Charles Stross wears his influences on his sleeve: Neil Stephenson, H. P. Lovecraft, and Cold War puppet-masters like Len Deighton. Still, that’s a pretty potent mix, and for those of us who like this sort of thing his The Atrocity Archives (which I found via Mark Bernstein’s blog) goes down like a hot fudge sundae. To wit:
[Y]ou see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back—see Al-Hazred, Neitzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the Platonic realm of mathematics—computerised or otherwise—draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractcal screen-saver was good for your computer?)
Yum. One enters the super-secret spy agency, the Laundry, by pulling the handle up in a certain public toilet in a certain station of the London Underground—the fixtures rotate and the wall swings outward (just like in a novel). The chief spook has a restored Memex as his workstation because he obsesses over Van Eck radiation. This world’s Necronomicon is the legendary fourth volume of Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming. The really scary thing is that Stross is apparently one of those first novelists who has piles of unpublished mss just lying around. So I suspect we’ll be seeing (a lot) more of him. Sign me up.
Posted by mgk at January 6, 2005 10:39 PM