Customer Reviews

The Atrocity Archives

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The novel and novella in this book are clever adaptations of prior themes. Stross places his characters in a world where magic is real but actually the result of complex mathematics/logical systems that can open portals to scary, alternative dimensions. This is a relatively old idea, to my knowledge used first by Pratt and de Camp in the 1950s. He has used this idea to adapt a Lovecraftian world and combines his plotting with satire of bureaucratic/corporate life. The third crucial element in constructing this story is a adaptation of Cold War thrillers, specifically the work of Len Deighton. Stross does a nice job of combining these elements and the plotting is imaginative with reasonably effective satire. Entertaining reading though perhaps too much of an in joke.

For those of you who have read the Bastard Operator From Hell series and are sysadmins this book will be a completely fantastic read, for the rest of you it will just be fantastic. Bob Howard is nothing like the American author who wrote the Conan tales, he's a systems geek for a very dreary agency of the British government where paperclips are counted and where you'd get reprimanded for not putting a cover sheet on your TPS reports. One day Bob is asked to help out with a field operation, and that, and some quick thinking during a departmental training course, get him transferred from systems administration to occult field operations. From there things just get worse as he is sucked into a conspiracy to open a portal to an alternate universe to let in one of the elder gods or into an interdepartmental conspiracy to eliminate his department. Incredibly fun, there are lots of ideas in here that are just fun to play with after you put the book down.

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...

Charles Stross has received a lot of well-deserved attention for his several novels including the current Hugo nominee Accelerando. His first published novel was actually a serial, in Spectrum SF in 2001-2002, "The Atrocity Archive." This story is now in book form, with a sequel novella to expand a shortish novel to more typical book length. That novella won the Hugo award.

The novel is a neat mix of horrific fantasy -- demons and Lovecraftian monsters and the like -- with smart contemporary SF. Add aspects of spy thrillers and Dilbertian office comedy, and throw in Nazis and nasty Islamists and a very secret branch of British Intelligence. It's told very wittily, though the central horrors are still pretty scary. The overall tone is snarky and fun, not horrific.

Bob Howard is working on a desk job for the "Laundry", but he's bucking for field service. We meet him on his first trial, breaking into an industrial building to destroy the traces of a dangerous discovery a young mathematician has made. It turns out that certain kinds of math knowledge lead to the ability to summon demons from other universes -- the sort of thing once done with chalked pentagrams, but much more efficiently achieved with lasers instead of chalk, and with computers to keep track of the summoning rituals. It's the job of the Laundry to keep such knowledge under wraps.

But aside from the dangerous job, the Laundry is just another Dilbertian government job environment. So the first few chapters show Bob dealing with bureaucratic hassles: stupid bosses demanding silly paperwork, dumb training classes, computer problems, etc. It's all very funny stuff. He's also dealing with his crazy sometime girlfriend, and his weird roommates. Then he gets sent to California to try to pry a beautiful redheaded Irish scientist from the clutches of the US -- it seems she might be studying some dangerous stuff. But his mission turns bad when she is kidnapped by some Islamists who may have bitten off more than they can chew. Before long, Bob is posted to a more curious part of the Laundry, with a boss straight out of classic spy fiction, and it looks like they might be dealing with a secret Nazi project -- or something even scarier...

The Atrocity Archives is a very breezy, fun, and imaginative novel. Structurally there are a couple of problems -- basically, the opening, though always entertaining, drags on too long. The novel proper doesn't start until about a third of the way through. But that's a minor issue -- overall, this is great fun.

The added novella is called "The Concrete Jungle". It is a separate work, not an expansion of the novel. It still features Bob Howard, this time investigating the sudden appearance of a bunch of concrete cows in Milton Keynes. The cows may once have been real -- thus a case of "gorgonism" is suspected. Worse, there is a possibility that someone has figured out a way to automate the basilisk effect that turns flesh to stone. Howard and a new, unwilling helper brave great danger in tracking down the eventual villains. There is more bureaucratic satire here as well, and it's snappily written and clever throughout. Still, though I enjoyed it the story doesn't have quite the impact of the novel -- perhaps a matter of length, or simply that the novel was first to present the ideas. There is also an introduction by Ken MacLeod and a smart afterword by Stross that compares the spy thriller and horror genres. The Atrocity Archives as a whole is definitely to be recommended.

A good idea does not necessarily lead to a good novel. The universe of the Atrocity Archives is a good idea, or a great idea, even. Unfortunately, the Atrocity Archives is not a very good book.

This novel came highly recommended to me. I am a great fan of Lovecraft, science fiction, spy fiction, and have worked in a government agency long enough to appreciate the lunacy of such places. When somebody told me the premise of the Atrocity Archives and Charles Stross's "Laundry" universe, I thought it was the most brilliant idea in the world.

The premise behind the story is this. There is an unseen world of occult, alien horror beneath the veneer of our mundane universe, and one gateway to that unseen world is computers and technology. To guard against this terrifying other-world, shadowy government agencies have sprung up. The Laundry is one such clandestine government agency. Its agents are an odd blend of tech geeks and

If you are into this kind of thing, this is a fantastic premise. But a premise is not a story. It only lays out the setting for a story. In science fiction like this, it promises a universe of opportunities for great stories. Sadly, despite the great premise, the Atrocity Archives is not a very interesting story. More importantly, the story was poorly told.

Despite Mr. Stross's fertile imagination, he is just not a very good storyteller. The story is told through a first person perspective, narrated by a Laundry agent named Bob. Bob seems like an obnoxious guy. He tells the story with a bunch of asides, obscure geek references, and digressions. He seems like the sort of guy who thinks he is quite clever and witty, but is not really. He seems like the sort of guy who you might run into at a party, and you would want to get away from because he loves to drop names and make himself seem smart. He would tell stories where he never seems to get to the point because he is too busy dazzling you along the way with how much he knows. And he whines...he always seem to be vaguely contemptuous of everybody and dissatisfied with the people around him. Bob is almost like a sociopath, he never displays any affection for any of the characters we come across in the book, or care about what's going on with them beyond how it relates to Bob. To Bob, everyone else seems to be an annoyance.

On top of it all, Bob's narration is delivered in a weird Micky Spilane over-the-top pulp style that's just too much.

So it goes with Bob's story, which is the subject of the book. Bob is supposed to be a tech geek and a bit of a bureaucratic drone, but he spends pages making references to geeky things like "The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms - translation: all your bank account are belong to us - and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time." Heavy exposition like this can go on for paragraphs and seem to litter every other page. The problem with exposition is that it is not story - things do not happen in expositions. So when a novel is so exposition heavy, it is not much fun to read.

I think these flaws could have together formed an asset for the novel had there been a detectable sense of humour behind it - if I could see Mr. Stross winking behind Bob's obnoxious narration. But I don't. Mr. Stross's attempt at humour mostly comes from flat cardboard characters meant to represent various office drone stereotypes that we should laugh at - like Bob's ineffectual but nitpicky boss, or some jockish dullard who sits with Bob at an arcane tech seminar but summoning entities from beyond with electronic circuits. These jokes aren't funny because they've done before and done better. These 1-dimensional figures of fun are dropped into the story at poorly timed intervals. We never get treated to any situations where would could have a bit of a laugh at Bob, or when Bob is portrayed with any kind of charm.

I really wanted to like the Atrocity Archives, so much that when I bought the book I bought the next novel in the series with it. Unfortunately, Mr. Stross is just not a very good storyteller. Bad writing like this just wears me down.

(Charles Stross says read them in this order)

* The Atrocity Archive -- short novel, in which Bob and various other major characters are introduced.

* The Concrete Jungle -- novella, set around 6 months after The Atrocity Archives

(These are collected in The Atrocity Archives)

* The Jennifer Morgue -- a novel, set around 3 years after The Concrete Jungle

* Pimpf -- interstitial short story set within a year of The Jennifer Morgue

(These are collected in The Jennifer Morgue)

* Down on the Farm -- novelette, set approximately 2 years after Pimpf. Collected in the short story collection "Wireless".

* The Fuller Memorandum (surprise!) -- a novel, set roughly eight years after The Atrocity Archives

(Published as The Fuller Memorandum)

* Overtime -- a novelette set less than 18 months after The Fuller Memorandum. (Not yet published in book form.)

* The Apocalypse Codex -- not yet published (it's due out in mid-2012[*]); a novel, set roughly nine months after The Fuller Memorandum