Review: The Atrocity Archive

Title: The Atrocity Archive

Author: Charles Stross

Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press

Year Published: 2004

First Line: “Green sky at night; hacker’s delight.”

I’ve been wanting to pick up something by Stross for a while now, as the buzz about him all across the netosphere has been tremendously positive. Needless to say I was delighted when my buddy Nick gave me The Jennifer Morgue for Christmas last year. And then I found out that while Jennifer isn’t really a sequel, The Atrocity Archive sort of sets the stage for it, and being the OCD series-whore that I am, I of course zipped over to Amazon and picked up The Atrocity Archive before I even considered starting Jennifer.

First off, there are four distinct parts to The Atrocity Archive (well… five if you count the Glossary, but more on that later). The first is an Introduction by Ken MacLeod. It’s an interesting look at Stross and how he thinks, but it’s short enough to act more of an advertisement than anything else. Not necessarily a bad thing for a newish author (in 2004) to have a “buy this now” endorsement from someone as prolific as MacLeod. The last section is a robust Afterward by Stross detailing what he sees as parallels between the spy thriller, the mystery, and his own science fiction. It is a really interesting read, and I enjoyed it as much as I did the fiction between the Intro and the Afterward.

And speaking of the fiction between, perhaps it’s because I came to it a bit ass-backwards through Jennifer, it caught me by surprise that what I assumed was a novel was actually two separate novellas, “The Atrocity Archive” and “The Concrete Jungle.” They are related in that they share the same universe and characters, but they aren’t linked and stand perfectly well on their own. And I think I actually enjoyed them more because of this. It gave me a firm breaking point where I could catch my breath before I dove back into another story.

And I needed that break. I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but Stross’ narrative voice took me quite a bit of getting used to. I am not a real “hard” science kind of reader (or writer, for that matter). I am more interested in character development, psychology, and sociology than I am technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I wish I was more conversant in the more complex aspects of it than I actually am, but more often than not I find hard science fiction to exist because of the “big idea” of something technological, and that gets boring for me pretty quick. Especially boring in this case was having to use the Glossary so often to refer to what the governmental abbreviations all stood for. In the end I stopped caring and just flew past the three or four letter monikers without giving them much thought, which meant all these various agencies just got lumped under “government stuff” in my brain. Perhaps that was, in some way, the point, but it bothered me that I had stopped caring about part of Stross’ world-building.

One piece of good news, though, is that even though I reached the point of tedium with having to check the Glossary, I was never bored with The Atrocity Archive itself. The ideas and development behind the Stross’ “big idea” technology kept me hooked and were strong enough to make up for what frustrated me. And what frustrated me the most, you ask? I wanted to be smarter than I am. Stross didn’t quite make me feel stupid, but the technology he puts out there is so rooted in possibility (or at least seems to be) that I was forever trying to figure out where exactly his leap from computers to magic originates. More than that, because it was all just barely over my head, I always felt that I was just on the brink of understanding something profoundly important, but that understanding was always just beyond my reach. It wasn’t until I actually stopped trying to figure it all out and just accepted it as Stross explained it that I actually began to really get into the stories.

I think that may well be the single reason why I enjoyed “The Concrete Jungle” more than I did “The Atrocity Archive.” By the time I got to it, I had lowered the bar on my Willing-Suspension-Of-Disbelief-o-Meter and was just soaking up the technology right along with the story. That and the fact that there are some fairly significant and highly technical info-dumps scattered throughout “Atrocity.” I think they needed to be there in order to establish different factors of his world, but they were the least interesting part of the story he was telling.

The other piece of good news is this…

With these two novellas, Stross has created a universe that I absolutely love. His main character is infinitely charming as he struggles with being turned from a cubicle-riding desk-jockey into a secret agent for a government agency that doesn’t exist. The relationships Stross builds along the way intermix with the technology he has created and they compliment each other supremely well. In the end, it is the building of his main character that kept me totally involved in the story. My only complaint is that there was no love-interest continued in “The Concrete Jungle.” The relationship between Bob and Mo was fun to watch as it developed, and the lack of continuation in the second novella was something that was sorely missed.

At the end of the day, The Atrocity Archive is a fun read, but not one I would recommend to anyone not at least a casual fan of technologically-focused science fiction.