Tor.com published Charles Stross’ demon story Overtime last year, and had him read it for their story podcast a few weeks ago. Stross reads pretty well, other than sounding like he’s reading in a closet. Which, if I understand his comments on Tor.com, is exactly where he recorded.
Here’s the gist of the story: underpaid low-level government clerk takes night duty post over the holidays because he didn’t request his days off in time. As he complains about the office where he works and stalks the halls, he works in bits that make it clear this isn’t a normal government office. Its job is the MI6 to demons. And it’s Christmas, and there’s a chimney. Is that Santa coming down the flue or is it a demon infiltration?
It’s light and it’s fluffy in the way that David Bledin’s Bank was. In other words, not very satisfying. Because it’s mostly office politics dressed up in otherworldly cloaking. If you’ve worked a government or big corporate office, you’ll recognize the standard budgetary cutback issues worked into the griping about the office Christmas party, and you’ll recognize how the grunts never get cut a break on scheduling vacation time when they are away. This is just filled with office absurdities. And then the last ten minutes or so is all about the demons. After 40 minutes or so of working preliminaries.
In a way it’s like Dilbert and most of XKCD. It’s more about the pain of of a shared experience. When a person works in an office, it’s nice to have someone else in a public fashion point out the annoyances so we can point to that and say See, I’m not the only one who thinks that!
These are more funny because they are public. I can laugh at my boss while showing him Dilbert while he doesn’t know it’s at
and not with
. We can gather in a group in the hallway, in a bar, or online, and commiserate over these strips that have a large amount of truth.
But what works in a comic strip got tiring for me in a long story. Caricatures are shallow by their nature. To make them long they need added depth. And this caricature of office life didn’t get that depth. It could have used more demons, and earlier. That would have changed the whole thing from an office politics/Christmas spoof to something more interesting.
Title: Overtime
Author: Charles Stross
Narrator: Charles Stross
Publisher: Tor.com
Format: MP3 podcast download
Length: 56 minutes
