Saturday, 28th of December, 2002

Charlie Stross doesn’t just write an excellent weblog. He is of course a fantastic hard science fiction author - at the absolute vanguard of the genre, in my opinion.
I finally got issue #9 of British sf magazine Spectrum SF, which had the concluding segment of Charlie’s new novel, The Atrocity Archive. It was being serialised since issue #7, so finally I could read the whole thing (having held off until I had it all).
The Atrocity Archive could perhaps be best described as “hard science fantasy”. It combines Stross’s love of Lovecraftiana with his (yes, geeky) love of computers and outlandish cutting-edge science. “Lovecraftiana”? For the uninitiated, H.P. Lovecraft created a kind of dark fantasy all his own, complete with Elder Gods and eldritch horrors which have inspired successions of writers to extend his world. Neil Gaiman (another author who keeps a journal) has done some amusing homages, and Stross also enjoys drawing out the high camp lunacy of it all. There are nevertheless some horrifying atrocities described in the novel…

I must admit I was expecting not to enjoy this as much as his action-packed gonzo futurism in the Accelerando sequence that Asimov’s is currently publishing. However, it had me rapt from the start. Lovecraft’s summonings are bizarrely morphed into an extension of computer science and number theory; the Elder Gods, ice giants and whatnot are entities existing in parallel worlds (the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics being assumed true)… It’s all far too silly to be considered hard science fiction, but it’s delightfully rigorous, in high detail. The “Laundry”, where our protagonist works, is a highly secret branch of British Intelligence in charge of keeping knowledge of higher algorithm theory from spreading (which could result in malevolent intrusions from other dimensions) - and it’s described as your standard bureaucratic nightmare, with squabbling office politics and all. The obligatory love story that fuels the plot is both sensitively described and played for laughs, as are the gender politics - and not to mention the real politics, amazingly up-to-date, with mad Islamic terrorists almost setting off Armaggedon…
The funniest bit, in my opinion, is the way that the descriptive language in the first few chapters is full of evil portents and allusions to horror, but continually lets you down as it describes a pager going off in the protagonist’s pocket and so on…

Somehow Stross (I’m trying to call him “Stross” when in review mode, but “Charlie” when in discursive/personal mode, if that makes any sense) has here created something which is both a hugely entertaining diversion and at the same time a complex piece of political and scientific extrapolation - admittedly somewhat more implausible than really hard science fiction.

According to Charlie, Golden Gryphon will be publishing the complete The Atrocity Archive together with a sequel (The Concrete Jungle) in early 2004. Hurrah!

One Response to “Stross, Charles - The Atrocity Archive”

1. Charlie Stross says:
   September 9th, 2003 at 6:06 am

   Political footnote:

   I wrote TAA in 1999-2000. I was looking for a random and appropriately fanatical bunch of Mad Arabs (see Alhazred, Abdul, Necronomicon, Ieyah, Ieyah, etcetera) to use as terrorists plotting an atrocity in California. I found such a group. I submitted the novel to Spectrum SF in late 2000, and in 2001 Paul Fraser sat down to edit it.

   Shiver down spine time. As he put it in email: “Charlie, in view of recent events … do you think you could find someone a bit *less well known* than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida to use in Chapter 3?”

   When I wrote it, bin Laden was *obscure*.