The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

This new 2007 edition of Charles Stross’ 2004 novel The Atrocity Archives brings its artwork into line with other books by the same author, such as Glasshouse, which I reviewed a while ago. The Atrocity Archive (singular) was originally serialised in Spectrum SF. For the novelisation, the award-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle” (set in the same milieu) has been added as a postscript – hence the plural Archives of the title. What with the introduction by Ken MacLeod and the author’s own Afterword, this brings the page count up to a respectable 336 pages.

In the Afterword, Stross explains a few of his influences (Len Deighton, HP Lovecraft) and acknowledges that Tim Powers ploughs similar ground with Declare, which he hadn’t read when he was writing this.

Regular readers will be aware that I rate Declare very highly indeed, combining as it does the two genres of urban fantasy and espionage. But while Declare is the work of a mature professional writer at the very top of his game, The Atrocity Archive is a first novel, written when Stross was still working in IT. It carries with it a youthful exuberance and a lot of IT-crowd in-jokes, but it probably runs out of ideas too quickly, and its hero/narrator Bob Howard finds it all just a little bit too easy to work things out. He manages to stay on top of the game, and provide explanations to those around him, whereas Powers’ Andrew Hale spends much of his time struggling to make sense of the extraordinary events he’s caught up in.

Still, I enjoyed this as much as you might expect, even if the central idea of a secret government department of the civil service, which one accesses through a deserted tube station, rankles a bit on a personal level. (In 1983, I wrote a short novel called The Obald, which had as its central idea that there exists a secret government department which is accessed through those mysterious and unlabelled doorways one sees in old tube stations. It was probably not all that bad, though too short, and might even have been publishable if I’d made more of an effort. An idea ahead of its time, perhaps. At the time, the fashion in SF was heading towards cyberpunk, which dominated the field until around 1990.)

Bob Howard appears to be an IT drone working for The Laundry (the secret government department), but at the beginning of The Atrocity Archive is activated as an agent, and finds himself involved in an operation concerning parallel worlds, nazis, and magic. The difference between this and the world-within-the-world imagined by Powers is that, for Stross, so-called magic has its origins in quantum computing. Or something. Howard’s love interest, Mo, unlike Elena in Declare, doesn’t have to do much more than get kidnapped and tied up on a couple of occasions so that she can be rescued.

This is entertaining and imaginative, and certainly worth reading. As Stross says in his Afterword, if you enjoy this, you’ll enjoy Declare, and vice versa. There’s another in the series, The Jennifer Morgue, which is on my list of things-to-read.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s taken me a while to get round to the third in a sequence that began with Forty Signs of Rain, continued with Fifty Degrees Below and now concludes with Sixty Days and Counting.

This trilogy is a real achievement in sustained writing about difficult ideas. We’re by now familiar with main protagonist Frank Vanderwal and his friends the Quiblers and the exiled buddhists from Khembalung. If the middle book of the three was concerned with a low point (a big freeze caused by the stopping of the Gulf Stream), in this one there are reasons to be optimistic, even if the problems faced by the world are immense in scale.

Phil Chase, the Vietnam veteran with a sound approach to the environment and a personal attachment to Franklin D Roosevelt, has been elected as President and sets out to make a difference in the first 60 days of his tenure. He and his advisors are “decapitating” the World Bank, giving a “root canal” to the US intelligence services, and negotiating hard with the Chinese, who are behaving “like terrorists” in threatening to burn their carbon and fuck up the world unless certain concessions are made.

Creative (and extreme) methods of reducing greenhouse emissions and rebalancing the climate include pumping vast quantities of water out of the sea into desert basins and onto the Antarctic ice sheet; or converting all US power production to solar generators; or using the nuclear reactors in US warships as temporary replacements for dirty coal power stations.

With Phil Chase in the White House, it’s like The West Wing on steroids: the ideal President who dares to say the things that the American people supposedly don’t want to hear, who overwhelms the two Houses with positive environmental legislation, and who blogs his radical thoughts, unspun, for the whole world to read.

Meanwhile, Vanderwal negotiates his way around personal problems and profoundly difficult solutions to mega problems (no solution is ever seen as easy, but with military levels of expenditure, there are solutions available). Robinson uses Vanderwal and Charlie Quibbler to muse upon these problems, and upon Capitalism, Buddhism, Game Theory, intelligence services, gene therapy, and low impact living. Vanderwal has been without a traditional place to live for some time. He has variously lived in a tree house, a garden shed, and his van. His is the truly radical outlook: live without all the things you don’t need. Desire nothing except desirelessness.

In this final book, the Buddhists and the game theory (is altruism or selfishness best to “win” the game?) come together and make a brilliant kind of sense. The answer, of course, is that like Captain Kirk in the first Star Trek movie, you rewrite the rules of the game in which “always defect” was the best option. You do this because the accounting system used in the old game was using the wrong set of numbers. As Charlie Quibbler points out to the World Bank representatives, oil companies only make a “profit” if they don’t have to pay for the environmental damage. You rewrite the rules and altruism becomes the ideal way to live and the only sure way of winning the game, in which nobody wins unless everybody wins. In the end, this reads more like an anti-capitalist sermon at times, but it is powerful stuff.

I like it. I’m still sceptical about that ability of humans to realistically affect climate one way or the other, but I’m really glad I read these books, even if my head is still spinning from all the facts and figures. Make no mistake: these are the major texts on the possible impact (and solution to) climate change. Not only recommended but required reading.

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone.

Axis is the sequel to Robert Charles Wilson’s superb 2005 novel, Spin, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I’m torn about the necessity for a sequel. On the one hand, sequelitis afflicts the SF market, overloading bookshop and library shelves with the over-rated and over-familiar, or me-too attempts to strike gold with a copycat franchise. On the other hand, Spin was so extremely good that you wanted more of the same, and as soon as it could be provided.

If the title Spin was a slight misnomer (see my earlier review), then I’m afraid this title, Axis, strays even further from the core idea of the book, which is that the universe has been colonised (billions of years before we came along) by an infinitely connected, infinitely self-replicating nanomachine, one that can commit extraordinary god-like acts of engineering, creating an effect that can only be described as the nanotechnological sublime.

This sequel begins approximately 30 years after the events in the previous novel. If Spin ended on a note of optimism, as some humans were able to escape the oppressive conditions of the late late capitalist Earth through an arch constructed by the Hypotheticals (so-called because their existence is surmised by the humans who experience their effects), then Axis begins by dashing that optimism. It becomes clear that the oppressive and fearful regulatory authorities have passed through the Arch themselves, to the New World, the planet linked to Earth through the Arch. Worse than that, human nature being what it is, people have started exploiting the New World like Robber Barons, taking advantage of its frontier nature and trashing the new environment in exactly the same way as they trashed the old.

The New World, in fact, seems to be a bit of a disappointment (a bit like Australia, perhaps). People cling to coastal communities and the interior seems to be dry and inhospitable. Life is hard, a living is hard to make. This is not the new Eden we hoped for at the end of Spin. Still, every summer the skies light up with a spectacular meteor shower.

The only surviving character from Spin enters the narrative some way in, but the novel begins with Lise, a young woman in search of her 12-years-gone father, and Turk, a pilot/drifter she has met along the way. They soon encounter the (illegal) Fourth community (humans who have achieved a longer lifespan – or fourth age – using technology derived from the Hypotheticals), and become embroiled in their attempts to communicate with what they surmise is the intelligence behind the Hypotheticals and their effects. In other words, RCW continues here with his theme of dangerous religious extremists. In this case, the idea of god has been replaced by the Hypotheticals, but the fanatical attempts to know god continue, with the usual human consequences.

Meanwhile, the forces of conservatism are in pursuit of the Fourths, trying to control any alterations of the human genome, and using the kind of oppressive tactics that made sense in Spin, but make less sense here, because the ideas are just not developed enough. These authorities, who don’t allow morality to stall them, are too easy to evade.

Inevitably (and gratifyingly), encounters with the nanotechnological sublime leave the human characters helpless, and there’s a sense that (unlike with the previous novel) the human characters are just too small and insignificant to carry the weight of the ideas contained herein.

Like the New World itself, Axis is a bit of a disappointment. At around 300 pages, it’s short: and the design of the book itself is the only thing that ensures we even get to 300. There’s a lot of white space between chapters. Does this feel like the “holding pattern” novel in the middle of a trilogy? I don’t really know. We certainly learn a good deal more about the Hypotheticals than we knew before, but I don’t think we learn enough about the human characters in the story. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to care about them in the same way that we cared about Tyler Dupree and the twins in Spin. In the end, I wonder why Lise is there at all, unless she’s a central character in a hypothetical third novel.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’ve grown to expect much more from RCW. You’ll certainly not be able to resist reading this if you have read Spin, but there really isn’t a lot of point in recommending this to anyone who has not. Cautiously recommended then, with a reiteration of the strongest possible recommendation for Spin itself, which remains one of the best novels – in any genre – that I have ever read.

Phase Space by Stephen Baxter

This collection by British Science Fiction writer Stephen Baxter contains stories originally published between 1997 and 2002. They’re loosely linked around a couple of recurring ideas and arranged together in the book within a thematic structure with such catch-all section headings as Dreams, Worlds, Paradox, and so on.

The loose relationship, underlined by recurring names/characters and ideas, doesn’t really hang together as strongly as a novel, but leaves you instead with the impression of a writer worrying at ideas, approaching them from different angles, picking away.

Probably the best entries here are the ones that stand best alone, because in the end the idea of “thematically linked” is hardly strong enough for the collection to have any real punch. Ultimately, any collection of SF (by different writers) published around the same time is going to contain repeated ideas. So the ones I enjoyed here include one of the earliest, “The Fubar Suit” (recurring theme/idea here is nanotech); “Lost Continent” (alternate worlds, reality is a simulation); and “The Twelfth Album” (alternate world, in which The Beatles released one last record), which was the reason I bought this book in the first place.

At his best, Baxter can be thought-provoking and eerie, and can write stories you wish could go on longer; the worst here are the ones that were (to me) wilfully muddled and obscure, with only the loosest relationship to the majority of the others here.

Cautiously recommended: if you like stories about alternate universes, nanotechnology, and ponderings on the Fermi Paradox. It really does make you wonder.