The Atrocity Archives

eVersion 2.0 - click for scan notes

Authors write, but not in a vacuum. Firstly, I
owe a debt of gratitude to the usual suspects—members of my local
writers workshop all—who suffered through first-draft reading hell and
pointed out numerous headaches that needed fixing. Paul Fraser of
Spectrum
SF
applied far more editorial muscle than I had any right to
expect, in preparation for the original magazine serialization;
likewise Marty Halpern of Golden Gryphon Press, who made this longer
edition possible. Finally, I stand on the shoulders of giants. Three
authors in particular made it possible for me to imagine this book and
I salute you, H. P. Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson, and Len Deighton.

"The Atrocity Archive" is a
science fiction novel. Its form is that of a horror thriller
with lots of laughs, some of them uneasy. Its basic premise is that
mathematics can be magic. Its lesser premise is that
if
the
world contains things that (as Pratchett puts it somewhere) even the
dark is afraid of,
then
you can bet that there'll be a secret
government agency covering them up for our own good. That last phrase
isn't ironic; if people suspected for a moment that the only thing
Lovecraft got wrong was to underestimate the power and malignity of
cosmic evil, life would become unbearable. If the secret got out and
(consequently) other things got in, life would become impossible.
Whatever then walked the Earth would not be life, let alone human. The
horror of this prospect is, in the story, linked to the horrors of real
history. As in any good horror story, there are moments when you cannot
believe that anyone would dare put on paper the words you are reading.
Not, in this case, because the words are gory, but because the history
is all too real. To summarise would spoil, and might make the writing
appear to make light of the worst of human
accomplishments. It does not. Read it and see.

Charlie has written wisely and well in the
Afterword about the uncanny parallels between the Cold War thriller and
the horror story. (Think, for a moment, what the following phrase would
call to mind if you'd never heard it before: "Secret intelligence.")
There is, however, a third side to the story. Imagine a world where
speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things
happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable
havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful
agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is
administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the
magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate
their activity. It's bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and
it's full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations,
all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The
coordinators, because they don't understand what's going on, are easy
prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand
arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to
the IT department.

It is Charlie's experience in working in and
writing about the Information Technology industry that gives him the
necessary hands-on insight into the workings of the Laundry. For
programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.
The analyst or programmer has to examine documents with an eye at once
skeptical and alert, snatching and collating tiny fragments of truth
along the way. His or her sources of information all have their own
agendas, overtly or covertly pursued. He or she has handlers and
superiors, many of whom don't know what really goes on at the sharp
end. And the IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a
mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are
constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a
lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don't
get out much, and when you do it's usually at night.

Charlie gets out and about a lot, often in
daylight. He has no demons. Like most people who write about eldritch
horrors, he has a cheerful disposition. Whatever years he has spent in
the cellars haven't dimmed his enthusiasm, his empathy, or his ability
to talk and write with a speed, range of reference, and facility that
makes you want to buy the bastard a pint just to keep him quiet and
slow him down in the morning, before he gets too far ahead. I know:
I've tried. It doesn't work.

I first encountered Charles Stross when I worked
in IT myself. It was 1996 or thereabouts, when you more or less had to
work in IT to have heard about the Internet. (Yes, there was a time not
long ago when news about the existence of the Internet spread
by
word of mouth
.) It dawned on me that the guy who was writing
sensible-but-radical posts to various newsgroups I hung out in was the
same Charles Stross who'd written two or three short stories I'd
enjoyed in the British SF magazine
Interzone
: "Yellow Snow,"
"Ship of Fools," and "Dechlorinating the Moderator" (all now
available
in his collection
TOAST
, Cosmos Books, 2002).

"Dechlorinating the Moderator" is a science
fiction story about a convention that has all the trappings of a
science fiction convention, but is (because this is the future) a
science
fact
convention, of desktop and basement high-energy
fundamental physics geeks and geekettes. Apart from its intrinsic fun,
the story conveys the peculiar melancholy of looking back on a con and
realising that no matter how much of a good time you had, there was
even more that you missed. (All right: as subtle shadings of emotion go
this one is a bit low on universality, but it was becoming familiar to
me, having just started going to cons.) "Ship of Fools" was about the
Y2K problem (which as we all know turned out not to be a problem, but
BEGIN_RANT that was entirely thanks to programmers who did their jobs
properly in the first place back when only geeks and astronomers
believed the twenty-first century would
actually arrive END_RANT) and it was also full of the funniest and most
authentic-sounding insider yarns about IT I'd ever read. This Stross
guy sounded like someone I wanted to meet, maybe at a con. It turned
out he lived in Edinburgh. We were practically neighbours. I think I
emailed him, and before too long he materialised out of cyberspace and
we had a beer and began an intermittent conversation that hasn't
stopped.

He had this great idea for a novel: "It's a
techno-thriller! The premise is that Turing cracked the NP-Completeness
theorem back in the forties! The whole Cold War was really about
preventing the Singularity! The ICBMs were there in case godlike AIs
ran amok!" (He doesn't really talk like this. But that's how I
remember
it.) He had it all in his head. Lots of people do, but he (and here's a
tip for aspiring authors out there) actually wrote it. That one,
Burn
Time,
the first of his novels I read, remains unpublished—great
concept, shaky execution—but the raw talent was there and so was the
energy and application and the astonishing range of reference. Since
then he has written a lot more novels and short stories. The short
stories kept getting better and kept getting published. He had another
great idea: "A family saga about living through the Singularity! From
the point of view of the cat!" That mutated into the astonishing
series
that began with "Lobsters," published in
Asimov's SF
, June
2001. That story was short-listed for three major SF awards: the Hugo,
the Nebula, and the Sturgeon. Another, "Router," was short-listed for
the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award. The fourth,
"Halo," has been short-listed for the Hugo.

Looking back over some of these short stories,
what strikes me is the emergence of what might be called the Stross
sentence. Every writer who contributes to, or defines, a stage in the
development of SF has sentences that only they could write, or at least
only they could write
first
. Heinlein's dilating door opened up
a new way to bypass explication by showing what is taken for granted;
Zelazny's dune buggies beneath the racing moons
of Mars introduced an abrupt gear-change in the degrees of freedom
allowed in handling the classic material; Gibson's television sky and
Ono-Sendai decks displayed the mapping of virtual onto real spaces that
has become the default metaphor of much of our daily lives. The
signature Stross sentence (and you'll come to recognise them as you
read) represents just such an upward jump in compression and
comprehension, and one that we need to make sense not only of the
stories, but of the world we inhabit: a world sentenced to Singularity.

The novels kept getting better too, but not
getting published, until quite recently and quite suddenly three or
four got accepted more or less at once. The only effect this has had on
Charlie is that he has written another two or three while these were in
press. He just keeps getting faster and better, like computers. But the
first of his novels to be published is this one, and it's very good.

We'll be hearing, and reading, a lot more from
him.

Read this now.

Ken MacLeod
West Lothian, UK
May 2003

Green sky at night; hacker's delight.

I'm lurking in the shrubbery behind an
industrial unit, armed with a clipboard, a pager, and a pair of bulbous
night-vision goggles that drench the scenery in ghastly emerald tones.
The bloody things make me look like a train-spotter with a gas-mask
fetish, and wearing them is giving me a headache. It's humid and
drizzling slightly, the kind of penetrating dampness that cuts right
through waterproofs and gloves. I've been waiting out here in the
bushes for three hours so far, waiting for the last workaholic to turn
the lights out and go home so that I can climb in through a rear
window. Why the hell did I ever say "yes" to Andy? State-sanctioned
burglary is a lot less romantic than it sounds—especially on standard
time-and-a-half pay.

(You bastard, Andy. "About that application for
active service you filed last year. As it happens, we've got a little
job on tonight and we're short-staffed; could you lend a hand?")

I stamp my feet and blow on my hands. There's no
sign of life in the squat concrete-and-glass block in front of me. It's
eleven at night and there are still lights burning in the cubicle hive:
Don't these people have a bed to go home
to? I push my goggles up and everything goes dark, except the glow from
those bloody windows, like fireflies nesting in the empty eye sockets
of a skull.

There's a sudden sensation like a swarm of bees
throbbing around my bladder. I swear quietly and hike up my waterproof
to get at the pager. It's not backlit, so I have to risk a precious
flash of torchlight to read it. The text message says,
MGR LVNG
5
MINS.
I don't ask how they know that, I'm just grateful that there's only
five more minutes of standing here among the waterlogged trees, trying
not to stamp my feet too loudly, wondering what I'm going to say if the
local snouts come calling. Five more minutes of hiding round the back
of the QA department of Memetix (UK) Ltd.—subsidiary of a
multinational
based in Menlo Park, California—then I can do the job and go home.
Five
more minutes spent hiding in the bushes down on an industrial estate
where the white heat of technology keeps the lights burning far into
the night, in a place where the nameless horrors don't suck your brains
out and throw you to the Human Resources department—unless you show a
deficit in the third quarter, or forget to make a blood sacrifice
before the altar of Total Quality Management.

Somewhere in that building the last late-working
executive is yawning and reaching for the door remote of his BMW. The
cleaners have all gone home; the big servers hum blandly in their
air-conditioned womb, nestled close to the service core of the office
block. All I have to do is avoid the security guard and I'm home free.

A distant motor coughs into life, revs, and
pulls out of the landscaped car park in a squeal of wet tires. As it
fades into the night my pager vibrates again:
GO
GO GO
. I edge forward.

No motion-triggered security lights flash on.
There are no Rottweiler attack dogs, no guards in coal-scuttle helmets:
this ain't that kind of movie, and I'm no Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Andy
told me: "If anyone challenges you, smile, stand up
straight, and show them your warrant card—then phone me. I'll handle
it. Getting the old man out of bed to answer a clean-up call will earn
you a black mark, but a black mark's better than a cracked skull. Just
try to remember that Croxley Industrial Estate isn't Novaya Zemlya, and
getting your head kicked in isn't going to save the world from the
forces of evil.")