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Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives




THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES




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 Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives




CHARLIE STROSS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors write, but not in a vacuum. Firstly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the usual suspects--members of
my local writers workshop all--who suffered through first-draft reading hell and pointed out numerous
headaches that needed fixing. Paul Fraser of Spectrum SF applied far more editorial muscle than I had
any right to expect, in preparation for the original magazine serialization; likewise Marty Halpern of
Golden Gryphon Press, who made this longer edition possible. Finally, I stand on the shoulders of
giants. Three authors in particular made it possible for me to imagine this book and I salute you, H. P.
Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson, and Len Deighton.




Introduction
CHARLIE'S DEMONS

"THE ATROCITY ARCHIVE" IS A SCIENCE FICTION novel. Its form is that of a horror thriller with
lots of laughs, some of them uneasy. Its basic premise is that mathematics can be magic. Its lesser
premise is that if the world contains things that (as Pratchett puts it somewhere) even the dark is afraid
of, then you can bet that there'll be a secret government agency covering them up for our own good. That
last phrase isn't ironic; if people suspected for a moment that the only thing Lovecraft got wrong was to
underestimate the power and malignity of cosmic evil, life would become unbearable. If the secret got
out and (consequently) other things got in, life would become impossible. Whatever then walked the
Earth would not be life, let alone human. The horror of this prospect is, in the story, linked to the horrors
of real history. As in any good horror story, there are moments when you cannot believe that anyone
would dare put on paper the words you are reading. Not, in this case, because the words are gory, but
because the history is all too real. To summarise would spoil, and might make the writing appear to
make light of the worst of human accomplishments. It does not. Read it and see.

Charlie has written wisely and well in the Afterword about the uncanny parallels between the Cold War
thriller and the horror story. (Think, for a moment, what the following phrase would call to mind if you'd
never heard it before: "Secret intelligence.") There is, however, a third side to the story. Imagine a world