Speculation, Fact and Fiction

I got round to reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross this weekend. Since becoming acquainted with Charlie on the convention circuit, I've read some of his more recent stuff - and enjoyed it immensely - but the original US publications of The Atrocity Archive and The Concrete Jungle were outside my orbit, so to speak. But hurrah, the UK publisher Orbit has just brought out a paperback with both stories in it, plus a forward by Ken MacLeod and an afterword by Charlie himself.

Meet Bob Howard, reluctant operative for The Laundry, a super-secret government organisation who deal with the kind of hackers where 'darkside' means pentangles and tentacled things from the great beyond. And the Cold War had ramifications that James Bond could only have dreamed of after someone spiked his vodka martini with mind-altering substances. Where people who don't know what they're doing can potentially end up exploding cows in Milton Keynes. Where the civil service mentality to paperclip audits still applies, mind you.

This is really, really good stuff - fast, intelligent, intriguing SF with a sense of fun as well as plenty of suspense and more than a few urgh, what? moments to ground it in a wider, more serious context. As far as I can tell there's solid basis to the science and computer stuff - which is nevertheless still (mostly) intelligible and (regardless) entertaining to non-science types like me. While the totally off the wall speculation has an equally solid basis in early SF, spy fiction and quite a bit of philosophy - none of which ever becomes unwieldy and that's a notable achievement.

So read it for itself, and if you're an aspiring writer, then go back to the start and read it again and see just what this has got that your current work lacks. Because that's what's the difference between the thanks but no thanks letters and that fabulous envelope with the yes, please, let's talk publication.

This was definitely the highlight of a not very exciting couple of days here; house-keeping duties had to be tackled after a run of weekends doing other stuff, having guests and going away ourselves. So elder son cut the grass and dusted, younger son hoovered and helped with the grocery shopping, husband spent Saturday catching up with work he would have done last week in the office if he hadn't been off on a training course, and I did assorted work-related adminstration and computer updating to do with renewing the megadeath to malefactors security software while shuffling loads of laundry in and out of the washer and dryer respectively, then tackling the resulting ironing.