Charles Stross

[Kathy Li]

Figure we can bust out of the "Books" thread a little, now that we've got the elbow room And yes, I'm seriously behind at finding authors everybody else already knows.

Over Christmas break, on a friend's recommendation, I picked up Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives and really enjoyed it. He reminds me a bit of Neal Stephenson (less machismo, though), and John Scalzi (a little less goofy). And, of course, he's Scottish not American.

This was apparently his first novel, which has only recently been reprinted in paperback in the US. The basis of magic in this book is mathematics. Once you start proving particular theorems, you thin the walls between the worlds and the extra-dimensional beings can come and get you. And they're kinda Cthulu-like gods. So, to stop that from happening, there are secret government agencies who forcefully recruit and stop anybody from doing so. Poor post graduate doctoral students who think they're doing cool things with Mandelbrot diagrams suddenly find themselves pulled into the Laundry.

And since this is a government agency, in between saving the world on top secret missions, you're also forced into the matrixed management structure from hell, needless/useless training sessions ad infinitum, petty beaurocrats and office politics, expense reports, and software audits.

The hero is part IT guy, part agent. And you can tell that Stross used to work IT. I think my favorite part in the book was when the hero was in a meeting with all the other secret agency types, and trying to explain what someone was doing. It was basically the math/magic to transform any N-P complete problem to be P-complete. My head exploded when I read that. In that good way. You also get a short novella (same character); it involves weird goings-on in Milton Keynes.

I'm eager now to find more Stross and I'm wondering which of the books I should pick up next. Anybody read this guy and got a specific title to recommend?

[Kathy Li]

Ok, now I'm just talking to myself. But I picked up the first book in Stross's "Merchant Princes" series, and it was almost but not quite totally unlike The Atrocity Archives. It's more Zelazney's Amber crossed with The Economist magazine than spy story meets Cthulu.

The heroine of the series is an investigative reporter who specializes in business writing about BioTech firms. She discovers out of the blue that she can travel from our world to a parallel one that's still in a medieval state. There, the genetic trait to worldwalk has been used by a small coterie of families to create an import/export trade between the worlds, and they've become fantastically rich and powerful, have been created nobles and are beginning to marry into royalty, and there's a ton of internecine court intrigue going on.

It turns out our heroine is a lost heir in this viper's pit of a family, and someone's now trying to kill her, both in the other world and in ours.

Let me just say that within three days, I'm up to book three in the series.

The four books are:

1. The Family Trade
2. The Hidden Family
3. The Clan Corporate
4. The Merchants' War

with two more titles The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens planned.

BTW, looking up Stross on Wikipedia, I found this. Hee.

If you're still unsure about plunking down your change for this guy, here's a short story with the main character of The Atrocity Archives in it you can read online at the Tor website.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

BTW, looking up Stross on Wikipedia, I found this. Hee.

Hee yourself. Can you say, "desperate to find a free-content-licensed picture of Diane for her article since Diane hasn't uploaded one herself"?

[Kathy Li]

I would---but it was taken by Patrick Nielsen-Hayden....that was the added factor that was giggle-inducing. It's off his Flickr stream. He's got a set.

For those who don't know who PNH is, he and his wife Teresa are editors at Tor, and they run the blog, Making Light.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

I would---but it was taken by Patrick Nielsen-Hayden....that was the added factor that was giggle-inducing. It's off his Flickr stream. He's got a set.

Oh, I know _exactly_ where it came from -- didn't you look at the uploader's username? :-)

So, what's so giggle-inducing about PNH having taken it? I don't keep up on the SF community the way I used to...

[Kathy Li]

For me, the giggle simply came from the odd random confluence of folks. I mean, how often is it that you're familiar with the work of both subjects AND the photographer? And, of course, being PNH, he'd put his Flickr photos in creative commons so they could be used for something like Wikipedia. This wasn't opportunistic skimming off of Flickr, but generosity aforethought.

BTW, I'm still in book three, and it's getting really interesting. He's tossed a third (Victorian-ish) world into the mix where, up against a completely different economy, Marx had a massively different role. Oi vey.

[Tuttle]

Because of your recommendation I read the story on Tor. My basic response to it is not going to the library, because if I do then I'll not focus on my work and I'm already far enough behind (but that's a different story). It definitely looks interesting though, as does your descriptions of the other stories.

I like the writing style. It may be different in the books, but in this story it makes me feel in a way like it is supposed to be something that catches your attention, holds it for a while, then lets it go. That works well with short stories and any issues in books with that is the holding it while you should be doing other things.

The whole idea in this story is just weird, but it works better than I was expecting. I was wanting to look into those, but I wasn't sure how it'd work. Works better than I was expecting. Math/Magic made sense to work, but this seemed different than most. I need to find more like it . Had a Lovecraftian feel at times, but that's not entirely unexpected. Also isn't a bad thing, though reminds me how few people around here have read any Lovecraft despite spelling Cthulhu being a test for the secretary of the club I am a member of.

Also, amusement at the photo.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Also isn't a bad thing, though reminds me how few people around here have read any Lovecraft despite spelling Cthulhu being a test for the secretary of the club I am a member of.

Not only have I read it, I've read it out loud for Librivox. :-)

I'm pretty sure I've plugged Librivox here before, but in case I didn't, it's an all-volunteer project to create public domain audiobooks from printed public domain works -- think Project Gutenberg for the ear. They have books with readers switching off chapters, books read by a single reader, poems read by multiple readers, plays -- you name it, they've probably tried it. :-)

[Kathy Li]

Ok, I've been steadily working my way through a lot of Stross, and I just wanted to mention a few things.

All his books rock.

The Atrocity Archives now has a sequel that's out in trade paper: The Jennifer Morgue. It does things with James Bond memes that only Stross could get away with. ("Are you the good Bond babe, the bad Bond babe, or the glamorous assassin from a rival organization?") O.M.G. I laughed so hard, I dang near got a hernia.

The fifth of the Merchant Princes books is now out in hardcover.

Halting State is a standalone, and it has some really interesting extrapolations of current technology and the dangers of virtual theft in MMORPGs.

Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are connected, and you want to read them in that order.

Ditto Accelerando and Glasshouse.

I'm so happy I found this author.

[Jacq]

I can't help but add books to my list when they are given such glowing praise.

I do have a small question though... How good is it in terms of readability for the, er, non-mathematical? I adore Stephenson's books, but there are portions of the Baroque cycle that went over my head, and I skipped the diagrams in Cryptonomicon totally.

A purely mathematical person would probably not enjoy Jasper Fforde's work with the same relish an English Professor would.

[Kathy Li]

Pure mathematics doesn't often rear its head up in Stross, but computer technology does. A lot. He is very much like Stephenson in that realm. And since Stross not only worked IT, but was also a pharmacist a bit of biochem pops its head up, too. I've never been bothered by either, and I'm pretty knowledgeable on computers, and pretty dang ignorant on biochem. I've gathered from non-computer-geeks that you can still enjoy Stross without knowing that stuff, but it could be a matter of personal tolerance.

I actually wasn't that impressed with Jasper Fforde's series--I enjoyed it, but after a while it lost its zest for me--most works that are heavily derivative tend to bore me to a certain degree (I don't grok Maguire's Wicked either). And I got a minor in English lit to go with my EE/CS BS degree, so I did get all the references. For that kind of fun, I'm much more likely to pick up something like Rudyard Kipling's Muse Among the Motors. But I'm really weird. I love my injokes when they're buried pretty deep.

Like how the name of Stross's hero of The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue ("Bob Howard") is a reference to Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan books.

[Birdhead]

Snow Crash happens to be my favourite cyberpunk novel in all the worlds, but when we arrived in class? Turns out that she only does SC every other year, and this year we were doing Accelerando. If I'd read the book under almost any other circumstance it's possible I would have liked it, but when you're reading a novel under duress and the whole time comparing it to the scene where Hiro Protagonist is the pizza delivery boy from badassville, or just about any scene with YT in it - well, it suffers, frankly!

However, those who are able to read this book and give it a fair shot may be interested in knowing that you can get it for free (under a CC license) here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/

Maybe this will help Kathy convert more people to him!

[Lazy Leopard]

I should, at some point, read at least one of his books. I've heard him talk at conventions more than once. Here's a photo of him I took during one of his talks at Eastercon last year.

There's nothing quite like being forced to read a book for a class to take the pleasure out of reading. I was firmly innoculated against Dickens, Austen, Bronte, and a few other authors by being forced to read their novels for classes at school.

[Birdhead]

I usually am pretty tolerant of class reading - I read Jane Eyre for class, my first Shakespeares for class, a bunch of others - but I've never gotten over having to do Death of a Salesman when every other class did The Crucible (although in retrospect I think Salesman is the more profound and valuable play), being forced to read horrible horrible DH Lawrence in my final year of English in secondary school, and, well, I think Accelerando is going to be the next one. Three is actually a pretty small number considering I'm an English Lit major.

Hey, LL, if you try Pride & Prejudice & Zombies maybe you'll get over the Austen thing! Which would be good because Austen's a delight.

[Kathy Li]

Tui, oh crud. And it would be Accelerando you got forced to down. ::eyeroll::. I can totally see how that would back-poison Stross as an author for you.

Myself, I have the same kind of block against the American literature I was taught in high school. You will not find me voluntarily picking up Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, or William Faulkner ever again.

Thornton Wilder might be the only exception for me of authors I was taught first that I learned to love. I'm pretty sure me and Shakespeare are tight because I got to him voluntarily before being taught. And me and Wilkie Collins is because nobody teaches Collins.