James Bond Vs. Cthulhu

Although I can’t think of any notable examples off the top of my head, the private detective meets Lovecraftian horrors novel is pretty much a staple of genre-mashing pulp fiction at this point. But given the ichorous saturation of The Elder Gods in our midst, how is it the MI6 has never fought Nylarlathotep and Azathoth? And how what gadgets could Q possibly muster up to help James Bond stare into the madness-inducing tentacled maw of the Great Cthulhu?

Charles’ Stross’ novel The Jennifer Morgue isn’t quite that cool: it would require permission from the notoriously cagey Fleming Estate (Christ, they thought Kingsley Amis wasn’t good enough to write a James Bond novel!). BUt Stross has done the best he can to write a series of potboilers about British Intelligence’s ongoing confrontation with Lord Cthulhu.

Stross’ description of his novel:

We first met “Bob Howard” (as he calls himself in these stories) in The Atrocity Archives. It turns out that magic exists; but it’s a branch of applied mathematics. Computers being gadgets that can be used for theorem solving at high speed, Bob stumbled across this the hard way at university — and only just survived long enough to be drafted by the Laundry, a shadowy British government agency for defending us from the scum of the multiverse.

And by “scum”, I mean “scum”. Or ichor. Or bubbling vile tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime. We are in H. P. Lovecraft territory here, and the horrid truth is that the stars are due to come right in just another twelve yearsor so, at which point we’ll have Cthulhu to deal with. And Bob is expected to deal with this on a civil service salary, with matrix management and paperclip audits on top.

Which raises the question: exactly what genre of fiction wouldn’t benefit from the addition of the Cthulhu Mythos? Cthulhu westerns! Cthulhu biographies! And I’d particularly like to see a reinterpretation of Tolkein incorporating Cthulhu’s influence on Middle Earth.

Author Interview Week: Charles Stross [By The Way] (via Boing Boing)