When an author knows that he's full of shit, but doesn't know that he knows that he's full of shit: Quantum of Nightmares, by Charles Stross

 Am I referring to myself?  Clearly not.  Am I full of shit?  Yes.  I just demonstrated that I know that I am full of shit.  However, upon reading my own statement, I become aware of my own knowledge.  Also, my own navel.  Your navel is Cthulu.  Gaze upon it, and go mad.  In game theory, one of our core assumptions is "common knowledge of rationality."  Each player is rational.  Each player knows that every other player is rational.  Each player knows that every other player knows that every player is rational, and so forth, turtles all the way down through the infinite regress.  Why do we rely upon this assumption?  It becomes important for the solution to many types of games.  Consider, for example, The Princess Bride.  In the famous scene during which Vizini tries to determine the location of the poison, he goes through contortions based on knowledge of who is and is not a great fool.  The point of "common knowledge of rationality" is that the infinite regress of that line of reasoning makes the whole endeavor pointless.  So, too, the question of knowledge, knowledge of one's own knowledge, and turtles.  Yet self awareness should be a thing.

If you cannot tell by now, I shall grumble a bit.  This is a follow-up post, of a sort.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Dead Lies Dreaming, which was the 2020 book in Charles Stross's long-running Laundry Files series.  To break up my reading a bit, I then read Ball Lightning, and that was the subject of last Sunday's sci-fi post, but for this morning, we are back to Stross.  Quantum of Nightmares.

Here's a-what's a-goin' on.  In brief.  I do not intend for this to be an overly-long post, but in the hypothetical case that anyone bothered to read this pretentious, little blog, such a person would know that this statement can be followed by several thousand words, when it comes from a thing with two thumbs that likes to rant about annoying books.  (This guy.)  Anywho, the premise of The Laundry Files series is to combine H.P. Lovecraft, The X-Files and Dilbert.  Magic is real, sort of, and it can be invoked through mathematical computation.  Prove a theorem, break down the walls between universes, bad shit happens.  Maybe that's casting a spell, and maybe that means letting an eldritch, elder god into our universe to wreak havoc.  The British government formed "The Laundry" to deal with related threats, but ultimately, they had to hand control over to one elder god to stop another, and by the time of the current books, the PM is "the Black Pharaoh," who is just a hair less evil than some of the bigger threats trying to break down the walls between universes.  Just call him, "the New Management."

When Stross started the series, his main POV character was Bob Howard, a schlubby tech guy, because most authors write from their own perspectives.  With Dead Lies Dreaming, about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Stross began a new sub-series, which continues with Quantum of Nightmares.  He shifted the character focus.  Basically, Bob Howard was a straight, white guy because Stross is a straight, white guy, and when you think through the branching effects, that had implications for surrounding characters.  But the politics of the 2020s, particularly in the science fiction community, are different.  It is pretty much verboten to write that way.  So Stross went woke.  Or rather, more woke.  He always wrote from a left perspective, an inclusive perspective, had LGBTQ characters, and so forth.  However, the real reason he shoved Bob and crew to the side was so that he could construct a new cast of characters in Dead Lies Dreaming that was entirely LGBTQ.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the sketchy mathematics of that.  I tried not to be overly harsh, but at this point, I'm more annoyed, basically because Quantum of Nightmares did some things.  And that's where we're going today.

So here's the basic plot, convoluted as it is.  The core of Quantum remains Eve Starkey, her brother, Jeremy/Imp and his crew of watered-down criminals, and Wendy.  Eve is now running Rupert's company, Jeremy/Imp is being useless, and his ineffectually harmless, criminal gang remains as annoyingly toothless as Cesar Romero's Joker from the '60s tv Batman.  (Yes, Heath Ledger was the best Joker.)

There's a grocery store that has turned into Sweeney Todd.  They're taking people, shoving them into 3D meat printers as feedstock, and printing specialty products.  The workers at this store are put into gimp suits, shock collars and shit, and sometimes someone in a gimp suit is actually a mincemeat golem.  Why?  It is being run by a creepy cult, and the woman in charge of HR (who of course calls everyone "sweetie," which is worse than the gimp suit, and she deserves to die torturously, not for the cannibal murder thing, but for the "sweetie" thing) is a priestess in said cult.

Actually, the cult is the same cult run by... Rupert.  And as part of some grand "plan," another higher-up in the cult-- the Thieftaker General (many police duties having been privatized)-- kidnaps the children of two superheroes who work for the actual cops.  Yeah, there are superheroes.  This is from one of the previous books, and basically, since there is magic and shit bleeding in from other universes, sometimes random people get "powers," and based on cultural beliefs, they call themselves superheroes.  So there's that.

Anyway, the Thieftaker General kidnaps their kids, through Mary, who pretends to be their nanny.  Yeah, make the joke.  All of this leads to a big showdown of an island in the English Channel, where the cult is based, where Rupert bought himself a Barony.  The cult is trying to sacrifice enough people to bring back Rupert, and their elder god, and blah, blah.

There are things to enjoy in this one.  It's better than Dead Lies Dreaming, honestly.  However, Stross is full of shit.  When I wrote a post about Dead Lies Dreaming, I wrote a statistical commentary about proportions in a population, and characters in literature, representation, and so forth, and I tried to give Stross some benefit of the doubt, but the basic thing is... he's just going so over-the-top.  I'm going to set two scenes for you.

First, after Mary gathers the kids and takes them on a "trip," she occupies their time with a visit to Blackpool's "Chariots of the Gods" theme park, which I had to go look up.  Yeahno.  A bust of a plan, based on the crackpot idea that any ancient structure whose construction was not documented was actually built by... wait for it... aliens!  So Mary is taking the kids around the exhibits, and whining about it, but not whining about it as crackpot conspiracy theory, or "the god of the gaps" fallacy, or anything like that.  Nope, she has to call it "white savior."

Even though it is neither.  The supposed aliens are neither white, nor saviors.  You wanna talk about Lawrence of Arabia, or some other white savior thing?  Sure.  Even Dune.  But the aliens-built-the-pyramids bullshit?  Ra was neither white, nor a savior.  You wanna talk about making Jebuz into a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy hippie?  Sure!  Let's do that!  Ra has a fucking bird head.  Still.  Europeans don't even change that shit.  Not white, not a savior, not a white savior.  This is just "god of the gaps," with the Arthur C. Clark twist of aliens substituting for gods under the bullshit premise that that's different.  It's not.  It's lazy and stupid.  But it has fuckall to do with race.

Wanna check my reasoning?  Stonehenge.  The same people who say aliens built the pyramids say that aliens built Stonehenge.  Race = a fuckall component of this.

Ask 'em about the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  Ask 'em about Atlantis, which half of them think is somewhere around Santorini.  Enough of this.

OK, but the thing is, Stross actually believes this stuff.  Every other page is a wokeness lecture.  Yet midway through the book, Eve has gone to the Isle of Skaro, in the English Channel, and returned to London with Sybil.  Skaro is where Rupert bought himself a barony and set up the Cult of the Mute Poet.  Sybil was isolated within that cult, and that was pretty much what she knew-- a backward-ass, racist, misogynistic cult that has retrograde attitudes somewhere around the late 19th Century, maybe possibly mid-20th, depending on where you are.  Anyway, Eve gets her to London, and she sees some different stuff, even at a service for the Cult of the Mute Poet.  She's not happy.  She goes on a bit of a rant, and says some racist, misogynistic stuff.

And here's where Stross really loses me.  Eve Starkey tells her, straight up, that that shit won't fly in London in the 21st Century.  If Sybil says anything like that around the company, at the very least, she's gonna have to do some DEI training (empirically ineffectual as that don't-sue-us stuff is), but basically, Eve says that history has passed this shit by.

Selah, pause and reflect.

OK, so through Eve, Stross admits that the racism and misogyny and shit that Stross poses against?  Won't fly anymore.  It's done.  You can't get away with that shit anymore.  So says Stross.  Through Eve.  So whom is Stross lecturing, on every page of this book?  Scratch that.  On every page of the second book in a row?

He's lecturing a woman who had been isolated in a demonic cult on a fictional island with 200 inhabitants, and virtually no communication with the outside world.  That's who he's lecturing.

Realistically, there are more straight-up racists and misogynists in the world than that.  There are more in London than that.  More in New York, even in San Francisco and the other cool places.  But the point is... dude.  Check the state of the battle.

You know that scene in a medieval war movie?  The real battle is over.  You have a fuckload of people moaning and bleeding out on the battlefield, and there's someone walking across the scene, finishing off the wounded and dying.  Call it mercy, call it the last act of brutality, whatever.  You know the scene.

Usually, though, when you watch that person stabbing at the grounded soldier, the one putting down the dying is doing it with a grimness.  He isn't trying to convince you that he's Volodymyr Zelensky, ultimate badass of the universe, standing up to Putin, showing courage and resolve to fight a better armed, better armored opponent, outnumbered and outgunned, but fighting on only to scrape out what victories he can on the power of moral righteousness alone.

If you're the guy wandering across the field of battle after the war is over, stabbing the fallen, you're not Zelensky.  And if Sybil has lost, then you've won.  All those rants, Charlie?  You're stabbing the fallen, and posing like you're Zelensky.

Sybil is not to be defended.  She's a bigot, and a relic of attitudes to be discarded.  At his core, Stross is saying "racism is bad, and misogyny is bad, and the other -isms are bad, and so forth," and yeah.  But once he recognizes how much he has won, it puts his posing in a different and frustrating light.

Consider anger over racism.  For basically ever, until very recently, the fear of the "angry black man" has made it really problematic for African-Americans to express anger over issues of race.  Hence, a paradox.  The better it gets over race, the more that constraint is lifted, and the easier it is to express anger.  This is, in part, an answer to Steven Pinker's progressophobia, but it means that it is a lot easier listening to African-Americans express anger over racism, given the long history of effective prohibition on such expressions of anger, even when we make the empirical observation that racism is less of a problem than in the past.  The existence of racism, and the ability to express anger when it could not have been expressed in the past means yes, there is a paradox, but that's just reality.

Stross, though.  Why is he doing it?  He's posturing.  That's it.  He's just posturing.  And he should have realized how silly it looks, when his own character admits that the battle is, not exactly over, but progressed to a point that this kind of posturing just doesn't have the same moral weight to it.

You can't have it both ways.  You can't have Sybil told that she's a relic of a bygone era who needs to shut up and get with the times, and that there is so much -ism that every reader needs to be beaten over the head with wokeness lectures on every page because Stross knows these things, and you don't.

What should Stross have done?  There were so many missed opportunities here.  The core point is that there are people who are "de-emphasized" by the law, which basically means the cops don't care if they get killed.  That creates all of the major plot points.  Stross wants to make a bunch of points about the justice system, class, etc.  And you know what?  That was an interesting thing that he could have done, to show the consequences of the New Management, but in order to do it properly, he needed to have that set up against what New Management was actually doing, the other threats, the cold calculation that the Laundry made to hand power to the Black Pharaoh, and... so many missed opportunities.  But instead, Stross wanted to run across the field of battle, littered with wounded and dying, yelling like a berserker warrior for social justice, bravest of the brave, as he stabbed and slashed at the ground to dispatch the last of those bleeding out into the mud.

You're so brave, Charlie!  Go to Ukraine!  Zelensky needs you!

Nicole Mitchell, "Egoes War," from Mandorla, Awakening II: Emerging Worlds.