A Laundry Christmas Story...

Charles Stross has written a new Laundry story for Xmas: Overtime

And very good it is too.

War of the Wenuses

I've got another book sorted for the FF CD-ROM; War of the Wenuses, an 1898 parody of War of the Worlds. A bit on the silly side, with women from Venus invading so that they can raid London's most fashionable shops.

NO one would have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than woman's and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire over man. It is possible that the mysticetus does the same. Not one of them gave a thought to Wenus as a source of danger, or thought of it only to dismiss the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or improbable. Yet across the gulf of space astral women, with eyes that are to the eyes of English women as diamonds are to boot-buttons, astral women, with hearts vast and warm and sympathetic, were regarding Butterick's with envy, Peter Robinson's with jealousy, and Whiteley's with insatiable yearning, and slowly and surely maturing their plans for a grand interstellar campaign.

I think the text is OK, it was printed in VERY large type which was a dream to OCR. I don't want to put it on line generally yet, it's going to be one of the extras on the FF XI release disk, but if anyone feels like taking a read through of this or Farewell Nikola I'd be grateful - they really need more pairs of eyes to eliminate all the errors.