book review: The Nightmare Stacks

Charles Stross.
The Nightmare Stacks.
Orbit. 2016

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Alex Schwartz, recently a highly paid bank employee, currently working for the Laundry on a much reduced civil service salary, and a reluctant vampire to boot, has been posted to Leeds to help set up a secondary HQ. Or at least, that’s why he thinks he’s there. Higher powers have sent him there for a rather different reason.

Cassie was a student, until she got her brain sucked out and replaced by the consciousness of the head spy of an invading Elven army. Alex has to save the world from Cassie’s warlord father. But all he thinks he has to do is convince his parents that Cassie is his new girlfriend. Good luck with that.

We first met Alex in The Rhesus Chart, where Bob Howard helped flush out the vampires. He’s now a Laundry employee (it was either that, or something more terminal), and we get to see how he is faring as the new boy.

Each of the books in the series has a schitck: here it’s elves. Usually in fantasy we get to see an army casually plough through the peasantry in the countryside before the big showdown. Here we get to see them plough through the ordinary people in the suburbs of Leeds: it cleverly demonstrates how utterly horrifying those fantasy battles should be, but somehow never are.

Although there are still the absurdities, of the clash of dark horrors and government bureaucracy, and we care about the various characters, the series is definitely getting darker, as it inexorably moves towards the End of Days.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

Open Access via a new University Press

White Rose University Press

I’m sure a lot of universities who haven’t traditionally had a University Press will be going this Open Access route, to save the enormous fees charged by commercial publishers.

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Design in the Park

I was at a two day workshop on Design: Shape & Structure in Leeds this week.  Part of the event involved technical conversations in small groups as we walked around the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Some of the sculpture I liked very much:

Ursula von Rydingsvard

Some was fun:

Marialuisa Tadei, Octopus, 2011

Some I thought was a bit pretentious:

Richard Long, Red Slate Line, 1986 (part of “walking as art”)

And a lot more I didn’t photograph.

At one point I was reminded of the amazing abilities of the human eye.  The two photographs below are of the exact same scene (as you can see from the shape of the treetops), one focused on the ground, one on the sky:

14:30 GMT, and the sun is already that low…

The shot on the left has a greatly over-exposed sky; the one on the right has a very underexposed foreground.  Yet to my eye at the time, the foreground appeared as in the shot on the left, whilst the sky looked like the one on the right (in fact, it was the glorious sunbeams that made me take the shot).  I am sure I could have got a better photo with something a bit more sophisticated than my phone-camera, of course.

As we were leaving, I spotted this very square tree, looking almost like a sculpture itself:

what growth rules result in this shape?

As a way of getting to know the research interests of the other members of the workshop, of getting fresh air, and of getting muddy shoes, I can highly recommend this walk-and-talk approach.

who’s idea is it anyway?

After solving our recent book storage problem, we decided to tackle the lack of storage in the bedroom.  We had a wall with a couple of old bookshelves, a tatty old chest of drawers, and a small ottoman, with everything piled higgledy-piggledy.  We decided to to replace these with some proper wardrobes.

Googling around, we came across something that looked plausible, from Ikea.  Not being previous Ikea-ites, this required a bit more research before splashing out.  I was a bit dubious, frankly, so one evening after work I drove over to the Leeds Ikea, and wandered the maze of twisty little caverns, snapping photos of the installations we had identified via the web.  We looked these over at the weekend, and decided they seemed fine.

There’s also a spiffy little online design tool, so we played around with various options for quite some time, before deciding on a configuration.  This was great, as we ended up with something quite different from our original ideas.  We ordered it, paid an extra £35 for delivery, and sat back to wait.

that’s a lot of flat-pack

Six carcasses, 16 drawers, 8 baskets, and 22 shelves take up surprising little space when packed flat.

The first weekend we tackled construction, we managed to erect two of the carcasses.

two down, four to go

The first one took us two hours to build.  The instructions are all pictorial, and quite clear (although do require careful peering in places to see orientations), but we went slowly at first to ensure no mistakes.  By the time we built the final carcass, a couple of weeks later, we were down to less than half an hour.

ready for the shelves (the ice cream cartons are to hold the various fixings)

Once we had connected the carcasses together, and attached them to the wall, they were rock steady.  All that remained was installing the shelves and drawers.

the finished construction, awaiting content

The drawers were the most complicated to assemble, so again we started slowly and carefully, but by the 16th, we were fairly ripping along.

I was very impressed with the build quality.  Sure, the “wood” is laminate over fibreboard, but the fixings are solid, and everything fits together snugly, solidly, and firmly.

Given the number of carcasses, shelves, and drawers, we managed some small process improvements as we went.  One of these was rather peculiar.  On the bottom of each drawer are a couple of plastic clips that hold the drawer on the runners.  The instructions say to install the clip after the drawer is placed on the runners; this is quite fiddly to do.  As we were assembling the drawers for the second small carcass, Charles said: “let’s put the plastic bits in before we install the drawers”.  So I took the drawer we’d just assembled, turned it over, and pushed the clips in place.  “Oh, I meant the plastic bits for the shelves, but that looks a good idea.”  It was: it made the drawers much easier to install.

So, it was a good idea, but who actually had it?  I was just following what I thought Charles had suggested; he was actually suggesting something quite different!