TRASHFUTURE - BONUS: Eldritch Austerity ft. Charlie Stross

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

This was originally recorded as a bonus episode, but we decided to release it on the free feed because it was a great conversation and we'd love for you to hear about Charlie's new book - Dead Lies Dreaming. Dead Lies Dreaming is the first entry in the sequel to Stross' Laundry Files series, and looks at what happens when Lovecraftian monsters take over the government. Spoiler alert - it's not that different. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

Hello, and welcome back again to this bonus episode of TrashFuture, that podcast you're listening to right now. It's me, Riley. I am joined from one sunny undisclosed location. I'm joined by Nate. Hello, yes. I'm actually, I'm allowed to disclose my location this time. I'm in the studio for the first time in months, and it's really weird. You have like an arm full of those Fitbit devices, all with the locations enabled. Just reminiscing about how much we used to be able to just move freely. What a weird sensation.

And so if you're listening to this, please at the band, the police, to let them know that Nate has been in the studio. Yeah, we will tactically deploy a SWAT team to the studio in order to compromise Nate to a permanent end for taking multiple trips outside in one day. That's right. And from a sunny undisclosed location as well is Alice. Alice, how's it going? It's going well. I love to not disclose my location, although it is very sunny. So I'll say that for it.

That's right. And joining us, we have a very special guest today, very pumped about this. From an eldritch horror, disclosed location. It is Charlie Strauss, the author of the Laundry Files series, as well as many other books and Dead Lies Dreaming coming out on October 2020. Charlie, how you doing? Hi, and hello from sunny Edinburgh in Scotland. So if you're counting at home, that is one disclosed location. Mark that down in your bingo cards. So, Charlie, the Laundry Files as a series, I was hoping we could get a little bit of

background on that so we can then go into your new code, which I've just near new code, your new book, I've got the bloody code written down on my notes, your new book. So we can get some background on it. So what's what's the world of the Laundry Files all about? Okay, the Laundry Files got started in 1998 of all times, when I just tried writing a really short one off novel. The basic premise is magic is a branch of applied mathematics. If you solve the right theorems, eldritch beings from other universes will listen and can sometimes be induced to obey your instructions. So magic is a branch of applied mathematics. It follows that computers, which machines that can be used for fair improving really fast, are magical tools and

the government, the civil service and GCHQ in particular will have something to say about that. Our initial hero, Bob Howard, he, that's not his true name, true names have power, he's a CS geek who was sort of made a job offer. He wasn't allowed to refuse in government IT after he nearly landscaped Wolverhampton by accident while working on his master's thesis in computer graphics. That was circa 2002-2003. The books had a very, the series has had a very, very weird history. It first, the first book came out in a really obscure Scottish SF magazine as a serial around 2002. It then ended up with a small press, then it accidentally won a Hugo award and things just kind of snowballed. Things kind of snowballed and I suddenly find myself 10 books

later, desperately trying to hang on to it. You know, I've been writing it for 20 years and things are mutated out of all recognition. It's gradually turned into a sort of civil service comedy. I think, yes, minister with tentacles. And then the Brexit referendum happened and since about 2015, we've clearly been living in the worst possible timeline. So I never imagined Lovecraftian horror would turn into a vehicle for political satire, but that's what's happened to it. Well, it's kind of you've been overtaken by events a little bit. We now live in civil service situation comedy. So yeah, that's great. Yeah. I mean, the only way to take the only way to go after 2016 and the Brexit referendum was to put an elder God near that hotel, the black pharaoh

in number 10 Downing Street, running a government known as the new management. The motto of a new management is strong and stable. And it doesn't get much stronger or more stable than something that wants human sacrifices every week. And I get I think once once again, you know, the your books have become slightly overtaken by events in as much as the governments of both the US and the UK seeing the possibility that garden centers may remain closed and their lawns intended for another couple of weeks have basically demanded broad scale human sacrifice in the forms of like sacrifices must be made. How else are they going to keep their bank balances expanding indefinitely? I mean, I feel like even when you set out with the only difference being sort of how how loud

they are about the human sacrifices part, even that just comes back around and we're two weeks away from step pyramids in the car park at Wicks and yes. Yeah, I will admit I'm having a little bit of a crisis of faith right now because I'm sort of halfway through writing the sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming. I sort of viewed as a first of a trilogy and I began writing it before the lockdown started and I had to divert on to another project edits on another book that's coming out next year. And now I'm trying to scratch my head saying how the hell I keep ahead of where things are going post COVID-19. Yeah, just how much worse can it get and you pick the worst thing and that comes true. And then yeah, it's we as a running joke call this the lathe of heaven in reference

to the short story. But like we have this power too. It is some kind of dark magic that is available only to authors and I guess podcasters is that we make a joke about something like oh, you know, Matt Hancock is going to make you register to like donate a kidney or something. And then it just happens. So Alice, stop making that Joe's jokes in pentagram. But in 2001, I'd sold the atrocity archive at the first story in what became the laundry files to Paul Fraser, the small Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF and Paul was editing it. And it was in September. And there's this bit about three or four chapters in where Bob is sent to California to rescue a British scientist from terrorist fundamentalists or trying to summon Cthulhu on

the West Coast because they're anti-American. And Paul emailed me very politely said, Charlie, I know you were doing your background research and trying to get it right. But do you think you can pick somebody who's less well known for the zombie bin Laden? So I think I wrote I was just going to joke about that because I recall I'm we're all a bit younger. But I was getting towards a point where I was looking at looking at universities when I was, you know, probably 2000 2001. And I remember one of the sort of like, if you know this trivia, maybe you can apply this journalism school question was, because you tell us in your own words, who Osama bin Laden is. And it's like, that was not really a problem a year later. But it's just crazy to look back at

this and think of the kind of sort of broad swath utopian view of what the future was going to hold that was, I remember being very profoundly in place in like the late 90s, early 2000s, and how much that just has basically, if you would pick the absolute worst case scenario coming true, what you thought was going to happen in 1998, it feels like that would be a very soft alternative to what has actually happened. Absolutely. And it's gotten worse. And it's accelerated faster and faster and faster. There is a theory I've heard, a joking theory. But I'm afraid it would explain everything, which is we live in an Everett Wheeler cosmology, you know, many, many parallel universes. And when they switched on the superconducting super

collider and that marmoset or weasel or whatever it is fell in, and burned it out, basically since then the supercond, sorry, not the superconducting supercollider, that's wrong decade, the Large Hadron Collider, sir. Yeah, sir. They switched it on, and it destroyed the universe, and it keeps destroying the universe several hundred times a second. Each time it destroys the most probable universe, and we're now well out down the wrong trouser leg of time, the many tentacle trouser leg, into a universe that makes no sense whatsoever, because every time they roll the dice, it keeps rolling sixes. So I mean, one, we talk about, yeah, making things, making no sense whatsoever. But one of the things I think that you explore in

this book and the previous books is taking the impossible and fantastical and bizarre and putting it into a world where the forces of bureaucracy, capital or imperial power turn into something like this combination of beige, drab and oppressive. That's like what would this good ability to do magic look like filter through all the social structures that exist today. And so in the laundry files, we get this we're beginning to look at this world of like infinite perfect surveillance as governments begin to tinker with powers they fundamentally don't understand. And in Dead Lies Dreaming, we still we have someone who's we have people who are able to do telekinesis being harassed by their boss or having to fill in DWP forms.

Oh, yeah. Dead Lies Dreaming is sort of a left turn of the laundry files, because it has no laundry in it whatsoever. It's entirely about what the civilians are getting up to in this universe under the rule of the new management. And we're seeing private sector contractors. And it's really to some extent, it's a crime caper novel. Indeed, the trilogy is about focusing around the doings of various criminals. And when I say criminals, I include offshore hedge fund billionaires. I have some I have a quote about the from the offshore hedge fund billionaire that I quite enjoyed and I pulled. And that is Rupert de Montfort big or big, big, big, frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve, whose big executive assistant and voice and

hand and second in command to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the cult of the mute poet. An esoteric religious order that because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy. These days, cultists were crawling out of the wordwork like cockroaches. And under the new management, membership of such dark churches was hardly a career killing move, as long as they did not challenge the supremacy of the mad god of Downing Street. And enough money could buy a worrying amount of selective blindness on the part of the authorities. Rupert had connections, Bullington Club connections, Pierce Gaviston Society connections. Rupert had had probably been inducted into the cult by Count Gottfried von

Bismarck himself. Rupert could get away with shit that would have had any normal person gazing eyelessly down from the glass and chrome skull rack at Marble Arch before you could blink. I'd just like to note that Marble Arch, the triumphal monument in London, is built on the site of the former Tyburn gallows, where thousands of people were executed over centuries. It was the main gallows for London. If you're going to build a skull rack anywhere in London, that's where you put it. We'll read this episode in a year's time or so, just from the skull rack, where we're all just lined up like decapitated and be like, huh, that was weird. So I want to talk a little bit about Rupert as a character, because I think he's terribly

interesting. He's someone who is a hedge fund billionaire, who has enough money and influence to be able to do whatever he wants. And yet all he seeks to do is acquire more and more and more and control more and bring more people under his thumb. That is the frame in the first book. I didn't mention a trilogy, didn't I? I have a story arc in mind for Rupert. And what Rupert's true plans are is not going to be revealed until book three, but he does have a long-term game plan in mind. It's a bit like trying to extrapolate Elon Musk's plans as he was getting ready for the IPO PayPal all the way to colonizing Mars. You just can't get there from here with the information currently available.

Just trying to predict what he's going to name his child. And it's just like a sort of incomprehensible like information hazard string of symbols. Let's bear in mind that Grimes also has some say in that. That's true. Yeah. I don't wish to erase women. Yes. Yeah. It's, I mean, if anyone is going to be accidentally summoning an elder god, you can imagine it is those two doing it through. Did you see that he corrected her on the name of the plane that they named their child after the day after she gave birth to him? Yeah, dude's rock. Yeah. It's classic.

So what I'm interested in here, right, is the relationship as well between, let's say, new management and the society at large, where we have this sort of eldritch abomination that has jumped into a society, right? But what I notice about this is that the eldritch abomination hasn't turned society evil overnight. The eldritch abomination in control of Downing Street has just sort of turned everything up a little bit. Yeah. Bear in mind that this novel is set sort of circa the very, very end around Christmas 2015. The Laundry Files, it's a Lovecraftian Singularity story, basically. The Lovecraftian Singularity happens in late 2014, early 2015. This series sort of kicks off after the end of the previous series, which I haven't written yet,

because I'm perverse and nasty and like annoying my readers. But I just wanted to give them some hope that the world will still exist after the end of the main story arc, while at the same time, no hope at all that the world will be a nicer place full of happy hopping bunnies everywhere. I mean, The Laundry Files is a series in which unicorns are deeply terrifying. I remember, yeah. But I just keep thinking about how well this mirrors our sort of general attitude of despair. I think we've confronted the idea of the end of the world, as we know it before, and come to the conclusion that there's no way we're getting off that easily. It's going to get considerably stranger before anything is through with us, right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, well, I'm just here in Macaulay having fun mashing up political trends with childhood literature classics. The Dead Lies Dreaming is, to some extent, a mash-up of Peter Pan with the Necronomicon. The original Peter Pan, the original Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barry is incredibly grimdark if you read it. He was writing in the late 19th, early 20th century at a time when infant mortality was around 20% before the age of five. And if you were parents, you had to know how to explain to your kids why their brothers and sisters weren't ever coming home from hospital. How do you explain to a five-year-old their brother or sister is dead? Well, you come up with Peter Pan, and if you read the original Peter and Wendy as an adult,

he is a stone-cold, psychopathic, kidnapper, and serial killer who is so detached from reality that his own shadow can't keep up with him. That's fortunate because I have another passage here from the book, which is about switching gears from Rupert and the new management to some of the people who are, let's say, slightly more sympathetic characters, the group which you have dubbed the Lost Boys, the transhumans who have some powers, but who are, let's say, not particularly privileged, and who are working on a creative project. I have your words here. The IMPs version of Peter and Wendy feature dead kids being downloaded from cyberspace and resurrected by the hacker Peter, a maniac with a detachable

shadow who led the Lost Boys. Peter was a ruthless gang leader locked in eternal struggle with a lawless cyborg ravager, the dread space pirate Hook, with whom he shared a mutual homo-merotic love-death relationship. By the way, IMP totally shipped Peter and Hook, in fact, IMP was bent on starring in his own movie as Peter, with Doc playing opposite him as Hook. A psychopathic murderer and child kidnapper, Peter slew without remorse or affection and demanded absolute unquestioning obedience of his followers on pain of being thinned out, this bit being totally faithful to the original. He had a malin-ghostly AI servant that ran through the tunnels and structures of an abandoned asteroid colony where they live. She had a crush on Peter.

Peter was nothing if not pansexual and tinkled maliciously as she vented the air from the sleeping capsules of any Lost Boys who dared to grow up. But that didn't happen often because Peter kept them trapped in an eternally delayed, pre-puberty state using a cocktail of hormone suppressors Game Boy had given him a list for to grow up was the ultimate betrayal of the principles of the Neotaneous Underground. Now, you have, again, you've taken the Peter Pan story and much like with your other work, have turned it into something that is a dark reflection of what it was already something that was, in fact, quite dark. But see, can you tell us a little bit about the Lost Boys and what the role sort of the criminal hero plays?

Yeah, I have a sneaky weakness for supervillain narratives, not sort of high end Marvel or DC comics level supervillains, but the relatively weedy ones, not very privileged, not very competent, not very effective, just trying to get by from day to day, not smart enough to do much more than hold up per supermarket checkouts, but still trying to make a living. And they're in a world that they simply can't cope with, as I think should become fairly obvious here. So I came up with this found family, I guess, of young, pretty much homeless, their squatters, gifted or talented people, individually, they're not up to a hell of a lot. But as a team of four of them, Imp, Dr. Pression, Game Boy and the Deliverator, are perfectly capable of running a competent heist,

and they have a few other talents on their side. This makes them useful as disposable minions for hire to people like Rupert, if it wasn't for Imp's relationship with Rupert's secretary Eve, who is to some extent the central character of this trilogy. So it's not so much redemption narrative as just a human narrative. It's a world in which the supervillains, I guess, you know, the ones who hold up banks are much more sympathetic and easy for readers to relate to than the authorities. Anyone who's actually working for the man, when the man is somebody who impales skulls of 100 in public, is not necessarily a very nice person. I mean, we've critical support for any supervillain who gets enough class consciousness to join a

union, which is what we like to see. No, that's right. So pulling away from, I think, so before we pull away from the main characters, actually, let's talk a little bit about Eve, because Eve is, if we have the upper class and Rupert, we have the lump and proletariat and the lost boys. Eve is social mobility in the world of Dead Lies Dreaming and the post Laundry Files world in under new management. So Eve is, I think, a very interesting character, because she's from a grammar. She's pushed, she's gotten her way up in the world. She became Rupert's secretary, but has really just an enormous amount of power in his business empire. And her ambition is to, at any cost, it seems, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, is to get some autonomy herself, which means

turning herself ruthless to deal with a ruthless and magical world. Yeah. Eve is driven because at risk of a spoiler, she's effectively lost her family to the machinations of cultists, who she detests with a violent, fiery passion. But having some magical talent of her own, her response is the best way to deal with them is to get to the top, take over as much of Rupert's power as she can and use it against them. But you've all, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. And if you're willing to use any means available against an evil, you've got to be very, very careful not to become evil yourself. And I should add, Eve is actually the central character in the next book, as the pigeons come

home to roost. Excited to see the efficacy of changing the system from the inside. A thing that's never been tried before and never has led to particularly tragic results. What are you talking about? It's called new management. It's like new labor. So I think let's, I was veering out of, say, the words on the page. One of the things I keep thinking about as I go through this is the lives of the ordinary people who are sort of scuttling hither and yawn. So let's talk a little bit about some of the regular schmoes that are like the fired security guards from Hamley's or the actors who find themselves enmeshed in a bank robbery they thought was a bit. What is daily life like under new management

again for schmoes? And how do you pull that from the experience of Britain, not just today, but of the last several years? If you assume that a lot of the intent behind austerity in the UK is vicarious cruelty on the part of people who believe that they're the natural rulers of right, then I just dialed it up to 11 basically. Crime and punishment, well, they're not going to reverse, the new management isn't going to reverse cuts to the police budget, even though they're having to deal with super villain outbreaks. No, they're just going to ramp up the punishments out of all proportion, bringing back the 18th century bloody code where you could be hanged for stealing two loaves of bread. And then they're going to outsource a lot of the work

that's currently done by the police to the private sector, bringing back the 18th century thief takers who are somewhat problematic. Basically, if you were robbed or burgled, you might get annoyed and go to somebody who knew a guy who would, for a fee, repossess your property and give it back to you. For a slightly bigger fee, they'd grab the thief and haul them up in front of the old Bailey where they'd be sentenced to death and hanged. And you don't need to be very cynical to figure out that the end product of this system, the thief takers who are paid by the victims to collect their property and get revenge. Jonathan Wilde. Jonathan Wilde, who was the thief taker general in 18th century London,

who went to the gallows because he was effectively the leader of the London thieves' guild. Look, I would say that that's an example of hustle and the gig economy and being a motivated self-starter. Jonathan Wilde, who was the thief taker general in 18th century London. Oh, absolutely. In the new book, the one in progress, I'm working on what happens under the new management with work fare and supermarket staffing. And dehumanization in a retail environment. When you throw a Lovecraftian dimension into it, it really does give a whole new slant to the phrase unexpected item in the bagging area. So, in fact, if we talk about outsourcing, right, in the early strains of the book, we're also

introduced to appropriate enough with the Peter Pan theme, Wendy, who is an XPC who got downsized in sort of what in probably the late 2000s, early 2010s and ends up working as a security guard far below her pay grade because of a bureaucratic error no one bothered to check. And there is this feeling of elation when she realizes her zero hours contract might become permanent. It's not so much a bureaucratic error as a malignant error. She got into the, she was on the losing side of a sexual harassment claim against a senior officer of a man. She was just a detective constable. Her boss was an inspector or chief inspector. And, you know, when it's something, when it's, he said, she says,

who gets the short end of a stick. And of course, when she applies for a job at Hiveco security, think Circo meets G4S with an added dose of Lovecraftian horror. Of course, human, somebody in human resources follows up her career reference with an old friend of the Met, and she's misfiled. I hate to see it. Yeah. And so one of the, one of the sort of inciting incidents for her character is, is, is the, the realization of Hiveco that it's like, okay, we need this person as a transhuman investigator. Okay, fine, we'll, we'll give her a permanent contract. And in, and against the backdrop of, of, I guess you could say, not just eldritch horrors, but again, people being able to literally make tea with their brain.

Again, we, we see her, we see her arguing in this world of scarcity for a, a decent raise and a permanent contract that is unthinkable to a normal work a day slob. Yeah. The thing is, though, Wendy is a cop and not a bent one. She still retains a sense of injustice at the world. She wants the best for people. She's not naive. She's seen enough of the way things work to argue for herself. But she's not going to be a doormat either. So I think one of the, one of the things that I think we can go into a little more as well is, is scarcity, right? In a world of, in a world of magic, and in fact, in the world of our sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic, scarcity becomes

less and less of a, of a reality, a more and more of a choice. It's constructed. Yeah. Look at how so many people are suddenly in just two months flat working from home who had office jobs. And you've got to ask, why were they in those offices in the first place, especially the open plan ones where you can't even hear yourself think, where the only obvious advantage is that the managers conceal their drones at their desks. Hmm. It's strange how when you look at the office plans, they have these kind of like, sigil like qualities. I was going to reference a book by David Graber called Bullshit Jobs, in which he makes the case that we live in a society where most of our physical needs can be maintained by maybe 20% of the population. And a lot of what we do is make work,

not to give us a sense of being valued, but to give the people who employ us a sense of their own value because of look how many people they're in charge of. Hmm. Yeah. So various like project management and then of course, you know, podcasters, we, we do not provide an essential service to anyone. That's right. Entirely and essential. Actually, I disagree. It's not essential, but it's talk radio entertainment on a micro targeted level. The inessential stuff would be if you had a Jan back office management structure dedicated to maximizing your click foods and advertising revenue. I mean, this is, this is essentially just all of us have bullshit jobs except Riley, we exist to make Riley's need for clicks. That's right. So I'm going to, I'm going to fire all

the back office staff and replace you guys with the black goat with a thousand young. Sorry. Yeah. Something I wanted to jump in and ask a question of you, Charlie, is that I'm American, but I live in the United Kingdom. I've lived here for about two years. And one of the things that struck me in reading what I have read of Dead Lies Dreaming is the extent to which so much of this, the sort of alternate reality is just a slightly worse extension of what already exists in the United Kingdom. And I'm wondering, do you feel as though you have to kind of base it in the United Kingdom or have it be here in order to be because it's something that's familiar to you, or do you feel like there's a particularly like, I don't know, refined level of dystopia here that already exists

because so much of this is like, it's already kind of horrific and jarring and dehumanized, but also it's, it's true to life in the sense of when you talk about the, the, the contractor work in the zero hours contracts and the instability, the high cost of living, things like that, those needs, those are all real, even if some of the more fantastic elements are not. Well, for one thing, there's the old aphorism, right? What you know, and I am British, I live here. But to another extent, the series got started because I was trying to actually write a satire, a particular type of British spy thriller. The first book, the atrocity archives, is a Len Dayton pastiche. The second book for Jennifer Morgue is in Fleming. We have a hapless hacker geek who's

expected to fill James Bond's tuxedo. Now, I could have tried setting it in the United States, and indeed, I have written another series that is set in the United States, the motion princess series. But I don't need to, the urban fantasy market in general is massively saturated with stuff set in the United States. There is comparatively less of it in the UK. That doesn't mean to say there's less room for interesting insights to come out of the UK, though, is my feeling. You could equally well set it elsewhere, but I have less experience of other countries. I'm handicapped by only being anglophone. I don't speak any other languages. So I couldn't, for example, comfortably sit down and write a novel set in Germany,

nevermind somewhere like Indonesia. But I think there's like, I think you've, something that's always struck me about the laundry series as a whole is how well it captures the kind of like dismal ingrained texture of British life and British bureaucracy. And like, I think that's one of the things that really struck me reading this was how much the sort of the withering away of the state, whether that's in the form of the laundry or, you know, previous management or whatever, has not eroded at all, has not left a dent on that kind of like drop panel ceiling institutional coffee taste vibe.

Yeah, we are amazingly good at stealing ideas from overseas and making them worse in every possible respect. I'm trying to see if I can come up with any concrete examples. The best thing I can think of is to look back to the British car industry in the 1970s and the abominations they produced. I mean, the United States, you had the Pinto, which was a trash fowler motor, but the UK gave us the Austin Allegro. More aerodynamic going backwards than forwards. This is stuff that made eastern block cars like the Lada look sophisticated and good. I mean, what's with with the British cars? My dad, my entire from the age of, you know,

me being nothing to the age of me being about 12 drove a triumph TR three largely to and from the mechanic and then entirely failing to learn his lesson switch to a triumph TR 250 from the 1970s. The man loved a British sports car, but while those I think didn't didn't feel particularly drab and awful, one of the things that I think you one of the ways that you sort of really bring it to life for me is the propensity of everyone's flat to be kind of shit. Yeah, we do have a real problem of housing in the UK. Indeed, deadlines doing is to some extent a meditation on the housing crisis of this century.

If you look at floor space in dwellings, the average British new build house or apartment today is smaller than its Japanese equivalent. And we think of Japan as having legendarily tiny houses and as being overpopulated. An Australian or American equivalent of equivalent value is three to four times the floor space. It's absolutely terrible. And I'm lucky. I'm now 55. I first took got a mortgage in 1987. So I am at that sort of cusp between leading edge of Generation X and being a boomer. I guess my elder brother and sister are technically boomers. Don't tell anybody that I'm kind of embarrassed about it. But I'm at that point where I was able to buy a home and I now actually live in a flat I own and have an extra room for

an office. Whereas for many younger people today, I just can't imagine how ghastly it is. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you can't imagine it because you have in this book, you have success congratulations, you have successfully imagined it. As far as housing goes, I have a running joke that I tell about the UK being an entire country with sick building syndrome. And I'm just realizing in the course of recording this, how much of that I've cribbed from you. So the average British house is 75 years old. On the one hand, they're built last. They use solid construction materials. But on the other hand, constant battle to modernize, constant battle to keep everything up, massive price inflation driven

by the financialization of everything. Thank you, Margaret Thatcher. I had to resist the urge to swear at her name just then. I'm sorry. Please do not resist it. We are not that kind of podcast. Jump in. The water's fine. No, I remember the Thatcher years. When I heard the news that she'd resigned as Prime Minister, I was driving home from work at the time. I nearly drove off around about cheering. I still remember very fondly the street parties in Glasgow when she died. That was a great moment in our municipal history. When she died, I was very, very happy that my wife and I were actually well out of the country at the time. In fact, we were in Malaysia,

where they were having a general election campaign. So the first 30 pages of every newspaper was electioneering broadcast on behalf of the ruling party. Somewhere on page 32, there was half a page of foreign news. And right out of the bottom, there was this two inch high column. Foreign Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies. That feels merited. That feels like the amount of coverage it needed. Yep. So I want to go into a little bit more. Two questions here. The second one's going to put you on the spot a bit. How the housing crisis is imagined as something eldritch because one of the key settings of one of the settings of the book is the Lost Boys House, which is on a palace which is like Kensington Palace. Palace Gardens. Kensington

Palace Gardens, which is the hits some of the nicest houses in London. In fact, some of the nicest houses in the world. And the idea is they get so expensive that they only exist as assets for like hedge funds and private equity firms and so on who don't need to get tenants in. They just literally want to park money there. So they're totally dilapidated. And so the Lost Boys have been able to just sort of break into one and live in them. Yeah. This is actually based on the real situation. There are streets in London where everything is owned by private equity or sovereign wealth funds, in fact, by governments. What got my attention was around 2005 to 2008, reading a news article, but I'm trying to remember his name. The former CEO of Google, Eric...

Sergey Brin. Eric Schmidt. Larry Page. Eric Schmidt. That's the one. He was trying to buy a house in London in one of two or three different neighborhoods with a good school catchment area because kids, it needed to have four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a reasonable garden. He approached a real estate firm and said, here is a war chest, here's $50 million, find something for me. A year later, they went back to him and said, sorry, Gav, that's not enough money to buy a four bedroom house. Cool. I wanted to explore a little bit more how this becomes eldritch, or do you think it's eldritch enough? It's probably eldritch enough anyway.

I don't want to go into any spoilers as to what the Lost Boys discover on the top floor of their house and how it connects to the realm of magic and the missing lost concordance to the Necronomic on. Other than to say that that takes some elsewhere in London in a very strange way. Everything goes sideways. And so here's what I'm putting you on the spot slightly. We were thinking a little bit more about housing and thinking more a little bit about how British housing is now some of the most sort of by all metrics crap in the entire world. A great big part of that is down to right to buy. Okay. A lot of British housing was social housing. It was built in the 1940s, 1940s to 1960s. Councils ran schemes to build lots of high rise apartments

and they built them cheap and crap and houses. Some of the estates were terrible. Some of them were actually quite pleasant. And when Thatcher comes to power, she looks and she sees all these people who are not putting much money aside in investments. She was all about the financial side of things, about the big bang, about deregulating the city and trading. And one of her reforms that she pushed through was to give tenants in council-owned houses who'd lived there for more than a couple of years the right to buy them at a ridiculously low price. This litter fire underneath the house price market by bringing a lot of new first time buyers into the market. At the same time, the councils were not allowed to spend the revenue

from sales of those council houses, which they didn't really want to sell to begin with. They weren't allowed to spend on building new ones. So this took a lot of social housing off the bottom of the market, which in turn created pressure for people to rent on the private sector or to buy in the private sector. And that's where the housing bubble really began to inflate. To put this in perspective, I have a sibling who bought their first home. There were a local government official. In 1980 in Nottingham, a two-bedroom terraced house, they paid £9,000 for it. Yeah. When we first moved, my wife and I first moved to the UK, we rented privately, but it was a home that it was a flat that had been sold as a right to buy

unit in a housing estate of probably about 300 or 400 units in Packham. And when we rented it, we realized the landlord had been trying to sell it but took it off the market when we rented it. It had been purchased in 1981, I think for about £11,000, and he was trying to sell it for £325,000. It was a 495-square-foot-one bedroom on the fourth floor of a big dilapidated council estate. And there was this moment of sheer dislocation looking at that because that's probably slightly inflated from what they would reasonably get selling it. But still, it's not necessarily off the mark. And you realize that if that's the norm, the sense of, I guess you might describe as enforced powerlessness that has been in play since

that you took over has never really left. At least that's my sense as an outsider. And I feel like in what I've read of your work, it feels as though that sense of powerlessness, there's much more, there's much more of the fantastic, there's much more, I guess, just objectively evil things at work, but the effects are the same on the people who suffer them. And that's what I feel like makes it so disconcerting sometimes reading is that the extent to which if you're the victim of these forces in a way, it doesn't matter if it's a bureaucratic decision made in the real world or in a more fantastic way, you're still being victimized. And that's something that has just shocked me over and over because it feels like that powerlessness, that

lack of agency, has never gone away despite what people might have convinced themselves in the 90s and early 2000s. Yeah. The biggest nightmares out there aren't magic spellbooks like the Necronomicon that let you summon up demons. They're interesting abstract financial instruments that dehumanize millions. The laundry files out of some extent a horror series, I mean, Lovecraftian horror with the near of different stuff. But, you know, we get tired of ghosts and ghoulies and werewolves and vampires after a bit and things with tentacles lose their fear. Somewhere in this flat, I think I've got a pair of Cthulhu bedroom slippers. So how do you put the horror back into it? There is one particular scene of really unpleasant

horror in Dead Lies Dreaming, which I cribbed from real life because when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. It's a book that I allowed myself to write because I couldn't stick to what I had a deadline on because my mother was in a nursing home after having had several strokes and was clearly on the way out, which really poisons your creativity. So I gave myself free license to write whatever the hell I wanted just for therapy and Dead Lies Dreaming is what popped out. And the key scene there in Dead Lies Dreaming is when Eve goes to visit her mother in the nursing home. I don't know if any of you clocked what was going on there because there is nothing in any horror novel that can compare with the experience of walking around a

nursing home with your mind listening to what's the subtext of what's going on in the background, listening to the person in the next bedroom over complaining that they don't like this hotel, the food's horrible, they want to go home. Mummy and daddy, when you're coming to take me home, this is somebody who's about 90. Yeah, and there are worse things than that in nursing homes. And especially now. Yeah, God, yes. I mean, it's once again. That's your step pyramid is your rack of skulls is, yeah. And and the I think the horror is again, not not fully being able to comprehend what's going on, and all the people who could make your life better, not caring on purpose, almost aggressively.

Yeah, there was this period in from the very end of January, I realized that something was badly wrong in Wuhan. This was going epidemic and probably global. Then by early February to mid February, as it's not going global, it's coming over here imminently. And you don't have to know much mathematics to know how to calculate an exponential and what it's looking like. And towards the end of February, I was getting ready close to panic. Actually, we went into self lockdown around March the eighth, March the ninth, about a week ahead of the official announcement, because it was glaringly obvious that this was going to be a plague really soon. And there was this sense of helplessness, like you're just watching a car crash,

it's about to take place, and can't get up a brake handle. I don't know if you guys had that sense of inevitability as well of events spinning out of control. But that's a sensibility that a lot of us live with the whole time these days, but we have no control over events. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, we had a similar sense, I guess. I never expected to live to be this old because, well, the Cold War. If you're under about 50, you probably don't really remember what it was like to live knowing that there were two nuclear superpowers facing off against each other. And if anybody made a miscalculation or a mistake, ideologically motivated politicians on opposite sides of the planet could burn your face off and destroy everyone you knew

at the push of a button. That's why I don't find myself believing the squirrel falling into the CERN Hadron Collider theory. On the basis that the odds of us surviving two nuclear superpowers are so astronomically low that it just seems like, why would it have started so recently as that? I think it's... No, I'm going to disagree. The nuclear superpowers, the one important thing we all didn't understand at the time is even fascist dictators like Augusto Pinochet want to die in bed at home at a good old age surrounded by their grieving relatives. They don't want to die in a fiery nuclear holocaust. It turns out that that was the subtext of the Cold War that nobody was willing to talk about. Nobody actually wanted it to go hot. They wanted everybody

else to be afraid that they wanted it to go hot, but they didn't want to actually do it themselves. I'm not thinking necessarily about malice. I'm thinking about incompetence, and I don't know how we got as close as we did to... The two or three times we almost... I appreciated it, Charlie, that you made the reference to Abel Archer because once again, a thing that's not necessarily all that well understood that it came very close simply because of basically someone's aggressive interpretation of an exercise taking place. Absolutely. That legitimately could have triggered a nuclear war, and by that point, once the first one lands, all the other ones have to be fired too. My parents were in the military in the US, and they were stationed in Germany

at that time. I never really understood until I was an adult the level of fear they were living with because there was always this notion of you might get the call up and we're guarding the full to gap if you want to call it that. You realize now that that was... It seems like an abstraction now, but at the time, it was basically, I guess, maybe probably like it feels with the current pandemic that the worst case scenario could actually happen, and then life has to go on somehow. That sense of helplessness, that sense of big events out of your control are going to determine whether or not you get to sleep in your bed or whether it becomes threads immediately. And it's a strange kind of given of the modern condition, and I think now also because we can

see more of it than we could see back then, that it feels, at least in my perspective, it feels like when you were describing that panic at the end of February, I moved here from New York, and I knew immediately when this hit New York what it's like there, the level of privation, the level of just complete, I don't know, it's like a city ruled by Leonid Brezhnev. It's going to get so bad so quickly because by the time people actually react to it, it's going to be too late. And I guess it feels like it doesn't take much to turn that into something horrible or supernatural because in a way, the consequences aren't that different than what we're actually experiencing in our day-to-day actual life.

Yeah, absolutely. The Berlin Wall came down when I was 24, 25, and up until that point, I'd never lived more than five miles away from ground zero of a major thermonuclear target. The UK is very small, and there's an awful lot of fat targets here for the Soviet Union, an event that war broke out in Europe. Germany would get it first, but as soon as things escalated above battlefield range, the UK would get slaughtered. And I'm sorry, just targets everywhere. You were never that far away from things. In fact, Fred's, if anything, was optimistic in its portrayal of people surviving. By about 1992, I was just about getting ready to try and tackle it in fiction to work my own fears out because I reckon an awful lot of my generation

have PTSD to some extent over just growing up with that level of awareness of imminent death for decades on end. I wrote a short story called A Calder War that came out in 1997-98, which was sort of a secret history sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, in which after the Antarctic expedition that Lovecraft documented, there was a sort of occult arms race and everybody, the Soviets, the United States, the Nazis, went and stole everything they could from the old ones lost cities in the Antarctic. And Cold War was fought with Lovecraft in Horrors as weapons. And that was so bleakly nihilistic, I could not expand it to novel length, but I decided to add an element of black humour and comedy, and that's where the atrocity archives

got started. So to some extent, it was trying to find a modern metaphor for fear of nuclear annihilation using Lovecraft in horror, or vice versa, to try and put the absolute terror and nightmare back into Lovecraftian tentacle monsters, which had been sort of rendered banal by overexposure. I suppose that's happened to nuclear weapons now. I suppose that's now a banal fear, it's now kind of retro, and I wonder if that's like a treadmill that just continues for as long as we don't get vaporized by something, that we make it quite cute and eventually you'll have like a pair of ICBM slippers. Possibly. Well, one of the things I think of about magic always, whenever it comes about in writing, is that magic always tends to stand in for something. It's the black box

that allows you to push whatever it is that you want to express to that one higher level of intensity. I don't know if you're familiar with, as a science fiction theorist, who's one of the main science fiction theorists. Apologies, Charlie, if I'm quoting some chapter-inverse shit to you. I always really like the writing of a guy called Darko Souven. He's a Bertolt Brecht guy, and he talks about this thing called Cognitive Estrangement, where the ideas you are in sci-fi writing, you're removed from the story by this other, this thing, this technology, whether that's- There's an element of distancing in play. It's to allow you to reassess the world you live in through fresh eyes, from a distance, from an estranged perspective.

What makes that cognitive is that it's explained how it's done. That's what he says, the difference between fantasy and sci-fi. Of course, you kind of tread the realms of both. He's just like, yeah, well, we're summoning Cthulhu, but we're doing it through math and computers. There is one point I'd like to make, which I brought up explicitly, I think, in the Nightmare Stacks, one of the later Laundry Files books, but a couple of books ago. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You try and explain to me how a DVD player works. This aphorism can be flipped on its head, though. Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

What I've been doing, I guess, is playing at the border between the two. I said earlier I was going to put you on the spot. I want to, as we are coming up on the hour, I wanted to do a quick speed round with you and think of some existing policies and see if we can eldritch them up a little bit. This is for everyone here. As we know, Help to Buy was the policy where the UK government would guarantee the mortgage of a first-time home buyer up to £500,000 in such a way that it caused tons of awful shitty houses to be built by basically one guy, Jeff Fairburn, who made billions off of it and now everyone who has actually managed to get a mortgage, they thought the government was going to give them housing. It turns out,

all of their houses, they now owe more debt on them than their worth because they were all constructed like shit. Is it possible to eldritch up this policy at all, or do we think it's eldritch enough? I'm going to say the only way to do it is if they had to provide their souls as collateral for loans. I was going to say first-born child, but yes, similar. Basically, the penalty can't just be bankruptcy or an underwater mortgage. There has to be some kind of flesh and bone You do own your house, but on top of the mortgage, there's just a skull that floats around and is screaming constantly. That's just Warhammer Alice. Because what I was thinking was, yes, you may own your house, but if it goes underwater at any point, then you start haunting it.

It's worse. It haunts you. You can hand the keys back, but you can never get away from it. Oh, that's right. Until you've paid off the mortgage, any time you walk out of your door, you blink, and then you're just walking out of your closet and you're back in your bedroom. You're living in the Winchester Mystery House. You're working from home. You're working from home forever. Mute with today's lockdown. I mean, that's just everyday life. Okay. We're going to do an easy one. An easy one here. The reintroduction of national service is a very popular among

people who are too young to have done national service, but far too old to do it now as a way to finally get the young people respecting Britain. Can we eldritch up the reintroduction of national service? I think it's fairly obvious we apply conscription for a bit of 1000 years to the souls of everybody over 75. Yeah, they are then made to this all these souls then are made to do the thing they hate most and power a coffee machine in a hipster coffee shop. Well, there's your war hammer. It is the emperor of all mankind is a coffee machine in Shoreditch that's having 1000 people a day sacrificed to keep it running. To note that the emperor of mankind, was it 1000 souls a day he had to have

sacrificed? I think so. 1000 psychers, not just any souls. Yeah, this was a state secret and you could be executed for knowing it. And yet today we've got Donald Trump trying to reopen America when he can get the death rate to stabilize at only 3000 today. He needs it to be a 9-11 every day in order for it to be symbolic enough for Americans to come out of the stronger. We've so much more efficient than fiction. Okay, I have another one for us. The private finance initiative was a policy that was

implemented, I believe, by major than put into turbo speed by Blair that meant that in order to build more hospitals or even bad things like prisons or whatever, the state wasn't really ever able to do it itself. It needed to always contract with an outsourcing provider like Circo or G4S to more or less provide any services, meaning that if you are in a hospital that's managed by, say, Circo and you want to change a light bulb, it costs you 500 pounds because you need to get them to do it and the government intentionally shot itself in the foot on the contracts. Can we eldritch up PFI? The entire PFI building is a cafeteria operated by Sodexo.

Just 100% of the floor plan. There is no hospital in the hospital. It's all cafeteria. No, actually, to make it worse, we have to import the current... What was it? The American Law Exchange Congress or Committee or whatever, Alec, who legislate for legislation. It is reasonable to assume that they or a sock puppet of theirs is at work in the UK, lobbying the conservative parties for better laws. And it is reasonable to assume that they'll be after, quote, religious freedom, unquote, meaning freedom of religious bigots to do what the hell they want using their religious pretext, religious beliefs as cover for dehumanization or cost-efficient strategies. So you need the government to preferentially grant outsourcing contractors to charitable or

religious organizations. Well, this happened, didn't it? They had the Field Hospital in Central Park in New York that was just operated by an extremely regressive Christian charity. What happens when you import that in the UK to take over various services such as air traffic control or the post office? And of course, it's not just Christians because equal opportunities apply. It's going to be for Black goat of a thousand, young et cetera, running pregnancy advisory services. I was going to go a little simpler, Riley, with your... How do you eldritch up a PFI? I was just thinking that maybe the light bulbs have to cost 500 pounds because the light they're emitting is actually the pain of massacred souls that have been conjured from

hell. And so you can't just make that in a factory with tungsten. That's totally laundry files. I mean, this is the thing where I have a very reductive view of horror. And so I keep my first instinct for every one of these is just... Oh, you put some skulls on it. There's just a bunch of skulls in every room just floating around just screaming at you. That's spooky, right? You wouldn't enjoy that. So it's horror. Man, you would not last a second in any Warhammer 40,000 world. There's always skulls everywhere. And that's the good guys. Genres have these visual identifiers. I mean, publishers love to put them on the spines of books. You can always tell a cheap sounds fiction genre paperback by the rocket ship of the galaxy

on the spine. Detective Yarns, there's a pair of handcuffs for a pistol, similar with romance, similar with pretty much everything. And skulls just say horror. I mean, what else signifies horror? Yeah. So also, with the PFI thing, I think that, yes, that's true. I like the idea that we bring in... That Alec basically allows cults to start taking over hospitals in the post office and stuff with the idea that they will slowly change certain bus routes so that they become dark sigils and so on. The gender identity clinic system remains indistinguishable. Absolutely. Except when you do finally go in, you find yourself transfigured into some kind of horror angel. So long as it took them less than six years to do it, I wouldn't

mind too much. Why not? I have one more. I have one more that I'm going to throw at us. A Strap for Cash public health service has turned to a combination of private fundraising and grand public gestures in order to keep the lights on as Captain Tom Moore walks up and down his garden, some hundreds of times raising 39 million pounds for the NHS. The government has embraced this spirit of replacing actual funding and resources with performative gestures, including having several Thames riverboats do donuts in honor of the NHS, having people come out of their houses and clap every Thursday for the NHS, having an old guy walk him down his garden hundreds of times to the NHS, doing fly pass for the NHS, anything really except imposing a capital gains

tax for the NHS. So performative love for the NHS as the government policy for supporting it when it's at its most difficult and demanded time. Can we eldritch it up? It does occur to me that the way COVID-19 preferentially kills elderly people, it's an absolute slaughterhouse event in our nursing homes now. But look how much less demand there'll be for public spending on old age services afterwards. So what we're saying is that the new management, let's say, in dealing with this instead says it is quite simply an opportunity to re-target society's resources to where they're more productive. I mean this is just documentary. Faced demand reduction. Oh no. Riley, you say that, but there was legitimately a point at which, if I remember correctly from the reporting,

that Boris Johnson and his team decided to change course instead of going full herd immunity from the get-go because it was made clear to them, you know, numerous times it finally sunk in that the people most likely to die were their voters. Only then were they're like, oh, maybe this wholesale call of the weekend disenfranchised isn't a good idea. Kind of too late. Now, I'm still going reductive. All of the flaming, screaming skulls come out of the houses that they're haunting at 7 or 8 p.m. and they all like spin in unison in order to support the NHS. I mean, we've joked about this before with Milo, Milo from the show, not horrible Milo Unopolis, just to clarify, we have our co-host who's not here right now, is that there is a

weird kind of mockishness about the NHS as this national sort of civic religion all the while the government is destroying its budgets and outsourcing things and just continually making it worse. And so in a way, I feel like the logical conclusion of this Riley to make it eldritch horror is just that whatever, like the hospitals might become tentacled creatures themselves, the buildings actually legitimately are just, it's like the creep from what is it called up from Starcraft. Like they're just living in this sludge and that everything about them is a human being in some capacity. But as long as it has that blue logo with the italicized font, British people will continue to support our NHS. Our NHS periodically turns into a dragon and

circles the world. Hospitals just lift up from the ground and just claim victims. But you know what? It's our NHS. It's the one thing we believe. Actually, there is another worse possibility. If the government were truly dedicated to reducing support for the NHS, they would not bother fixing the shortage of personal protective equipment for NHS workers. They just introduced conscription for nursing, auxiliaries and cleaners. You're going to be drafted and sent into a hospital where you may well die. Oh yeah. And then if the support for these people comes again, not through any kind of renumeration, but instead through press ganging other people to come in and cheer for them

while they change bedpans. And the rest of the people, of course, who aren't the the Rupert de Montfort bigs of the world, will then be forced to swim into the Thames and physically turn a giant ship so it does a doughnut. Just doing the noyads from the French Revolution, but like in order to spin a big boat. I just love the idea of like a Bruegel painting, but it's people like in this flaming river of hell pushing a boat so it can do a doughnut. It's an inspirational, Hieronymus Bosch. I think having done a few of these, I think I will open my eyes and release us from this particular spell of imagining. I forgot to ask about the aliens.

Go ahead. What do we all think about the US Navy UFO footage? Are we convinced that like life is out there and is just now taunting us because it's got nothing better to do? Now, I just think they've got some rather surreal looking stealth drones that the Navy doesn't even know about. It's probably operated by DARPA or the Air Force. And they've come to the conclusion that this stuff was all test programs that have been decommissioned some time ago, so there's no point keeping it secret anymore. So I think we've been going for a while here. So I may sort of begin, but say by way of wrapping up, first of all, Charlie, thank you so much for calling in today and talking to us.

Thank you for inviting me. It's been great. Absolute pleasure. Absolutely. And I think by way of summing up, right, one of the reasons that I think it's your work is particularly good to talk about on this show is that what you're doing is, if I may be permitted to speculate, is you have a very good way of writing about the anxieties of the horrors that are being visited on us, whether those are horrors of the unknown or horrors of the known far too well in the case of this book. And that's sort of what's been my running theme going through of reading it. And so I just think that's been... It's this really good metaphorical way to talk

about so many of the things that we talk about in a, well, non-metaphorical way, sort of several times a week. So I must recommend that everybody who's listening to this goes out and, in October of this year, picks up a copy of Dead Lies Dreaming. It does not go out. Stays in and buys a copy. Stay in and buy a copy. Unless you have a help to buy house, in which case, you'll just end up walking out of your own closet. So you must obtain that particular book. And also check out Charlie's other work. Check out the Laundry Files. Check out all the other different kinds of series that are going on as well. It's all very worthwhile.

And it comes strongly recommended by me, Riley, from that podcast that you listen to. Yeah. In fact, all of us, I think, we're all fans. Indeed. So once again, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything else you would like to plug or have I hit the big ones? You pretty much hit the big ones, but thanks very much for having me. It's been great. Yeah. Oh, any time. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much for entertaining our ridiculous format of the show. We really appreciate your time. And to all of you listening out there on Patreon land, thanks for listening, and we will see you on the free episode on Tuesday. See you soon. Bye. Bye, everybody.