The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I might have read "The Concrete Jungle" 14 years ago but I don't recall it. In the end I enjoyed both of the stories, but overall I can handle Stross pretty well. I love hard, full-on geeky SF and he scratches that itch here. The afterword is very helpful for those of us that like to analyze writing in these reviews. He draws parallels between his work and others that treat mathematics as magic, or as a connection to other universes.

The series is humorous, but it's both dry and dark. There's a certain density to his writing that means I wouldn't read all seven of these in a row. The contrast of dreary government bureaucracy and utterly insane saving-the-world-from-monsters stuff is interesting but eventually gets wearing. I think he's trying to convey that Bob Howard gets a lot of satisfaction from his job even though it's painful on so many levels--perhaps because of that.

I've read other stories in the series and while they actually stand alone OK, they make much more sense now that I've read the first one. Not sure when I'll follow through on the rest, but I'll be willing to do it at some point.



View all my reviews

Neptune's Brood, by Charles Stross

Continuing my exploration of the award nominees for 2013.  Neptune's Brood is a Hugo nominee--I checked it out in good old print form at the local library.  The book bills itself as a "space opera", and it definitely has that Golden Age feel, updated with today's technology.  And I'm figuring that the "today's" part is intentional as well, since most space opera was basically straight line extensions of current ideas, with starships.  So it is with Krina-Alizond 114, part of a cloned batch of metahuman daughters of an extraordinarily powerful capitalist mother.  Natural humans ("fragiles") have gone extinct several times, and are only present by reference here.  Krina holds one half of the authentication key to a financial instrument that would change the galactic economy, and is just about to locate the other half. 

What's interesting and fun here is Stross's continuing interest in how economics and capitalism would expand off-world.  His novel Accelerando speculated on how rapid change would work here on earth, but the speculation in Neptune's Brood is quite different.  He's less convinced of ever-accelerating change here. 

On the whole it is a fine read if you like space opera--it's authentically (and only mildly) blocky in prose, and liberal with background explanation.  You also have to be kind of a geeky capitalist to really get into it.  I enjoyed it for its joy of itself, as much as anything--I'm sure Stross had fun writing it.  I give it three stars, with that guarded recommendation. 

Equoid, by Charles Stross

Equoid is the second story I've read in Stross's extensive Laundry series.  The Laundry is part of British civil service, the part that deals with occult threats.  And the threat in this one is a doozy.  We get a lot of fun action as Bob Howard (not really), computer nerd and office drone, takes on unicorns.  I know I've read some similar stories but can't bring them to mind right now, so you'll just have to go read it for yourself.  Very good stuff.  Reminds me very much of George Saunders' CommComm, so if you liked that one you'll like this one.

The Concrete Jungle, by Charles Stross

The Concrete Jungle was a Hugo winning novella for Charles Stross in 2005.  It's a very helter-skelter sort of story set as a sort of police procedural in a world where magic crosses over into technology and is understood that way.  Our protagonist is the chief IT guy and high-ranking detective in the Laundry, the British agency tasked with protecting the public from unauthorized, fatal use of magic.

The plot in this one runs from bureaucracy to pranks to deadly magic all at once, with a near-omnipotent agency thrown in.  For me, it's somewhat frantic, then resolves a bit too neatly.  It reminds me very much of Jasper Fforde's books, but Fforde is funnier.  But given that it won a Hugo I would say most folks liked it a lot. 

Give this one a try if you like British comic fiction, especially involving bureaucrats, as they are nicely skewered here.  Three stars for me.

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

Accelerando is a "fix-up" novel, I guess meaning it's assembled from short stories and novellas, because that is what it is.  I came across this while reading the award winners from 2000-2005 on Free SF Online.  Several of its components have been nominated for awards: "Lobsters", "Halo", "Nightfall", "Elector".  And when I went to read them, I found that the novel was actually pretty seamless, so decided to read the whole thing.

And it was quite a commitment--bloody LONG, it seemed like, especially being densely packed with near future/singularity jargon almost impossible to avoid in describing it.  Obviously a labor of love, also, taking him five years to put together.  It is on the whole a fairly entertaining period piece, kind of a William Gibson satire or parody, careening off the edge of weird.  It just does manage to make sense all the way through, which I am sure was a tremendous challenge.  Did I say it was long?  Three weeks to read it!  Not counting the Firefly interlude, even.  So it's an interesting speculation on what would happen if change just kept accelerating.  Good thing it isn't.  Change just doesn't work that way, it differentially penetrates and our poor meatminds hold it back, which is on the whole a good thing, as long as they hold out.  After all, once our computers start to program themselves (see a recent Dilbert, am too lazy to get the link) it's all over.  3 stars.

Overtime, by Charles Stross

Charles Stross has a Hugo-award novelette nominee to accompany his novella nominated Palimpsest. This one is called Overtime, one of a series of stories about the Library. The Library appears to be an ordinary sort of run-down British government bureaucracy, except that it deals with the supernatural. And it is dealing with the first of an expected onslaught of Things That Go Bump In the Night brought about by belief. The story is quite funny, a good read. If you like this you'll probably like Jasper Fforde's work.

Palimpsest, by Charles Stross

Have just finished another Hugo-nominated novella, Palimpsest by Charles Stross. This is a very intricately woven time travel story, and very well told, probably the strongest of the lot I've read so far. The time entanglements in the story make it clear what a pain time travel would be if it were possible--times become more like places, infinitely accessible and mutable. There is a sense of time outside of time--the sense of bodily decay, I'm guessing. Some have speculated that that is in fact what time is, the sense of entropy. There's no rules in physics that say time has to run one way.

There is also a novel named Palimpsest that is nominated for a Hugo. It's a fun word to say--palimpsest, palimpsest, palimpsest. I expect to see it in a Zippy cartoon sometime.