Review: The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross

[jeriendhal]

Summary: 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 (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.

Comments

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

  I just finished Saturn's Children by Stross earlier today. Are you interested? If so, I can lend it to you via our wives. I'm not sure, but it may be the first Stross book I've read. I liked it and recommend it, in any case. I won't say anything else, in case you haven't read it and don't want spoilers. (The Wiki page I just linked to avoids any significant spoilers.)

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.

  It's not the only story to tie Nazi genocide to large-scale necromancy; I've read a Harry Turtledove story which had that as a plot point, and I recall seeing some other examples listed on a TV Tropes page.

[seawasp]

Charlie undoubtedly was aware of, and even following in the footsteps of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in Illuminatus!, where the Nazis not only did that, but a whole division of zombie Nazis are raised from their resting place beneath a lake to attack a Woodstock-like European gathering.

And Hambly did a similar thing in the Star-Cross dualogy, and of course there's strong implications of something similar in the FMA movie.

I feel using a historical event in a reasonable in-story fashion is perfectly reasonable, as long as it doesn't try to make evil things good or something like that; I was very annoyed, actually, by the spate of sudden editing after 9/11 to make the Twin Towers disappear from forthcoming movies and shows.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Brin's Thor Meets Captain America is another story in the same vein (and it's not, by any means, a light adventure tale).

[shadur.livejournal.com]

I heartily recommend the second book in the series - The Jennifer Morgue - as well.

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

the electric pentagram first turned up in the Carnacki stories by William Hope Hodgson - late 19th Cen., possibly early 20th IIRC

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Charlie accidentally picked the near exact location for the real world government spy-tech engineers HMGCC in 'The Concrete Jungle'.

And there's also a couple of free to read on-line Laundry short stories. A story about legacy hardware maintenance http://www.tor.com/stories/2008/07/down-on-the-farm and a very *special* Christmas story in http://www.tor.com/stories/2009/12/overtime

Oh, and the next two books 'The Jennifer Morgue' and 'The Fuller Memorandum' are pretty good too.

Oh, and also the unrelated story series 'The Merchant Princes', which starts with 'The Family Trade' and involves alternative universes and government paranoia, is pretty good too.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I've listened to the Audible version of Saturn's Children. Can't say I enjoyed it as much as this one, mostly due to some of the worldbuilding decisions. Thanks though.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I know it's been done before, I just don't regard it as a particularly good idea. YMMV. Shrugs