Gracile hominids are individually vulnerable, but are social animals with a rich repertoire of learned behaviour. Language facilitates horizontal transfer of knowledge; a mute hominid species would be under intense selection pressure for stronger theory of mind and enhanced cognition so that they can survive despite lacking rich semantic communication.

Consider the implications of this restriction in a setting where what you think can have external physical effects—the ritual magic path in the Laundry universe. It imposes a selection pressure for general intelligence. The baseline of general intelligence among elves is higher than among H. Sapiens because the dumb ones weren't able to borrow ideas from their intelligent peers, and were vulnerable to predation. Elves are hunters—they tend to have slightly larger brains and a high energy metabolism, and although they're not obligate carnivores their ancestors used their strong theory of mind to enhance their abilities as ambush hunters. That's where the big eyes and the pointy ears come in.

When the ancestors of elves acquired language, then rapidly wiped out every rival hominin subspecies on their world. Magic-wielding hominin ambush-hunters can generally be described as "sociopaths" by the standards of non-magic-wielding hominin hunter-gatherer/scavenger/pursuit hunters. The normal form of social control among elven societies is the geas or magical compulsion, in which the strongest or highest-status individual imposes their will directly on those lower down the feudal pile. On the diplomatic level, they tend to be aggressive and warlike.

One side-effect of building a civilization on geases is that you go direct from the divine right of kings to fascism as your culture acquires complexity and attempts to address the drawbacks of a social order that produces critical single points of failure. Another is that any technology you get is based on direct mental manipulation of the world around you. (Elves understand the laws of thermodynamics and metallurgy, but would never dream of building a jet engine: they'd grow a hollow ceramic tube and use a gate to a universe with different physical laws to heat the air moving through it.)

This has regrettable consequences in the universe of the Laundry Files. Notably, the elven civilization attracts the attention of the Elder Gods somewhat sooner than low-magic-use human civilizations. By the time we meet All-Highest, the Host have been in hibernation in their redoubt for some centuries, cowering under the rubble of their shattered world.

The shadow roads connect a manifold of different universes with different physical laws and histories: they are largely time-independent. The road Agent First traverses brings her to our world in our specific time, during the early phase of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, simply because it's easier to get to our world during the Lovecraftian singularity: magic attracts magic.

(Agent First is anomalous in having some capacity for empathy. Among H. Sapiens, the prevalence of sociopathic personalities is around 2-5%; among H. Alfarensis the prevalence of empathic capacity mirrors this. Of course, empathy is often an asset for a spy.)

The world the elves are invading from is probably not where they originally evolved. They're aggressive and invasive, after all. They expand via percolation between worlds, but this leaves huge gaps in their coverage. They're also lazy enough that they'll take an unoccupied or defenseless parallel earth in preference to one with existing hominid "vermin" who need hunting down or enslaving, and there's an infinity of worlds out there, so the previous scouts who found the way to our world reported (a) no wealth worth stealing and (b) an annoying prevalence of orcs who have developed cold iron weaponry (which interferes with elven magic). It was about as attractive a prospect for invasion as contemporary Afghanistan. But now there's a lot of infrastructure (even if it's incredibly ugly, noisy, dangerous and annoying), lots of orcs to enslave, the moon's still intact, and the background magical "noise" makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

Wrt. pointy ears vs. round/floppy ears: firstly, note the domestication hypothesis (and supporting evidence); floppy/rounded/non-pointy ears correlate with domestication by humans. Note also Stephen Pinker's argument that human civilization progresses (and internicine violence decreases) because we're domesticating ourselves—intractably violent members of human societies are weeded out and don't pass on their genes. This process accelerated with agricultural settlement and cities (representing order-of-magnitude increases in population density, hence opportunities for friction to result in violence). The Alfar are intelligent but non-domesticated. In a society organized by direct mental coercion, but based on an intrinsically undomesticated and potentially violent species, empathy is a dangerous character failing.

So it's not too far off the mark to say that in the Laundry universe, elves are nazis with pointy ears.

Spoiler (for the record): The Laundryverse and the Merchant Princes multiverse do not coexist in the same fictional universe. (Who do you think I am, the elderly Robert A. Heinlein?)

Assorted militaria:

I brainstormed the British military response to the Host with various ex-military people I know. Apologies to anyone who spotted any of the numerous holes in how it plays out!

To turn one of Clarke's laws upside down, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. The Alfar host is the remnant of an advanced mobile combined-arms force and has doctrine and tactics adapted to fight other highly mobile, energy-intensive thaumaturgic threats. They're utterly unequipped to go up against tanks and jet fighters ... but the converse is also true. (Many thanks to ex-RAF Squadron Leader Simon Bradshaw for discussing the pros and cons of a QRA intercept of weaponized dragons, and explaining why heat-seeking missiles and air combat radar might be less than useful against them.) I had to rig the dice a little to provide a plausible conflict: too little magic and the Alfar host could have been arrested by the West Yorkshire Metropoltican Police, too much and it's game over already. To some extent it's an idiot plot insofar as All-Highest fails because he purged most of his intelligence section prior to the invasion and handed executive control to a proponent of air cavalry: but the cognitive biases of the Alfar preclude understanding how control structures in an H. Sapiens society work (we're mind-bogglingly inefficient), and the fact that the United Kingdom is nominally a monarchy is a plausible source of confusion for the 24 hours or so the invasion lasts.

Pinky and Brains' Kettenkrad is a left-over from "The Atrocity Archives". Yes, they really did have an optional machine gun mount. And yes, the Royal Armouries really do have an M134 minigun in their collection, and although they weapons don't have ammunition and are nailed down, they're not disabled/deactivated (according to a former assistant curator).

As for what my favourite element of the whole book was? Hands down, it's the dinner party sequence. (I was trying to match the dinner party in Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign" for painful hilarity. I don't think I quite got there, but I'll happily take silver.)

Any questions? Over to you!