Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod ISBN: 1-930846-25-8 Publisher: Golden Gryphon Pr Pub. Date: May, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Hilarious "hard dark fantasy"
Comment: Charlie Stross has been making a name for himself over recent years for his extraordinary "Accelerando" stories, chronicling human and post-human civilisation towards and past the Singularity event at which technology becomes sentient and near-godlike. Another future world is being explored in the novel Singularity Sky and sundry short stories/future novels - also post-Singularity, and imbued with a pervading humour even through some quite horrifying passages.
The Atrocity Archives is best read with this in mind: despite looking a bit like horror, this is really hard science fiction with a lot of humour and a very weird Lovecraftian twist regarding the nature of the world. It's geeky but cool, a clever take on the spy thriller, and the only connection it has with "A Colder War" is that it's Lovecraft-inspired spy fiction by the same author. (Indeed, other even sillier Lovecraft homages appear in his short story collection "Toast").
The one-star review below should be taken with a grain of salt: don't come to any book with brittle expectations and then complain that it's the book's fault when your expectations are dashed!
The Atrocity Archives is quite unlike anything else out there at the moment, but those familiar with Stross, Cory Doctorow, or various other contemporary sf authors' up-to-the-minute genre-busting fiction will eat it up with gusto.
And the beginning passage, in which a succession of everyday events (such a pager going off in our hero's pocket) are made ominous by horror-inflected prose, is pure gold.
Rating: 5
Summary: Deighton meets Lovecraft
Comment: It's difficult to review this book without comparing it to other authors, simply because they share certain common moods. The actual story concept is original, a fusion of espionage, horror, and SF that won't necessarily appeal to readers who are purists in any one of these genres, but is hugely enjoyable if you can take it all in.
Briefly, the story revolves around agents for a British intelligence organisation tasked with suppressing certain mathematical concepts; the ones that are the keys to other dimensions, most of them containing entities implacably hostile to mankind. The trouble is that they happen to be very interesting mathematical concepts, the ones that are close to the cutting edge of computer research, and there are a lot of people out there that are working on them. In the past it took thousands of man-hours to screw up reality, today a laptop can do it in sceonds. This can result in horrific accidents and is potentially the ultimate terrorist weapon. There is an uneasy peace between the world's intelligence agencies, which pool resources to counter this threat, but things haven't always been that way. The ultimate threat of the book is a remnant of Nazi research from the second world war, and turns out to be much nastier than expected.
I enjoyed everything in this book, from the home-life of the hacker/agent hero to its final apocalyptic scenes on a dying alien world. Thoroughly recommended.
I wrote this before seeing the publisher's description, and it's interesting to see how similar it is. That possibly means it's unnecessary, but that's life...
Rating: 4
Summary: It's a fun read
Comment: I'm about halfway through the book and totally disagree with Mayhew's review. He panned the book because it's not a sequel to another story he read.
Since I never particularly got into Lovecraft, or horror, I'm enjoying the book even more than I expected to. I find it a wonderful twist on the whole cyberpunk genre. The protagonist is a geek that talks and acts like a real geek. He even gets the slang right.
As I said in my title, the book is a fun read.
 |
Title: Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross ISBN: 0441011594 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: 06 July, 2004 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
 |
Title: Singularity Sky by Charles Stross ISBN: 0441010725 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 05 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
 |
Title: The Knight (The Wizard Knight, Book 1) by Gene Wolfe ISBN: 0765309890 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 03 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0060523867 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 13 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: The Golden Transcendence : Or, The Last of the Masquerade by John C. Wright ISBN: 0765307561 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
