The Atrocity Archives

This is my favourite book from the last five years.

It is funny, intelligent, insightful, and full of geek-culture references (spot them all!).

Like much of Charles Stross's writing, it can be hard going. He rarely takes the time to explain much, throwing a tsunami of ideas, concepts, jokes, and facts at the reader. Because of this, I can't recommend it to everyone. I lent my copy to a friend and he simply found it unreadable. If you get jokes about programming, maths, HP Lovecraftian horrors, and geek culture, you might just cope with it. Like when reading Accelerando, keep Wikipedia open when you read it, to catch the more obscure references. Unlike Accelerando, there is actually coherence and sense to the plot - there's romance, action, humour, and the world even gets saved from Nazis and a creature that eats universes.

Part of the humour of the book is the shoe-horning of pseudoscientific explanations for supernatural occurences in. A basilisk doesn't turn you to stone, however it might just cause a certain percentage of your carbon atoms to spontaneously become silicon by a corruption of the Observer Principle. A demon isn't a supernatural entity, it's an infovore creature from another dimension which maps your nervous system, decrypts your mind and downloads itself into your brain.

The second story of the book is too short and underdeveloped, and doesn't quite gel as well as the first. It is clearly there to bump up the word count to "novel" quantity, as the first story is much longer, and far better developed and coherent.

This book will either become your firm favourite, or you'll never get past the first chapter without hurling it at the wall. It's the marmite of books, so beware. If you enjoy it, check out "The Jennifer Morgue", the sequel.