jethrien

Title: The Atrocity Archives
Author: Charles Stross
Genre: Cold War technothriller only with Cthulhoid beasties instead of Commies
Thingummies: 4

Synopsis: IT tech in a shadowy British intelligence agency devoted to mathemagically defending the world against demons gets a longed-for promotion to field agent--and discovers not only will he have nightmares for the rest of his life, he still can't escape the paperwork.

Thoughts: If the Dresden Files is a noir detective meets vampires, Stross' Laundry is if James Bond tried to fight Lovecraftian horrors while working in the same office as Dilbert.

First person narrator Bob is delightfully snarky, the only possible defense to going nuts when you watch that annoying dude from accounting get possessed by demons while at a training seminar and then have to fill out all the paperwork for misuse of the fire extinguisher you had to use to put him down. Stross manages an impressive juxtaposition between the indignities and ridiculousness of modern bureaucracies with Nazi war atrocities and existential horror. It's funny and creepy and a little too true in both cases.

There's an enormous amount of technobabble, using a mix of real IT jargon (only some of which I recognize) and made up stuff. It makes sense in context--he's an IT guy and they really talk like this. But there are definitely points where it obscures the action a bit too much. Specifically, there are two inconsistencies that I can't tell if they went unaddressed or whether the explanations were just so buried in geek-speak that I missed them.

First, Bob seems to know way too much about the magical weapons he handles, given his stated backstory. The guy was a computer scientist who goofed around with some stuff he shouldn't have and got himself drafted, ending up working in a dead end tech support role until he managed to wiggle onto the active duty roster. There's a sequence where he establishes he knows nothing about conventional firearms, which makes perfect sense. But he's apparently a crack shot with and expert on an esoteric magical weapon, which shocks everyone, but he never quite seems to explain. Why does he know this shit?

Second, (minor spoilers ahead) the infovore waited in a dead universe patiently for the Nazis to invite him in. So why is it that the newly dying universe will contain him, if only they can keep him from coming through the portal for the next fifteen minutes? Sure, nearly all the energy in the dying universe has been eaten. But if he could survive in the original dead universe, why can't he survive in the newly dead universe until someone lets him in again? Did he really kill off all the terrorists who summoned him in the first place?

So I found the fact that some of the info dumps are kind of deliberately unintelligible to be somewhat frustrating. Even so, the book was loads of fun.