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.