Book Alert: The Atrocity Archives
Necromancy is the popular reason which conspiracy theorists of the magical world use to explain Auschwitz and all the other manifestations of human darkness in this world. After all, what else could all that pain and suffering be used for? The theme of a supernatural backdrop to the whole soul-destroying morass recurs in Hellboy, Planetary, The Red Magician, and many others in a long litany of guilt and suspicion.
And so, secret histories grow up, from the stoic vermetica of John Whitbourn's Popes and Phantoms to the comic universe of Robert Rankin's Brentford sort-of-trilogy. There is always the strange feeling that somewhere, somebody knows the truth. I think that feeling is most effectively parodied in John Constantine, Hellblazer #143 - in general, wherever Warren Ellis steps, he will leave traces of the kind.
But that's a long preamble to the point of this entry. And that point is: Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives, now reissued in a beautiful hardcover edition by Golden Gryphon Press, is about 80000 words of pure entertainment in which information technology is the root of all evil. The intelligence agencies of the world have secrets so bizarre, so outré, so mindblasting that Cthulhoid beings from the void are the least of the problem.
Bob Howard is a hacker who somehow finds himself drafted into the SAS because of certain things Man was not meant to know. His is a world where pentacles have power, and the coder of computers controls the geometry of that power. Topology and information are the source code of the universe, and something might be trying to rewrite it - something indescribable using existing code. In the end, as it was with U2 and the Beatles, it's always the British who are closest to the root of the problem. Centuries of accretive myth-modification have to end up somewhere, I suppose.
Sometimes, the Library of Congress record for a book can be most revealing. The record for this one lists five subjects: Computer Hackers; Turing, Alan Mathison 1912-1954 Influence; World War 1939-1945 Atrocities; World War 1939-1945 Germany; and Nazis - Fiction. Stross also credits Len Deighton, H P Lovecraft, and Neal Stephenson. He specifically omits Tim Powers, whose supernatural spy thriller tour-de-force Declare also describes the same era of human history, saying that it was a total coincidence.
I believe him. Powers writes secret histories in an inimitable way, and Declare is to Archives as John Le Carré is to William Gibson. Sort of. Maybe you should just read both.
And so, secret histories grow up, from the stoic vermetica of John Whitbourn's Popes and Phantoms to the comic universe of Robert Rankin's Brentford sort-of-trilogy. There is always the strange feeling that somewhere, somebody knows the truth. I think that feeling is most effectively parodied in John Constantine, Hellblazer #143 - in general, wherever Warren Ellis steps, he will leave traces of the kind.
But that's a long preamble to the point of this entry. And that point is: Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives, now reissued in a beautiful hardcover edition by Golden Gryphon Press, is about 80000 words of pure entertainment in which information technology is the root of all evil. The intelligence agencies of the world have secrets so bizarre, so outré, so mindblasting that Cthulhoid beings from the void are the least of the problem.
Bob Howard is a hacker who somehow finds himself drafted into the SAS because of certain things Man was not meant to know. His is a world where pentacles have power, and the coder of computers controls the geometry of that power. Topology and information are the source code of the universe, and something might be trying to rewrite it - something indescribable using existing code. In the end, as it was with U2 and the Beatles, it's always the British who are closest to the root of the problem. Centuries of accretive myth-modification have to end up somewhere, I suppose.
Sometimes, the Library of Congress record for a book can be most revealing. The record for this one lists five subjects: Computer Hackers; Turing, Alan Mathison 1912-1954 Influence; World War 1939-1945 Atrocities; World War 1939-1945 Germany; and Nazis - Fiction. Stross also credits Len Deighton, H P Lovecraft, and Neal Stephenson. He specifically omits Tim Powers, whose supernatural spy thriller tour-de-force Declare also describes the same era of human history, saying that it was a total coincidence.
I believe him. Powers writes secret histories in an inimitable way, and Declare is to Archives as John Le Carré is to William Gibson. Sort of. Maybe you should just read both.
etched with acid at 9:04:00 pm
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