Scan barcode
A review by thearbiter89
Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross
4.0
Ah, to be reading about the misadventures of good old Bob Howard once again. Too bad it's like 80 pages long and reads like an amuse bouche to a longer meal that'll never be served.
It's a great short story that combines usual Laundry spook tropes with wild Shinto animist yokai legendaria - a mashup of non-adjacent vertices of the nerd n-polyhedron that simply screams with unrealized possibility.
The fact that a Scottish writer has written a story in Japan might raise questions of whether it escapes the curse of starry-eyed cultural appropriation that is often so endemic amongst third-wave cyberpunk authors of this stripe and generation (looking at you, Neal). But the Laundry's saving grace is that its appropriation of unfamiliar cultural property is often at the level of parody, and that takes much of the sting out such accusations (which are themselves often overblown) when the yokai in question is a possessed Hello Kitty cognate whose mouthlessness becomes transmuted into a symbol of eldritch horror.
But ultimately, the novella doesn't seem very satisfying because this is akin to a kind of long-past-due-date fanservice - just another day in the annals of a character who himself has not seen significant exposition for the past three or so Laundry Files books. There's nothing new here character-wise, just more of the same, but in Japan.
But with it being essentially an OVA freebie, one cannot really expect more. If there is one thing to be said, it is that the novella reveals a promise to this premise, and I implore the eyeless gods that writhe about in the noosphere to contrive more stories in this vein, especially about the mysterious half-spirit character, Dr Suzuki.
I give this: 4 out of 5 spirit wards
It's a great short story that combines usual Laundry spook tropes with wild Shinto animist yokai legendaria - a mashup of non-adjacent vertices of the nerd n-polyhedron that simply screams with unrealized possibility.
The fact that a Scottish writer has written a story in Japan might raise questions of whether it escapes the curse of starry-eyed cultural appropriation that is often so endemic amongst third-wave cyberpunk authors of this stripe and generation (looking at you, Neal). But the Laundry's saving grace is that its appropriation of unfamiliar cultural property is often at the level of parody, and that takes much of the sting out such accusations (which are themselves often overblown) when the yokai in question is a possessed Hello Kitty cognate whose mouthlessness becomes transmuted into a symbol of eldritch horror.
But ultimately, the novella doesn't seem very satisfying because this is akin to a kind of long-past-due-date fanservice - just another day in the annals of a character who himself has not seen significant exposition for the past three or so Laundry Files books. There's nothing new here character-wise, just more of the same, but in Japan.
But with it being essentially an OVA freebie, one cannot really expect more. If there is one thing to be said, it is that the novella reveals a promise to this premise, and I implore the eyeless gods that writhe about in the noosphere to contrive more stories in this vein, especially about the mysterious half-spirit character, Dr Suzuki.
I give this: 4 out of 5 spirit wards