After the frustrating side-trip of the New Management books, Stross finally returns to the Laundry series proper, albeit with a prequel. This is the long-promised backstory of Derek the DM, the Forecasting Ops guy with the magic dice. Parts of which are very neat; if you were a roleplayer yourself in the eighties (and Stross was enough of a grognard to have created a now-canonical D&D race), and you write fiction about the British establishment's bureaucratic response to occult threats, then it makes perfect sense to ask how the Satanic Panic would have intersected with such an agency (short answer: not well). And now that RPGs have gone fairly mainstream, it's a great set-up for a character who's been institutionalised since gaming was still thoroughly spoddy to find himself at a modern convention – even if fitting the story into the series' established timeline means this has to take place back in 2010, when the process was definitely underway but had yet to be turbocharged by Stranger Things &c.

Of course, in the very irresistibility of that scenario lies part of the problem. Perhaps it's just a generational thing, internalised nerd-bashing, but I have a level of reflex aversion to books that seem too eagerly engaged in tickling geek tummies with familiar references. And while A Conventional Boy certainly isn't anywhere near R**dy Pl*y*r *n* territory, I did occasionally find things getting a bit Scalzi. Worse, sometimes it gets the references wrong. If characters from something approximating the real world find themselves trapped inside an RPG, and one of said characters comments that they've fallen into a bad LitRPG, then you're already skirting the limits of acceptable meta. But the story is set a couple of years before that term was even born. Granted, Stross' afterword says that the Laundry world, even on the surface, started diverging from ours in the nineties – but that branch point is definitely too late to explain why snakebite and black is apparently just cider and black here. That, granted, is the sort of glitch which could well be fixed between my Netgalley ARC and the finished book, but there's a more general problem with inconsistencies in quite how institutionalised Derek is meant to be. We're told that the camp had TV, and he watches it, so surely he shouldn't be in quite such an eighties mindset as to wonder "What does the internet have to do with phones?" Although I did love his summary of modern cars as all looking slightly melted.
(There's also the question of the location explicitly being named as Scarfolk. Which I hope has been cleared better than in the previous Laundry book that was called Escape From Puroland when I read it, but not when it came out. Pissing off Sanrio is one thing, but I really wouldn't want Scarfolk Council on my tail)

Still, for all those little quibbles around the margins, there's never half the sense of the whole edifice being unsound that I got from the New Management books (which one amusing/apologetic subplot here implies could all have ended up that way due to a messy convention RPG session intersecting with Derek's unusual relationship to causality). Sure, as a reclamation of all the old scare stories about roleplayers thinking the games are real, it's not up there with Die. But for all that, it's a Laundry book, and it feels like one, exasperated bureaucrats and out-of-their-depth geeks up against cosmic horrors in authentically crappy British backwaters. And I've missed that.
(The book does also include two earlier Laundry stories, Down On The Farm and the festive Overtime, both of which I read and enjoyed when they were first posted on the Tor site)