Having left the Oz novels behind us...

[seawasp]

... today's On My Shelves features Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives, a modern-day Lovecraftian Espionage novel!

Comments

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Shiny. Has Charlie read the review yet?

[seawasp]

That I don't know. He still shows up on LJ but I don't know if he reads his F-list that much.

[seawasp]

Update: Yes, he knew, he retweeted my tweet about it, and that's become probably the most-noticed of my tweets ever.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Excellent, and congratulations to you.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I liked that book and The Jennifer Morgue, but I had serious reservations about the plot point about the origin of the Archives themselves.

[seawasp]

What reservations precisely?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

The entire Holocaust being a Nazi magical working. A relatively recent real life horror being twisted into something fantastic just rubbed me the wrong way.

[seawasp]

It's not an uncommon thing in fiction, though. Barbara Hambly used the same general conceit in the Star-Cross dualogy, and I've seen it often in others, going at least back to Illuminatus!, so it's not like Charlie was doing something terribly unusual there.

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

Not unusual -- and not the least bit interesting. Can't authors pick on one of our other seventy million recent atrocities?

[seawasp]

They could, and a few have, but if what you want is 1) something truly horrifically huge, 2) something that pretty much EVERYONE knows, 3) Something in the modern era, and 4) your audience, or at least a significant chunk of it, is American, then your choices boil down to 9/11 or the Holocaust. And 9/11 isn't old enough yet for long-term plot significance, nor was it associated with the group that has pretty much come to be the go-to symbol of evil for DECADES.

(And, of course, 9/11 is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE smaller than the Holocaust, even though in American view it looms large)

[dsrtao]

You'll want to read _The Rhesus Chart_ and _The Armageddon Score_ immediately afterwards. The end of TRC overlaps the beginning of TAS, in a way which is likely to make you cranky unless you can see what happens next.

This is the only time in the series where that happens, by the way.

[kjn]

So far. I believe the next book (being The Annihilation Score) will overlap to a significant extent with TRC.

[dsrtao]

Oh, sorry. The Armageddon Score was the original title of The Annhilation Score. Conflict with the Bruce Willis movie.

Double sorry: TAS comes out July 7th.

[seawasp]

Well, if I'd read the earlier ones I could already have read TAS, since I AM on Charlie's F-list and he provides a chance for people to read them in advance.

[theoldone.livejournal.com]

I've enjoyed all of The Laundry novels so far. I'm really excited about the next one!

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

Odd, I missed the BOFH reference.
I am not a fan of horror; however, this series is well written. I've recommended The Atrocity Archives to friends of mine who quite enjoy playing Call of Chthulu.