As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you’re a child.
And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.
Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He’s absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We’re keeping him here because he’s not deemed a hazard to himself, but so fa...
Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing...
Toma un puro, Sherlock.- Lo siento; sólo echo humo cuando me enchufan a la red eléctrica.
The geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population’s faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to som...
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 you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment.
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:...
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 isn’t very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn’t get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.
There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.
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.