The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

by Charles Stross

“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.”

He smiled thinly. “I am innocent of the blood of this person: see ye to it.”

(Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)

(There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)

Now, there are few existential crises as unnerving for a geek like me (the original feral kind—not your commercialized cash cow as-reimagined-by-Urban-Outfitters-and-Hollywood fashion geek, who is basically a hipster with a neckbeard and worse fashion sense) as being off the net.

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.”

Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”