Book review: The Atrocity Archives

Takes the fast-paced technothriller genre and marries it with the Lovecraftian universe of alternate dimensions and alien menaces, using the idea of magic as susceptible to mathematical calculation and design. (In his afterword, Stross notes the parallel invention of this idea by Tim Powers's novel Declare, which I'm going to have to look for, and the Delta Green sourcebooks for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.) Stross is good at describing the sysadmin mindset, and flavors the book with some of Brazil's out-of-control bureaucracy. Occasionally the technobabble goes on for too long -- I don't care about the details of how Turing discovered magic -- and he jumps upon a hobbyhorse such as business software audits or CCTV monitoring, but the resulting rants are mercifully less than a page. It's a fun set of two stories that are both amusing yet still moderately chilling; the reveals of what's going on in each story are effective and demonstrate Stross's inventiveness.