Tag archives for Charles Stross - Page 3
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Charlie Stross Rocks
I've just finished reading "The Jennifer Morgue", the second of Charles Stross's Laundry series (the first is the "The Atrocity Archive" and there is a third and a few more short stories as well). It is a fantastic read, I really didn't want to put it down, even though family life wouldn't let me read it all in one sitting. Avoiding spoilers the two books are both very readable and set in a sort of modern day techno-magic spy thriller piss take. The premise is that magic is just applied mathematics and there is a very low budget Government cover up, the British civil service meets Delta Green. Having been an official computer geek in the British civil service I can relate to some of this very well, which makes the humour very close to home, in a Dilbertesque sort…
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The Atrocity Archives
A friend put me onto this book, saying that he was sure I'd like it. So I sneaked a copy of Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives into one of my orders of Christmas presents. My only regret is that I didn't know about these stories before. Charles Stross has taken some lovecraftian horror, added geekery and then put it into a British civil service context for the conspiracy cover-up, although it is much more a case of hiding the cock ups as on a low The basic premise is that magic is just about doing mathematics, which makes using computers a serious occult capability. It sort of puts the sysadmin up there with sorcery, which given the jokes about getting SCSI to work needing black candles and a blood sacrifice makes some sort of sense. I certainly could identify a…