Product Description
Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.
Marc Ruby™ @ 6:15 pm
What if Alan Turing solved one more problem and completed one last theorem? And suddenly higher mathematics was awash in spells, summonings, and alternate dimensions where forces lived that would like nothing better than to munch on your brain. Thanks to the Turing-Lovecraft theorem magic happens, almost inevitably for the worst.
The British Secret Service (MI-6, the anti-spell branch) has a unique way of dealing with theoreticians who trip over the right formulae – they hire them into The Laundry and retire them to meaningless desk jobs. Bob Howard, however, is a little to itchy for the passive life. After a lot of trying he manages to get into field work. Now, as a relief from an irritating boss who counts paperclips and takes regular attendance, Bob gets to deal with dark forces and demonic possession.
There are two tales in this book. The first is The Atrocity Archives, which was Charles Stross’s initial effort. Told as one long computer geek in-joke, the story introduces us to Bob and follows him through his first set of assignments and nervous breakdowns, while a series of ever more peculiar administrators keep telling him what a good job he’s doing.
And he is doing a good job. Spotting mathematicians who have crossed the line, saving workshop attendees from being munched, and getting thrown out of the States for poking too far into the badness on what should have been a routine extraction. But even good agents have bad days and our wisecracking hero finds himself going through a portal to rescue a very attractive scientist from a very dead earth.
The second story Concrete Jungle mixes interdepartmental politics, electronic basilisks, and fears about the end of the world in a story of one too many cows.
Intrigued? If you are comfortable with computers, or at least have a handle on geek speak and enjoy twisted, funny writers whose imaginations have run wild, this is something you will want to read. Despite a large serving of sarcasm and irony, Stross also manages to deliver a genuinely interesting plot with as much action as there is esoteric muttering. By all means check this out. I’m going to order everything else he’s written.
Peter Hollo @ 6:16 pm
Charlie Stross has been making a name for himself over recent years for his extraordinary “Accelerando” stories, chronicling human and post-human civilisation towards and past the Singularity event at which technology becomes sentient and near-godlike. Another future world is being explored in the novel Singularity Sky and sundry short stories/future novels – also post-Singularity, and imbued with a pervading humour even through some quite horrifying passages.
The Atrocity Archives is best read with this in mind: despite looking a bit like horror, this is really hard science fiction with a lot of humour and a very weird Lovecraftian twist regarding the nature of the world. It’s geeky but cool, a clever take on the spy thriller, and the only connection it has with “A Colder War” is that it’s Lovecraft-inspired spy fiction by the same author. (Indeed, other even sillier Lovecraft homages appear in his short story collection “Toast”).
The one-star review below should be taken with a grain of salt: don’t come to any book with brittle expectations and then complain that it’s the book’s fault when your expectations are dashed!
The Atrocity Archives is quite unlike anything else out there at the moment, but those familiar with Stross, Cory Doctorow, or various other contemporary sf authors’ up-to-the-minute genre-busting fiction will eat it up with gusto.
And the beginning passage, in which a succession of everyday events (such a pager going off in our hero’s pocket) are made ominous by horror-inflected prose, is pure gold.
misterfurioso @ 7:41 pm
These two droll, amazing and entertaining stories hopefully herald the start of a cycle of “Laundry” tales. Stross’ obsession with science, computers, internet technology, office management structures (!), occult history and HP Lovecraft meshes into a dizzyingly fun reading experience. Somehow, massive exposure to all this information – cleverly turned on its head to meet the demands of the stories – causes synapses to sizzle and crackle, giving rise to an illusory boost of one’s own intelligence. Yes, Virginia, reading Stross makes you feel smarter, as others have observed….
This is Must Read stuff for Lovecraft fans, but if you like the work of Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, or Grant Morrison’s THE INVISIBLES, then this is more or less guaranteed to flip your wig.
Larry Colen @ 9:53 pm
I’m about halfway through the book and totally disagree with Mayhew’s review. He panned the book because it’s not a sequel to another story he read.
Since I never particularly got into Lovecraft, or horror, I’m enjoying the book even more than I expected to. I find it a wonderful twist on the whole cyberpunk genre. The protagonist is a geek that talks and acts like a real geek. He even gets the slang right.
As I said in my title, the book is a fun read.
Marcus Rowland @ 10:39 pm
It’s difficult to review this book without comparing it to other authors, simply because they share certain common moods. The actual story concept is original, a fusion of espionage, horror, and SF that won’t necessarily appeal to readers who are purists in any one of these genres, but is hugely enjoyable if you can take it all in.
Briefly, the story revolves around agents for a British intelligence organisation tasked with suppressing certain mathematical concepts; the ones that are the keys to other dimensions, most of them containing entities implacably hostile to mankind. The trouble is that they happen to be very interesting mathematical concepts, the ones that are close to the cutting edge of computer research, and there are a lot of people out there that are working on them. In the past it took thousands of man-hours to screw up reality, today a laptop can do it in sceonds. This can result in horrific accidents and is potentially the ultimate terrorist weapon. There is an uneasy peace between the world’s intelligence agencies, which pool resources to counter this threat, but things haven’t always been that way. The ultimate threat of the book is a remnant of Nazi research from the second world war, and turns out to be much nastier than expected.
I enjoyed everything in this book, from the home-life of the hacker/agent hero to its final apocalyptic scenes on a dying alien world. Thoroughly recommended.
I wrote this before seeing the publisher’s description, and it’s interesting to see how similar it is. That possibly means it’s unnecessary, but that’s life…