The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

by Charles Stross

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

I discovered the hard way that Nietzsche was right: if you stare into the Abyss for too long it stares into you, and likely finds you crunchy with ketchup and a little relish on the side.

‘There is a huge difference between returning fire in personal self-defense and ordering an artillery strike on an inhabited civilian settlement suspected of harboring enemy forces.

‘Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.’

‘Since when do you speak Starbucks?’ I shrug. ‘It’s not as if I can help it; they’ve got our office surrounded, and they don’t like it if you try to order in English.’

There is good management and bad management: good management is like air – you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.

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

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it ‘refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,’ or, if I’m being honest, ‘making it up as I go along.’)

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

‘You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.’ I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself.

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.

Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution, say I: but at least this is the abstract kind, lacking the figure of Yeshua ben Yusuf writhing in his death agony.