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June 22, 2009

What to read

I just finished reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. They are the stories (4 among the two books) of a mid twenties man working for the UK government as an anti-occult agent. The world is one in which the H P Lovecraft / Cthulhu stuff works and that some sorts of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science are fully function sanity eating magic, but the vast majority of us don't believe the world is any different from our own. Though he says in an appendix that he'd never heard of Delta Green, the series reads like a series of Delta Green stories set in a better world where these horrors aren't quite as threatening, the government isn't quite as bad or incompetent, and magic and horrors don't as rapidly consume your sanity.

The first book (The Atrocity Archives) was great. It was dark, dangerous, interesting, and exciting without being anything like a bond movie. The world had some eldritch horrors in it, but not so many dark gods, black magic, and zombies that you wondered how the rest of the world didn't know about it. A horrible (in the other sense) and wonderful story.

The second story (The Jennifer Morgue) was more like a sloppy parody of the first book. The first book wasn't the most well written science fiction book, but a good read. The second is a sloppier mess, with shifting vantage points, dream sequences, way more magical elements (making you wonder how anyone could keep that stuff under wraps), and tons of chatty footnotes (a la Terry Pratchett but they don't work nearly as well here), all indicating the author couldn't tell this second book int he tight, organized the way he told the first one. The second book has way more Bond-like stuff in it. Which is great in James Bond movies but sloppy here, even with the geas-driven plot driving some of it, this reader just didn't care for it.

I don't believe that Stross has written sequels to any of his other books, so I wonder if he rushed it to market for commercial reasons. I'd strongly recommend reading The Atrocity Archives, but you can take or leave The Jennifer Morgue.

Posted by OneEyedMan at June 22, 2009 8:19 AM

Comments

The Atrocity Archives sounds really good. For what it's worth Stross has at least one other sequal: Iron Sunrise, which is a continuation of "singularity sky", and in my opinion a better book as well.

Posted by: giblfiz [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 23, 2009 9:43 PM

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