The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

Yay! More Stross! Thanks to the weird release order, I think this might be some of his earlier work, but it's only recently been released in the UK. It's actually two short books in one, rather than one whole story, which meant I got very confused by the pacing before the end of the first story. It's a lot of fun, but not quite as good as Glasshouse.

The setting, though, is great. Genre-wise, it's spies meet horror, with with a certain amount of Office Space and BOFH thrown in. It's comedy, to a large degree, but that's not to say that the horror and spy elements are a complete disaster-they're competently done. The setting is that inter-dimensional horrors can be brought forth computationally, using the (well-suppressed) P=NP equivalence to perform the computations. It's that kind of book.

Posted 2007-07-15.