The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

by Charles Stross

it was amazing how fast most people zoned out if you babbled at them, in Persephone’s experience. (It was all true, easily verifiable—drown ’em in data and they won’t suspect you’re holding out.)

Ritual magic is unpredictable, and the civil service hates it because it relies on the unaccountable exercise of power by the dismally eccentric, if not un–house trained; nor does it work as reliably as numerology or cabbalism, let alone their infinitely more potent and reliable descendants, algorithmic imprecation and computational demonology. Its practitioners also tend to die young and horribly, of Krantzberg syndrome or something worse.

don’t like the term “collateral damage”; it trivializes agony and dismemberment, mourning and grief. (You try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom. See how you like what they say to you.)

There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”

visionaries are all very good but you cannot count on them for legwork and form-filling. Which is why there is tail-chasing and make-work and so many committee meetings and reports to read and checklists to fill out, to keep the low achievers preoccupied.

some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor.