While I’ve enjoyed Charlie Stross‘s books before (Singularity Sky, Accelerando), I hadn’t been blown away, despite his vaunted reputation.
The Atrocity Archives blew me away.
I think I crushed this book in less than 48 hours as part of a 4th of July holiday reading binge. While quite rich in detail, and droll geeky asides, The Atrocity Archives is not nearly as conceptually dense as Accelerando. This was a welcome change as I found Accelerando incomprehensible at points.
The peak moment for me was the trip to Amsterdam. The actual atrocity archives left a true knot of horror in the pit of my stomach. After that I simply enjoyed the roller coaster combination of Lovecraftian horror (none of which I’ve ever read), traditional pop spy thrills (few of which I’ve ever read), and geek insider (which I’ve lived) story physics.
You get a bonus short story, The Concrete Jungle, which starts out great, but then devolves into office politics. Even with Stross’ style the result is the same as every inside baseball tale of bad blood: somewhat silly looking in retrospect, with a “what was all the fuss?” air.
The front cover of The Atrocity Archives, touts the terror of, “…a surprising number of meetings…,” but I was disappointed that there was only one stupefyingly bad meeting. And a training class at that. Would that Stross ventured to skewer the dreaded “weekly status update” or the truly monstrous corporate “All Hands Meeting”.