Charles Stross

Ace, 2007, 351 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01498-9

I love the feel of sizzling neurons in the evening.

People read Science Fiction far various reasons. I’m in it for the rush I get when SF knocks a few new ideas in my head, links them to the world at large and asks if I’m ready to deal with them. It’s a cognitive pleasure that is seldom seen elsewhere in fiction, and Charles Stross excels at it. Even when he’s dealing with occult horrors or dimension-hopping economies, Stross is never too far from the “use the future to think about the present” ethos of the best SF. With Halting State, Stross attempts the most dangerous game imaginable for SF writers: a near-future thriller.

It’s a risky dare, because it carries along its own metric for failure. Never mind that Stross isn’t attempting to be a futurist: a surprisingly large number of falsely sophisticated readers will read his novel as a grab-bag of predictions and pass judgement on how closely his extrapolations will match our real-world 2010s. And there are no ways to win at this game: The slightest errors will be highlighted, and what does survive may not be detectable from the then-mainstream. (There are surprisingly few rewards for being prescient in SF.) Halting State is a novel with an ever-closer examination date.

It seems, at first glance, like a departure from Stross’ three existing strands of fiction. It’s not far-future post-Singularity SF like Accelerando, it’s not occult horror/thriller like The Atrocity Archives and it’s not a fantasy of finance like the series launched with The Family Trade. But look closer, because the links with his other fiction are all over the place.

First, Stross is still fascinated by how economics shape our societies. The trigger to Halting State is theft. Virtual theft, as an attack on a bank set in a virtual role-playing game results in a police and insurance investigation. This may be virtual money theft, but it quickly has real-world consequences as the lead investigative team is assembled: A computer expert who knows on-line gaming, an insurance investigator who wields a mean sword and a police investigator who finds herself bemused by the whole case. These three characters each get alternating viewpoint chapters, rounding out our perspective on a case that becomes more complex than anticipated. Because this isn’t just a game.

And this is where Halting State takes off, as it riffs on the nature of reality and fantasy like the best of Stross’ SF work so far. The theft is the tip of a much deeper business, one that has links to the setting of the novel. As it turns out, Stross doesn’t set his novel in a newly-independent Scotland just for the local atmosphere. SF used to dream about how the real could shape the virtual, but the current crop of genre fiction (including William Gibson’s surprisingly similar Spook Country) is busy describing how both the real and the virtual interact until it all becomes one single augmented reality.

But this vertiginous realization comes with the understanding that virtual universes have been with us for a long time, and that “The Great Game” keeps extending its reach as computers end up forming part of our identity. That’s the point at which Halting State is revealed to be tightly linked to Stross’ “Laundry” espionage/horror series, and where his usual mixture of horror, humour and speculation finds its ultimate expression.

Stross keeps on getting better with each novel, and Halting State is a tour de force in many ways: Stylistically, it’s more audacious than it has any right to be with a second-person narration, but even that works after a while. Thematically, it vigorously explores Stross’ usual preoccupations. Narratively, it features a number of strong scenes and carefully-measured revelations. Conceptually, it proves that high speculation is not incompatible with near-future settings. It’s a good thing that Stross is able to temper his extrapolations with a heavy dose of humour, because some of the speculations in here are enough to drive anyone to full-blown paranoia (an approach explored in Ken MacLeod’s not-dissimilar The Execution Channel.)

So who said that SF was running out of future? There are more fresh ideas in this “near-future thriller” than in most “far-future science-fiction” published this year. Stross made a dangerous bet in looking at a future well within the lifetime of most readers, and it looks as if he’s well-placed to win. Even if reality catches up to this novel (and I’m hardly the only one who caught recent news of virtual bank thefts in Second Life), doesn’t it suggest that you too should read this novel as soon as possible?

Golden Gryphon, 2006, 313 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 1-930846-45-2

The first problem in talking about The Jennifer Morgue is trying to establish how unique it is. The word-blender approach (“geek humour plus Lovecraft horror plus Bond thriller”) works well, but it leads to a second difficulty: the audience either goes “cool: I’m off to buy it” or looks puzzled. The buyers don’t need to be told anything more, while the puzzled are unlikely to ever get why it’s such a cool and unique and wonderful book.

In a sense, The Jennifer Morgue is review-proof: the audience self-selects according to the high concept, their opinion of Stross’ fiction in general, or their take on the prequel volume The Atrocity Archives.

But to briefly recap the elements of the series so far: The world as we know it is susceptible to invasions from other strange dimensions, and advanced mathematics are one of the surest ways to open portals between dimensions. To protect the rest of us sheep against those extra-dimensional threats, governments around the world have set up secret agencies. “Bob Howard” (not his real name) is a member of the British “Laundry”, and his geek personality makes him an odd fit for the shadowy world of spooks. The Atrocity Archives was his introductory adventure, a mixture of nerd hilarity, high horror and knowledgeable nods to the spy genre as written by Len Deighton.

In this follow-up adventure, Bob finds himself assigned to a mission where he gets to live out the Ian Fleming lifestyle more or less against his will. Fighting a high-tech villain in the Caribbean may sound like fun, but for Bob it’s more of a distraction keeping him away from computer screens. His discomfort quickly becomes something more serious when he finds himself bonded (er…) to an American female demon with unhealthy feeding habits. His sanity becomes at stake, not to mention his relationship with his girlfriend.

Laughs, thrills and chills are once again to be expected from Stross in this second entry in the Laundry sequence: The Jennifer Morgue manages to find new and interesting areas to explore in the chilling mythology of the series while parodying another strain of British spy thrillers. This time, it’s Fleming’s James Bond series (along with the film adaptations) that provide much of the book’s structure and humour, although Stross is too clever to keep this from staying strictly a joke for the readers: there is an ingenious in-story reason (which I’d trying really hard not to spoil) why the plot veers into Bond territory and stays there… though maybe not conventionally so.

I was particularly impressed at how far The Jennifer Morgue was willing to go in order to explore the consequences of its premises. One of the strengths of the series so far is that it features a lot of very disturbing material right underneath the veneer of geek humour. Here, Stross occasionally presents very disturbing developments and though Bob’s narration may soften the blow (“I’m not cleared for sex magick,” [P.90] he protests), it doesn’t make it any less dramatic. This unease also goes deeper than the simple horrible-monsters level: Bob is in a committed romantic relationship, and the implications of having a Bond-like adventures on his domestic life form a significant part of the novel’s underlying tension, which carries through to the very last pages of the book.

Also impressive is how Stross manages to fit the entire Bond connection into the existing mythology of the Laundry universe. The underwater focus of the novel is both very Bond-like, and rich in occult possibilities: The first half of the novel crams in clever ideas about humanity’s true place on the planet, and through this aspect fades as the novel advances, it’s gradually taken up by the Bond mechanics and Bob’s reaction to those clichés.

The Atrocity Archives was my favourite book of 2004, so it’s not a real surprise if The Jennifer Morgue doesn’t manage to out-do its predecessor’s impact in putting together this wonderful mixture of geek culture, deep horror and thriller parody. But this follow-up is satisfying in its own way, and not simply as a continuation of Bob Howard’s adventures. Not many novels, after all, feature death-by-PowerPoint: That should probably be a selling point for the eventual paperback edition.

…and that brings us back to the critic-proof nature of The Jennifer Morgue: Are you more likely to read a book if it comes with a sticker warning “Contains death-by-PowerPoint”? If so, my job here is done. Otherwise, there’s nothing I can tell you to top this.

Ace, 2006, 335 pages, C$32.50 hc, ISBN 0-441-01403-8

After the massively successful Accelerando, expectations ran high for Charles Stross’ follow-up SF novel Glasshouse. Would he try to top his wide-screen vision of a post-singularity future? Would it even be possible to go even one step beyond Accelerando? Wisely, Glasshouse doesn’t even try. Instead, it heads for a different territory with a more focused narrative and an intent to satirize.

It begins more or less hundreds of years after the events of Accelerando, in a comfortably post-human empire scattered around the galaxy. Our narrator is learning the world again, fully conscious that his latest incarnation has had entire chunks of his memory removed. That doesn’t worry him all that much, through: Simply being human is a challenge enough after a lengthy period being something else. To heighten the experience, he declines regular personality backups, risking everything on his continued existence. The first chapter even has a sword fight, just to keep things hopping. As it turns out, the biggest problems with amnesia is that you can’t remember your worst enemies…

But there may be a way to hide away for a while, as his medical advisers have an idea to facilitate his recovery. Why not, they suggest, volunteer for a harmless psychological experiment? Nothing serious, of course: just a few years locked-up in a fabricated environment, interacting with other volunteers according to a predefined set of experimental social rules. A good way to take a break from the infinitely mutable, constantly evolving post-human diaspora. Completely harmless. Completely safe.

Oh sure. Just as the opening quotes by Kafka and Hitler are there completely by accident. Just as the Zimbardo references are purely coincidental. Things are about to go bad really quickly for our narrator, and they indeed do from the start of the experiment: Waking up with no memory of actually signing and backing its mind up, it also finds itself stuck in a weak female body after a long stay in a succession of powerful male bodies. But then it has to contend with its fellow lab rats…

Glasshouse quickly turns into a nightmare as the narrator slowly comes to realize the insanity of the experiment, recover bits and pieces of its previous memory and pieces together a sinister motive behind its current situation. While deceptively simple at first, Glasshouse eventually comes to reveal itself as a narrative simultaneously working on different levels, as Science Fiction thriller, as post-human speculation and as social satire.

Because, you see, the micro-society in which the narrator finds itself turns out to be American Suburbania, circa 1950-2000. Built from fragmented records, of course, given how few reliable accounts of the period survived the various information wars that followed the Acceleration. As a female, our narrator finds itself relegated to the role of a housewife, weakly built and socially ostracized. But then she finds out what’s really going on…

If, at first, Glasshouse seems a step back after Accelerando, it eventually becomes obvious that this is, in many way, a more complex novel: Voluntarily mirroring Accelerando in regressing from a post-human future back into something innately familiar to us, Glasshouse then uses its not-quite-contemporary setting to deliver, in interweaving instalments, both a social critique and an affecting military SF thriller.

The satire is easy to perceive, especially as the narrator can’t figure out the massively counterintuitive social mores of suburban America. The gender roles are inefficient, the religious and social restrictions are insane and the technology is brain-damaged. There are a number of smirks and gags in store as readers get to see a post-human try to cope with our restrictions. As an alienating device, it works well. Given how Glasshouse seems to target a quasi-mythical cold-war American way of life that died with the sixties, it’s not hard to emphasize with the narrator while taking along the points that are still valid today. Gender roles, in particular, are thrown in a blender and whirred around: It will be interesting to see if the book manages to make it on the Tiptree Awards lists next year.

But there’s also an espionage/military thriller lurking in the back of Glasshouse as hidden identities are revealed and the protagonist’s own mind reveals its mysteries. This is where Glasshouse, for all of its hyped-up links to Accelerando, is more likely to remind readers of Stross’ own Iron Sunrise in its grim depiction of a post-humanity that nonetheless keeps all of its pre-human brutality. The protagonist’s flashbacks offer the equivalent of a military SF novelette in which fancy weapons do their best to destroy anything that can be called human. One particular scene in which heads have to be decapitated in order to be saved is likely to remind some readers of a related scene in Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. As a writer now fit to be compared to Morgan, Stross fulfils his growing reputation as a writer able to be, even in the same book, both hilarious and horrifying.

The non-flashback thriller also succeeds brilliantly, especially given how it has to take place in a panopticon environment. Plotting an escape, or even a hassle-free life, can be a real problem if you can reliably be expected to be under surveillance all the time, whether by unseen experimenters or by fellow experiment subjects. Some scenes carry a real thrill as the narrator plots and schemes how to reach set objectives while trying to avoid detection. There are even unexpected payoffs in the form of bonus points for craft. But the penalties for being caught can be high, especially when your enemies have complete access to your brain chemistry…

It goes without saying that Stross’ similarly-renowned ability to cram four times as much speculation as other SF writers is also on display here: although he lightens his prose after the mega-pascal intensity of Accelerando, there is still plenty of good crunchy speculation, fancy gadgets, excellent techno-fluidity, appalling back-stories and shock-a-minute ideas. The narrator literally perceives suburban life differently. It’s one of the book’s small treats to hear perfectly ordinary objects being described using ultra-technical vocabulary.

Given all of the above, it almost seems petty to complain about weak plot points. But the sometimes rough caricatures of the antagonists (relying on the ever-popular wife-beaters or religious leaders) aren’t particularly sophisticated and take away some of the creeping horror of the situation: It’s one thing to show normal people being manipulated in committing hair-raising horror, but its a different, lesser thing to simply show monsters without conscience running free. Worse still are at least two coincidences essential to the plot: The narrator meets and then recognizes two powerful allies in ways that seem awfully convenient. (Though I may have missed an unseen manipulation: this book isn’t light on unseen controls and made-up contrivances, after all.) &ldqu
o;Awfully convenient” is also a good way to describe a mid-book discovery which facilitates plotting in a panopticon environment, or the way the villains seem unusually forgiving of perceived threats.

But every Stross book seems to top the previous ones, if not in scope then at least in execution. Here, the theme may not be a broad as Accelerando, nor as guilt-free as The Atrocity Archives, but Stross is showing even more maturity in how he tackles his story on several different levels, weaving and shuffling his stuff without pausing for breath. Reading Glasshouse is a lot like seeing a card trick being performed right in front of your eyes: focus on this, focus on that, oh didn’t see this coming didn’t you? Stross has recently been a regular on the various SF awards ballots, and you can expect Glasshouse to go on to similar success. It’s a strong entry in a year already blessed with plenty of good science fiction books.

Ace, 2005, 390 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01284-1

(Also freely available online at accelerando.org)

This book should come with warning labels.

This book could melt your brain (and that would be a good thing.)

Caution! Content requires some mental assembly.

Warning: High density of ideas. May explode.

Danger: This book dissolves outdated assumptions about science-fiction.

Do not put in contact with people unable to cope with new things.

This, I’m convinced, will be the defining SF novel of this decade. The closest analogue would be Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, the unheralded best SF novel of the eighties, the one that blew away a generation of influential readers and writers, the truest shift between SF as it was and SF as it became. Charles Stross’ Accelerando, after five years in the incubator, has finally emerged to sweep away the dregs of old-style Science Fiction and show us how things will be done from now on. This is the first true SF novel of the twenty-first century.

High praise indeed, but this novel is liable to inflame even the most jaded SF critic. Accelerando is a fix-up of nine short stories (a trilogy of trilogies) charting the evolution of humanity through a twenty-first century marked by a technological singularity, through the eyes of a cat who’s not a cat —and three generations of a dysfunctional family. It’s almost unimaginably big and it does what few SF writers are even willing to do: stare the Singularity in the face and say “bring it on.”

The first three stories of the book are those of Manfreld Mancx, a genius whose day job is to bring humanity, kicking and screaming, into a turbulent new future. He’s so far ahead of the curve that he is essentially living in the future. The second trilogy of stories sticks close to his daughter, Amber Mancx, as she (and then a copy of her) travels away from Earth as humanity lives through the Singularity. The last three stories follow her son, Sirdhan Mancx, as he confronts the cold reality of a post-Singularity humanity that may be headed toward an existential dead-end.

As a novel, Accelerando is hardly perfect. Stross’ prose owes more to brute-force hacks than to elegance: His story requires so much bandwidth that stylistic flourishes take too much space. So he dumps information any way he can. The result requires you to pay attention, keep going forward and try not to drown under such a torrent of material.

Heady, heady stuff. If you’ve read Stross’ fiction before, you may be ready for his onslaught of ideas. Others may give up in frustration as every sentence needs to be uncompressed for understanding. A.E. Van Vogt used to say that real SF ought to throw a new idea every eight hundred words. Improbably, Stross doubles that average. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s got the sheer guts, the insane audacity to imagine his way through the Singularity and come up with post-Singularity issues. (What’s more, he also manages to deliver a neat solution to Drake’s paradox, a solution that presumes that information science, economics and evolutionary biology all boil down to the same thing.)

To hack a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: Your mind, once stretched by Accelerando, will never regain its original dimensions. Neither will Science Fiction as a genre. This novel destroys the comfortable futures of old-school SF and redefines the picture we’ve got of the future. I don’t think that SF fans could tolerate a steady diet of novels like Accelerando. But then again, I don’t think that most SF writers could write such novels.

One further word of praise and warning: This is not a Science Fiction novel to put in mundane hands. In order to make sense of it, you will have to either hold a CS degree, overdose on Wired and Slashdot and/or be a time-traveller. As Rick Kleffel has memorably put it, “This is the kind of science fiction that scares normal people” to which I’d add “and those merely pretending to like Science Fiction as it should be.” It’s hard stuff, and all the more exhilarating for it.

But what a trip. If this isn’t the SF novel of the decade, I can’t wait to read what will beat it.

Simon & Schuster, 2004, 227 pages, C$37.10 hc, ISBN 0-7432-3591-6

Well, this is it: the state-of-the-art of the science-fiction genre at the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps even its future. While other authors are reluctant to face the new possibilities offered by the information revolution, Charles Stross not only embraces strange new tomorrows, but revels in them. Lives in them, one could say. The result of this vision is Toast, a brilliant anthology of short fiction that doubles as one of the best example of what cutting-edge SF has to offer.

If you’ve never read anything by Stross before, be prepared for some concept overload. The title of the book says it all; if the only thing you can think about when you say “toast” is lightly-burnt bread or banquet platitudes, then you may not be the ideal public for this book. Stross’ hacker-jargon “toast” is all about severely damaged hardware or humans shell-shocked by change. Much like your brain once you’ll be done with this collection.

It starts out with a bang, with “Antibodies”, one of the neatest stories of the past decade. Here, a yawn-inducing statement (“someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P!”) ends up being the harbinger of the end of the world. Our narrator knows this because he’s from somewhere else. Too bad; he had such hopes for this universe.

Other standout stories in the volume include “Big Brother Iron”, a computer-heavy follow-up to George Orwell’s 1984 in which the day-to-day job of sysadmins makes them natural revolutionaries. Clever, much like “Extracts From the Club Diary”, a series of letter chronicling the evolution of a very special group of addicts. Both of those stories skirt the edges of strictly science-fictional content, but their detail-heavy execution, packed with concepts and consequences, is straight from the Science Fiction school of thought.

Direct echoes of Stross’ longer-work resonate through the collection. “Bear Trap” is loosely set in a variant of the Eschaton universe explored in Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. “A Colder War” is recognizably from the same imagination that came up with The Atrocity Archives, though in a much darker vein. The same fascination for the H.P. Lovecraft mythos carries through material like “A boy and his god”, a light-hearted story where the title really says it all.

Stross has been an active member of SF fandom for decades (you can find mentions of him in David Langford’s Ansible as far back as October 1984) and it may be no accident if two of the stories in the book take the form of convention reports. “Dechlorinating the Moderator” is amusing if not quite believable, but “Toast” is the stuff pure SF is made of: at a convention of technical enthusiasts, boredom may be the first stage of transhumanity.

It’s not all so cutting-edge, mind you. “Yellow Snow” (1990) has visibly aged, set in an obviously cyberpunk setting with a few extra twists. Not bad, not dull, but its kick now has more to do with nostalgia than anything else. A similar fate is reserved for “Ship of Fools”, a Y2K story that probably worked well when it was published in 1995, but seems overly talky now that this particular crisis has been worked out. The last line is a lovely inside-joke, but it’s a slog getting there.

To be fair, both of those stories are singled out by Stross himself in his fantastic introduction “After the Future Imploded”, a presentation piece that reads like a manifesto for current SF writers. If you’re not convinced that this is an author on the leading front of the SF field, this essay will remove your last doubts. Stross knows the genre, understands what it can be used for, and not-so-secretly delights in the possibilities at his fingertips.

Toast may not be widely available in bookstores, but in terms of impact it’s a welcome throwback to the heady days where single-author short-story collections ruled the SF world. Here we’ve got a collection of excellent stories, unified by a unique vision that masters the tools of the Science Fiction genre and it willing to nudge it forward. It’s heady, brainy, funny stuff: another success for Charles Stross.

Ace, 2004, 355 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01159-4

Singularity Sky, Charles Stross’ debut novel, was immediately acclaimed as one of the best SF books of 2003 and went on to earn a spot on the Best Novel Hugo Awards nominee list. Its sequel, Iron Sunrise, is even better. Reprising some of the same characters in a different adventure set in the Eschaton universe inaugurated by Singularity Sky, it expands the scope of the series and also shows Stross’ progress as a novelist.

It starts with a bang, of course, as a sun is detonated in spectacular technical detail. New Moscow has just died, taking along with it billions of people and destroying an entire culture. Who’s to blame for the star-killer? UN investigator Rachel Mansour (co-star of Singularity Sky) is assigned to the case after a messy interlude defusing a nuclear bomb in suburban Geneva. Things quickly get worse when it’s revealed that New Moscow’s destruction has triggered a doomsday device aimed at another star system. As the race against the clock begins to save an entire planet, events spin out of control when the Nazi-like reMastered faction steps onto the stage… and that’s not even saying anything about Wednesday Shadowmist, an exiled teenage girl with a very unusual education who comes to play a big part in the subsequent events.

There is a lot to like about Iron Sunrise, and perhaps the best thing about it is how it shows Stross’ increasing control over his material. While Singularity Sky told a rather simple story with a lot of padding, Iron Sunrise goes for a more complicated plot and a tighter focus on what’s really important. Rachel Mansour herself is almost a supporting character, what with Wednesday constantly stealing the show. The threat of the reMastered has big repercussions outside the immediate events of the story, and the feeling of the novel is more vertiginous than its prequel.

A lot of it has to do with the expanded scope of the Eschaton universe as used by Stross, which takes on new shapes and shades. This imagined future is profoundly upsetting, in a way, as it resets the clock on human history and reignites ethnic conflicts on dozens of world without much in a way of impartial mediation. For a writer quickly being known for light-hearted storytelling, Iron Sunrise proves to be surprisingly mean and effective at times: Times of London blogger Frank the Nose’s recollections of Newpeace, for instance, is awful, disturbing and one of the best thing Stross has ever written.

Sometimes, though, Stross’ quirky sense of humour can get the better of him: I’m worried that the book will age prematurely, what with blogs and slashdotting being bandied about casually in this far-future setting (heck, Iron Sunrise even has a chapter called “Someone set us up the bomb”. Top that!) His energy is contagious, and his gift for putting characters in bizarre situations is getting better. (The sequence in which the characters have to plot inside a panopticon is definitely ingenious.)

Fortunately, Iron Sunrise keeps moving at a steadier pace than Singularity Sky. The slingshot ending alone is a piece of work, kicking the novel in high gear just as you thought everything was winding down. Alas, Stross confirms on Usenet that he’s grown doubtful about the Eschaton universe and has no immediate plans to return to it. Too bad, but then again we’ve got more than enough to satisfy us with those first two volumes.

As of this writing, Iron Sunrise looks like a leading contender for the Hugo Awards, helped along with Stross’ physical proximity to Glasgow in time for the 2005 Worldcon. Best of luck to him; the book certainly deserves consideration. It’s a fine piece of modern SF by a rising star of the genre, one who can be counted upon to deliver the good like a true professional.

Golden Gryphon, 2004, 273 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 1-930846-25-8

Stop the presses! It’s only August, but unless I hit another brain-burner before December (and Charles Stross’ own Iron Sunrise may very well do the trick), I’ve found my Book of the Year.

Oh, the chances are that you won’t like it. It’s been a pet theory of mine that what is great to one cannot be great to all: Given that the great stuff appeals to unique facets of a personality, such quirky likes and dislike won’t be shared by all, ergo stuff that reaches you won’t necessarily affect everyone.

And -whoah- does The Atrocity Archives push most of my buttons: Computer Science, Office Work, Lovercraft Mythos, Spy Thrillers, Tech Jokes, Historical Trivia are all thrown in a particle accelerator and the result of this experiment is a book that just about grabbed me by the ears and demanded to be admired. It wasn’t much of a fight: Scarily enough, Stross thinks a lot like I do, or at least like I would if I were a lot smarter.

Consider the premise: Today’s world is a fragile reality. Right underneath the surface, evil creatures are just waiting to emerge, and the way to bridge the gap is through higher mathematics. Or, in practice, advanced computing. The only reasons why we haven’t yet been crisped and ketchuped by tentacled creatures is that there are shadow agencies working to keep the unmentionable, well, unmentioned.

We find our narrator in the middle of all this. Bob Howard is a computer wizard working in the bowels of the British “Laundry”, wizard being no mere metaphor in this context. As the novel begins, he’s drafted in a complex operation involving three secret services and a lovely red-haired philosopher who has unknowingly discovered a very dangerous piece of knowledge. Before soon, Howard finds himself neck-deep in very dark matters best left to professionals. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Nazis are involved. The short title novel (“The Atrocity Archive” is 70,000 words long) is followed by “The Concrete Jungle”, another spooky novelette combining Total Surveillance paranoia with a -literal- Medusa effect in the middle of an ultra-dirty bureaucratic war. (A passing reference to “something” set for 2007 is one of the most frightening things in the book.) An afterword describing links between thrillers and horror caps the rest of the book. Whew!

But plot summaries usually fail to do justice to Stross’ fiction, and The Atrocity Archives is a perfect example of this. Scarcely a paragraph goes by that doesn’t include throwaway references to layers of imagined back-story integrating mounds of arcane knowledge. Sentences have to be unpacked for maximum meaning. Stross doesn’t write as much as he encodes entire novels in lossy compression schemes leaving just enough hints to make us wonder at the rest. He effortlessly discards more stuff in a chapter than most lousy writers manage to pack in trilogies. Even though the book clocks in at less than 300 pages, there is plenty for your money in here: You will end up reading the book as slowly as possible to get every reference. And, if you really get into it, you won’t want to stop before you’re through.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Unless you can get references to “maze of twisty little passages”, “Old Ones”, “the Wannsee Conference”, “NSA Echelon”, “the Church-Turing hypothesis”, “are belong to us” and so forth, it’s a safe bet that you won’t get maximum enjoyment out of the novel. If, on the other hand, cryptic expressions such as “BOFH becomes Bond” are enough to make your eyebrows shoot up, Golden Gryphon is the small-press publisher you should patronize.

The Atrocity Archives isn’t just good: it’s “oh goodness my mind is blown”, “this is turning me in a drooling fanboy”, “I’ve been waiting to read this book half my life” good. It’s the kind of book fit to be lent, or gift-bought in massive quantities. Scary reactions: As a reviewer, isn’t it my job to be professionally jaded by now?

Aw, stuff it: Book Of The Year. If it’s not, I can’t wait for the better book.

Ace, 2003, 313 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01072-5

These reviews are often written to share my joy at coming across fine examples of genre fiction. Dull books I ignore and bad books I warn about, but it’s the good ones that keep me going month after month. While I won’t try to pretend that Singularity Sky is a classic for the ages, it’s a damn good example of what modern SF should be, and a fine way to spend some quality reading time.

It starts with phones falling from the sky in what looks like a pre-industrial world. No, it’s not a Nokia stunt: These freebies from heaven are the first signal of an alien invasion. Answer the phone and you’ll be asked to entertain the mind at the other end of the line. In return, your wishes can be granted, with an emphasis on materialistic possessions. Within days, the tranquil bucolic existence of that particular planet is shattered through centuries worth of future shock all hitting at once. Imagine going from horses to nanotechnology in a single day for a taste of the trauma.

There are much bigger forces at play here, though. The assaulted planet is part of an Russian-styled empire that isn’t too thrilled by the sudden technological spike. So, completely misunderstanding the nature of the invasion, they answer with an attack force and a plan to futz around causality through judicious time-travel.

But wait! It gets better, because in Stross’ imagined post-singularity universe, the Eschaton has become a force for causal enforcement. Twiddle with time too much and you’ll wake up to your sun going supernova. So Earth itself has put special agents in place to enforce compliance before the Eschaton does… and that’s where protagonists Rachel Mansour and Martin Springfield come in, two agents with hidden agendas. Expect the usual boy-meets-girl stuff (well done) and graft on to this plot the traditional complications.

Obviously, plotting isn’t the main attraction here, not when we’ve got a vigorously imagined future to kick around. One of Singularity Sky‘s most satisfying aspect is how it reconciles once more the space opera genre with the increasingly probable eventuality of a singularity. By focusing on the left-behinds, by showing different levels of technology interacting with one another, Stross creates tension from above (the threat from the Eschaton) and manages to fit all the good old space battles of golden-age SF with what we now suspect from the universe. It’s canny world-building, and one of the most obvious proofs that Stross is a hard-core SF writer with an easy familiarity with the genre. He certainly can talk the talk, what with the easy sprinkling of technological jargon, future technologies and nifty ideas. (As an added attraction, I’m not sure that the novel is even intelligible to anyone who doesn’t know already a lot about science-fiction) He’s from the Internet generation and it shows, through the novel’s ideological message and the various in-jokes hidden here and there throughout the novel. Make no mistake: this is a deeply amusing book, filled with well-placed silliness (MP-3 missiles?) and compulsively readable despite an impressive density of ideas.

Still, some of the plot points weaken the overall impact of the novel. Viewed from afar, the novel is a shaggy dog story that, despite the amusing plot developments, ends pretty much exactly as could be deduced from the first fifty pages. It’s also filled with tangents of dubious interest, the worst of which has to be the “Felix” plot thread and the gratuitous space combat scenes. Parricidal elements of the ending stretch plausibility, even in the context of a light-hearted science-fiction story.

Not that I’m seriously complaining: Anyone who has read more than a few of these reviews already knows that for me, fun trumps structure six days of the week. And so Singularity Sky easily finds a spot on my short list of the year’s best novels. It’s vivid, imaginative, fresh and dynamic. It deftly mixes science and politics. It’s one of the best examples of twenty-first century science-fiction. It reaffirms my growing admiration for Stross’ work and tells me that not all is lost for the genre.

In fact, I’m so jazzed-up about Singularity Sky that I’m looking forward to the sequel (Iron Sunrise, due Any Time Now) with some trepidation. And that, for someone who doesn’t usually like the whole idea of sequels, is really saying something.