Firstly, and with regret, Stross the shark has jumped. From File 770.

Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize. There’s a lot of potential shareholder value in the Laundry’s “knowledge assets.”

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

Stross has biases. He is anti Tory, has been since Thatcher (if not before) hates Brexit and the UKIP, and sees nothing but disaster in the UK stopping Brussels taxing them. He has missed, for instance, that the Tories keep secrets, while the progressives (cough Clinton Foundation /cough) privatize and sell them. I think Brexit wrong footed him: it clearly scares him.

Brexit is going to kill people. And soon.

This week saw the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, and in among the rather scary exclusionist rhetoric it became apparent that the Nasty Party has decisively swung away from representing the interests of the business community and is staking its future on the xenophobic anti-foreigner vote which came out of the woodwork to swing the Brexit referendum in June. In particular, the Prime Minister has a plan for Brexit and it appears to be trending towards the hard option; that her priority will be to clamp down on immigration, and to do so she will abandon the free movement of people that is a keystone of the European Union.

This all saddens me. I like Stross’s books. Some of my best lines, such as trolls being crispy and tasty with tomato sauces, are paraphrases from the series. He has stayed on the believable side of the uncanny valley with skill, wit, and unix command in-jokes.

The Laundry, on one level, is a horror urban fantasy. On another level, a spy story, And on the third, it has become a satire of the pretensions of the British Civil Service. The British Civil Service still is a good reason to move to than Antipodes.

But there is a tide in the seasons of man, and his neo-liberal political model — which he hates — is becoming one with the Soviet and Tyre. The Luddites he despises are on the flood. And the organisations he writes about, supports, and have his loyalty are converging, which means they are becoming unreliable, without utility, and forked.

For those forks are a threat.

The fact that anyone at File 770 took the time to burble over Infogalactic indicates one thing: they’re afraid it will work as intended.

Of course they are. They saw what I did to the Hugos. And Wikipedia is vastly more vulnerable than the Hugos ever were. Believe it or not, Infogalactic to date has cost a fraction of what the Puppies spent on the Hugo campaign.

The progressive consensus has morphed.

• Postwar, the existentialist philosophers began to deconstruct reason, subverting faith and reason, following on from the errors of the 1920s and 1930s. Russell’s Principia Mathematica , Freudian psychoanalysis, and a belief that all problems could be solved technically led to a sterile conformist end of the long AngloGerman war
• The fourth turning started in the early 1960s, peaked around 1968, with the boomer rebellion: a rejection of purely materialistic socialism, the development of social democratic and social welfare structures in all developed countries, and a removal of moral restrictions
• The following generation — the punks or “Jones”, found themselves living in a bankrupt welfare state. (The exception here was the USA). The move to a market economy occurred by allowing a compromise with the libertarian wings of both parties. The neo-liberal consensus began. As the Soviet system fell, leftists began a long-term project of subverting family, church, and culture.
• The conservative loss of the means of mass communication meant that the progressive agenda was conflated with the national agenda. The corporations became global, and agitated for free trade and free movement of people
• Around the turn of the century, a deliberate programme to remove borders and allow immigration from the developing world occurred. White immigrants from the old commonwealth were shunned — the traditional “OE” for a Kiwi and Aussie of serving in bars in London stopped. Indian and Pakistani ghettos appeared. Movies promoting immigration became common
• The working class, having lost their jobs to third world sweatshops and their neighbourhood to immigrants fleeing the aforementioned factories, began to revolt.
• The left, now controlling the arms of the state, became a nanny state, micro regulating all aspects of live into a sterile conformity.
• The young leave the left, noting the Tories have been converged with them, and move to Alternative structures, such as Alt-West, Alt-Right, and Traditional Christianity. Memes — from Pepe to Wrath of Gnon — develop. The progressive project, deemed to have failed, is being abandoned

Stross and I are of an age. Our youth was the time of Thatcher, Gorbachev, Clinton and brush wars in failing states. Our leaders became neo conservatives, including the converged leftist ones, and broke the social contract of the welfare state. We remember the welfare state. And we remember the Christmas strikes.

But that world has gone, along with the rules that made our society decent, functional, and allowed us to align with those who did not have the same religion, politics or lifestyle. The current social justice cadre instead demand we all double down and quackspeak.

My fear is that Stross will do this. I would much rather he pull the plot off, as he did when he introduced vampirism into the world. He moved too far into the uncanny valley with the last book. I want his cynical, but believable, Bob back. He is too good a writer to quack. And he does not deserve to go down with this death dealing elite.