The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Not long ago I had half an hour to spare and, being the person I am, thought Waterstone’s was a good place to while away the time. I came across The Atrocity Archives and, having seen the cover before but not read the back, I checked out the blurb and the first page. I got the impression from that The Atrocity Archives would be another present day fantasy fiction with magic and some technology advances. The writing seemed informal, witty and the blurb had enough to hook me. I was expecting Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files meets Computers For Dummies.
There is plenty of the first. For those of you who haven’t read any of the Dresden Files, it is characterised by the main guy, Dresden, who tells the story with a lot of wit and humour. You can tell things about his character simply by the way he says things – for instance, he can joke and being quite blasé about very scary subjects which means he’s brave and possibly a bit of an idiot. And, to an extent Stross has this in Bob Howard. His charm lies in the same ‘not good with authority’ way as Dresden and, as mentioned, the wit with which the story is told. But Stross is not in Butcher’s league. Where Butcher will put in perhaps one or two references to things you might not get – TV show references from the 70s and 80s for instance –, Stross litters them across every page. I’m lost already and I’m only seventeen pages in.
For those of you who want a plot, here’s a summary of what I understand so far: Bob works in an obscure branch of the government who deal with magic and alternate dimensions – don’t expect Tinkerbell or dragons though – as a computer repair man. Then, he gets promoted and has some fun with field work. Where it all goes wrong. (Except the bit where it all goes wrong takes a long time to appear. Nothing substantial really happens for almost the first third of the book.)
I’m not a computer nerd, I’ll admit that. I know how to defragment my computer and I can write basic html but I get totally lost with Stross’s explanations of things, or lack of explanation. What, for instance, is a node when it’s at home? He mentions ‘the Turning result’ but doesn’t explain what that is for another six pages, by which I’ve entirely forgotten what the point of the conversation was when it was first mentioned. What’s worse, no-one knows what the Turning result is, because he made it up, so no-one could possibly know what the reference is to.
The worst offender by far, though, (that is, the worst offender in the seventeen pages I’ve struggled through so far) is this: ‘The theorem is a hack on a discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves Church-Turing hypothesis (wave your hand if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into p-complete ones.’
First off, that wave comment, that’s part of the quote. And I found myself slightly upset that Stross was either talking to the few people who understood what he meant and no-one else or that he was intentionally flagging up the fact no-one’s meant to understand it, in which case, why put it in there? I felt totally alienated. (If anyone reading this does feel they could wave their hand, I’d love to know what on earth it all means.) The other problem I have is…well it’s with his problems. What is an NP-complete problem? The only thing I can think of is ‘no problem’ but that doesn’t really work. A No Problem complete problem?
((Having read a little further after writing this, I found this and felt the need to share.) ‘Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule, or so they tell me when I ask.’ )
There’s another snag. If you haven’t read H.P. Lovecraft, you’re not going to get the references to his work, such as Shoggoth. I’ve read some Lovecraft but I’ve not heard of that one. Similarly, do you, without looking at Google, know who Knuth, Dijkstra or Al-Hazred are? I’ve never heard of them but apparently I should have because Stross uses them to suggest a person’s character by the material he’s reading.
All this is building up to one very large, very unmoveable difficulty. I cannot follow what’s happening. There’s computer jargon being thrown around, mixed in with philosophy, mathematics, an awful lots of theories and some pretty heavy ideas, none of which I understand. I get the physical things that are going on – he’s walking over there, now he’s hacking a computer – but if the ending hinges on a concept I can’t grasp, what’s the point in reading any further than page seventeen?
Perhaps I’m being unkind and judgemental. Perhaps that isn’t enough material to judge the whole book by. But still, there’s that niggling doubt that if I can’t get the basic premise, all hope is lost.
I always try to judge a book by how friendly it is to the reader. That is, in terms of how accessible it is, not how nicely it can compliment your hair. And, granted, there will be science fiction that’s out of my range. But I’m not sure how many sci-fi fans would enjoy this either. And that’s what it comes down to: an author tries to sell books, which will be difficult if he’s alienated all by a tiny slice of his readership.
Fail, Mister Stross. Fail.