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jeriendhalSummary: Bob Howard is just your average government IT worker in Great Britain, fixing computers, ignoring his penny pinching superiors as much as he can get away with, and earning some time and a half pay breaking into a computer company to erase the hard drive of a programmer on the verge of discovering Turing's (Deliberately) Lost Theorem and creating a genuine AI and potentially bringing the Old Ones back into our home universe and sucking out our brains through a straw.
Did I mention the electrified pentagram his roommates have in the basement of their flat?
Review: I think Charles Stross (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope here on LJ) is my new regular fix between Bujold novels. This pair of novellas (plus several essays on The Cold War as Horror) is both reasonably terrifying and damned witty, as Bob Howard's increasingly complicated life a newly minted field agent, taking on black extra-dimensional tentacles and universe freezing frost giants without much more than his jumped PDA, is contrasted with the slightly more mundane horrors of working in a British government bureaucracy that makes Yes, Minister look warm and comforting. Stross is a geek at heart, so careful readers will get a smile at passing mentions of a certain Austin based gaming company's card game and Bob's roommates Pinky and Brains, even as they shiver a bit at an underfunded bureaucracy guarding the world (or at least the EU's portion of it) from stuff that sucks out a very unfortunate Guy From Accounting's brains out when he ends up at the wrong in-house training seminar.
That said, I have one very big beef with the history of the title naming Atrocity Archive (actually a collection of Nazi era necromantic torture implements stored in Rotterdam.) Bluntly, the Holocaust is Serious Business, and the suggestion that it was part of an SS attempt to create a great magical Working through mass sacrifice trivializes an act of genocide for the sake of what is, ultimately, a light adventure tale. But, if you can get past that (and I'm slightly ashamed that I did), you do have a cracking good adventure/spy thriller/horror story.
Though I doubt I'm ever going to look at a CCTV camera the same way again...
Recommended.
Did I mention the electrified pentagram his roommates have in the basement of their flat?
Review: I think Charles Stross (
autopope here on LJ) is my new regular fix between Bujold novels. This pair of novellas (plus several essays on The Cold War as Horror) is both reasonably terrifying and damned witty, as Bob Howard's increasingly complicated life a newly minted field agent, taking on black extra-dimensional tentacles and universe freezing frost giants without much more than his jumped PDA, is contrasted with the slightly more mundane horrors of working in a British government bureaucracy that makes Yes, Minister look warm and comforting. Stross is a geek at heart, so careful readers will get a smile at passing mentions of a certain Austin based gaming company's card game and Bob's roommates Pinky and Brains, even as they shiver a bit at an underfunded bureaucracy guarding the world (or at least the EU's portion of it) from stuff that sucks out a very unfortunate Guy From Accounting's brains out when he ends up at the wrong in-house training seminar.That said, I have one very big beef with the history of the title naming Atrocity Archive (actually a collection of Nazi era necromantic torture implements stored in Rotterdam.) Bluntly, the Holocaust is Serious Business, and the suggestion that it was part of an SS attempt to create a great magical Working through mass sacrifice trivializes an act of genocide for the sake of what is, ultimately, a light adventure tale. But, if you can get past that (and I'm slightly ashamed that I did), you do have a cracking good adventure/spy thriller/horror story.
Though I doubt I'm ever going to look at a CCTV camera the same way again...
Recommended.
