Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

319 pages

Charles Stross likes science. You can tell this because the amount of jargon present in this book is staggering. Charles Stross also likes the Cthulhu Mythos. You can tell this because he once wrote a story where the US weaponized the Big C himself. Rule of Cool full in effect, y'all. The Atrocity Archives is the first in a series dealing with Bob Howard, employee of The Laundry. The Laundry are your typical Spookshow beyond-top-secret shadowy government department specialising in Weird Shit in all its forms. Of course, this being set in Britain, things are a lot less glamourous than you'd hope, with nary an Agent J, Jakita Wagner or as much as a Scully in sight. Bob is about as low on the foodchain as you can get, having been forcibly recruited by the group when he nearly turned half his hometown into a hellish abyss, dicking around with mathematical formulae as a student. Bored with being the departmental bitch, thanks to a boss who relishes every opportunity to make his life misery, he jumps at an opportunity to spread his wings with some fieldwork. Needless to say, shit gets very real, very quickly, and a decades-old Nazi plot to win the Second World War is swiftly rearing its ugly head.

Stross comes from the same school of writing as Grant Morrison: throw enough ideas at the reader and some of them are bound to lodge in their head. As a result, the number of concepts you're introduced to are almost too dense to take in, and less time is spent on any of them than you'd like. Maybe I've been spoiled by writers like Frank Herbert and China Mieville lately, but when I'm being introduced to a new world with new rules, I like to have some clue of what I'm doing before the game starts. Stross' frantic pace doesn't help in this respect either, and with the overall shortness of the book (the first 5 pages are an unrelated introduction, the last 103 are a short story, afterword and glossery of acronyms and abbreviations), you find yourself wanting more. Another 150 pages or so to fully explain the theories and ideas - or at least the terminology - within would've helped immesurably. Still, it's interesting finding out exactly how the core of an atomic bomb goes boom.

What we've got though, is damn good stuff. Bob's flatmates, nicknamed Pinky and Brains also work for The Laundry and are known to take their work home with them, resulting in some great moments - Pinky's attempts to disprove the old omelette/shell-breaking axiom will stick in your mind if only for the outright weirdness of it all. The idea that Alan Turing, honorary Grandfather of Steampunk, developed a mathematical formula to basically summon demons and punch holes in the spaces between dimensions is wonderful (and begs to be used in an RPG campaign somewhere). And then there's the moon with Hitler's face carved onto it. Can't forget that one. The thing that strikes you is the mundanity of it all though. You're cheerfully dicking around with arcane weaponry, disarming nukes that may just give demonic forces the oomph they need to play merry hell (literally) with our edge of reality, but there's always the chance you'll get shitcanned for showing up late once too often, and the training courses are still as boring as ever, if a little more deadly than the norm.

The Atrocity Archives is a solid book that needs to learn to catch its breath. I haven't read any of Stross' other books yet, but if this is any indication of the rest of his lineup, it's well worth checking out.