Book Review: The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

This was the second book I've read by British SF/Fantasy author Charlie Stross, the first being The Family Trade.  The Atrocity Archives has two stories, "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Concrete Jungle", both featuring darkside hacker Bob Howard and his (mis-)adventures in The Laundry, a super-secret UK agency struggling to hold back the Lovecraftian apocalypse.

The Atrocity Archives is a better effort by Stross than Family Trade, largely because the stories hang together better, and there are fewer moments where a discontinuity or mistake jarred me out of the text. Perhaps that's because Atrocity Archives posits multiple universes, not just two like Family Trade, and differences in larger policy and law can be ascribed to the central universe in the story not being this one. 

Stross notes that one of his inspirations, besides the obvious one of H.P. Lovecraft (and if you haven't read Lovecraft, you will be confused by  Atrocity Archives), is spy thriller master Len Deighton. The inspiration is clear; so clear, in fact, much as reading Lovecraft is a must before picking up this book, reading Deighton's spy fiction is a brief detour that I would highly recommend.

I have read a later Laundry story by Stross as well. His writing improves, in no small part because in the later story ("Equoid") Stross emphasizes the bureaucratic hurdles before his hero Bob Howard as much or more than the supernatural foe.  It is the humor that Stross brings out in the absurdity of bureaucratic business-as-usual while attending to the urgent business of throwing back the forces of darkness that sets The Laundry apart from the usual spy or horror tale.

Book Review: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross.

Incomplete. Simply put, this novel, the first in a series by UK SF author Charles Stross, is incomplete, in two senses. First, it simply ends after 300 pages, with no resolution of any plot elements. Some  research reveals that Stross asked his publisher to split The Merchant Princes trilogy into six books. So the book just stops, mid-story.

The "Family" " Trades" in a particular high-value item (which I'll call "Substance A"). The author again leaves his book incomplete by utterly failing to explain how the Family obtains its supply of  Substance A in the first place. The omission is all the more curious as Stross has the Family rejecting trade in another high-value item as there is no feasible way to obtain it - yet, the same obstacles (and more besides) should also be in the way of the Family getting Substance A as well. Sure, this is a fantasy or SF novel - but the Ferengi of ST:DS9 had an explanation for their trading business. Even Cyrano Jones had a back story for the tribbles.

Skipping over some minor factual and continuity quibbles - I still wonder why there were four pages of what appears to be another story all-together around page 200. In the old days, I'd guess it was a publisher's mistake - it really HAD stuck four pages of somebody else's manuscript into the text. Now? No clue. It is as if Tolkein broke away from The Two Towers for four pages from an Agatha Christie novel. Meanwhile, the protagonist's first challenge is merely discarded after she meets up with the "Family", even though the two challenges could have been played off each other.

The blurb compares Stross to Roger Zelazny, H. Beam Piper and Philip Jose Farmer. If you haven't read those authors, read them instead of this. If you have ... don't let the comparison get your hopes up.