His arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in...
Concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth—it’...
Before the hardcore idiots began cooking up bombs and declaring war on the System, a System that had ultimately gotten tired of their posturing and rolled over in its sleep, obliterating them.
Because there’s something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as...
You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms? I shake my head. I just assume you have a good reason.
What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?
We shouldn’t even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we’re management, not heroes.
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
This would be an extinction event for humanity. We can’t let it happen. It is also a who-poisoned-my-beehives event for the Black Pharaoh, which is why He’s trying to prevent it. (We bring Him honey:...
This is rural England, after all; please set your watch back thirty years
This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.
They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.
There’s no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder.
There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon...
There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on Quatermass for shits and giggles—strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I...
The PM smiles, and for a moment I see a flickering vision where His face should be: an onion-skin Matryoshka doll of circular shark-toothed maws, lizard-man faces, and insectile hunger. A word in my s...
The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonitio...
The Denizen of Number 10 is the avatar—the humanoid sock-puppet—of an ancient and undying intelligence who regards mere humanity much as we might regard a hive of bees. Our lives are of no individual...
Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.