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A comment on 'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Rakish Rock Star. Parent comment

Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by shoo on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @07:33PM (#39461591)
Byron aside, I recommend Tim Powers' novel "Declare" -- enjoyed that one more than "The Anubis Gates". Keywords: fiction, espionage, thriller, 40s-60s ww2 / cold war, occult horror, historical fiction.

For anyone who enjoys the mix of espionage & occult horror themes in "Declare", there's a couple of similar themes, with differences, in Charles Stross' Laundry Files series. Stross' series features a lot more government & IT bureaucratic comedy/horror.

I'm not sure there's a direct Byronic connection to the Laundry Files, but one of Stross' axioms for the Laundry Files universe is that magic is a branch of applied mathematics -- understanding the right theorem or having a person (or circuit) execute a certain algorithm has occult consequences. So we can at least indirectly make a connection back to Byron via Ada Lovelace.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/190554.Declare

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/the-lau...

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Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by amenhotep on Thursday February 22, 2024 @07:52AM (#39466353)
I've been wanting another book like Declare ever since I read it - annoying to find your absolute favourite genre appears to consist of exactly one book. Not that the Laundry isn't fun and good :) but there's something about how mystical Declare is, like a Crying of Lot 49 or Foucault's Pendulum but that actually wants to get somewhere with its hints of a bigger world rather than just tease the reader with them.
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Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by jhbadger on Thursday February 22, 2024 @09:14AM (#39467336)
Depends on what you want from a book "like Declare". While it isn't about spies, Powers' "Last Call" is basically "Declare" only about the early mob-run history of Las Vegas as the background instead of the Cold War.
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Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by sonofhans on Thursday February 22, 2024 @12:56PM (#39470673)
“Last Call” is amazing. I’ve read it 3 times, and I swear, the last 150 pages are still some of the most intense I’ve encountered.
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Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by amenhotep on Thursday February 22, 2024 @08:47PM (#39475884)
I've read most of Powers' other books and liked them, but none hit quite the same. Declare had a gritty majesty to it with the geopolitics, the others had a bit too much of the fantastic about them. Too obviously stories to fit the history, rather than... history turned into a story, I guess? The spy angle really lent itself to his writing, for me.

O fish, are you constant to the old covenant?

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Re:'Byron: A Life in Ten Letters' Review: The Regency's Raki... by bmordue on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @04:28AM (#39535794)
"The War in the Dark" by Nick Setchfield scratched a similar itch to "Declare" for me. (There's a sequel too, but I've not read it).
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