"Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of
those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon
immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is
an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those

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 Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

who coordinate their activity. It's bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it's full of people at
desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The
coordinators, because they don't understand what's going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers
of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to
the IT department.

It is Charlie's experience in working in and writing about the Information Technology industry that gives
him the necessary hands-on insight into the workings of the Laundry. For programming is a job where
Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time. The analyst or programmer has to examine documents with an
eye at once skeptical and alert, snatching and collating tiny fragments of truth along the way. His or her
sources of information all have their own agendas, overtly or covertly pursued. He or she has handlers
and superiors, many of whom don't know what really goes on at the sharp end. And the IT worker has to
know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are
constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a lot like being a spy, or
necromancer. You don't get out much, and when you do it's usually at night.

Charlie gets out and about a lot, often in daylight. He has no demons. Like most people who write about
eldritch horrors, he has a cheerful disposition. Whatever years he has spent in the cellars haven't dimmed
his enthusiasm, his empathy, or his ability to talk and write with a speed, range of reference, and facility
that makes you want to buy the bastard a pint just to keep him quiet and slow him down in the morning,
before he gets too far ahead. I know: I've tried. It doesn't work.

I first encountered Charles Stross when I worked in IT myself. It was 1996 or thereabouts, when you
more or less had to work in IT to have heard about the Internet. (Yes, there was a time not long ago
when news about the existence of the Internet spread by word of mouth.) It dawned on me that the guy
who was writing sensible-but-radical posts to various newsgroups I hung out in was the same Charles
Stross who'd written two or three short stories I'd enjoyed in the British SF magazine Interzone: "Yellow
Snow," "Ship of Fools," and "Dechlorinating the Moderator" (all now available in his collection TOAST,
Cosmos Books, 2002).

"Dechlorinating the Moderator" is a science fiction story about a convention that has all the trappings of
a science fiction convention, but is (because this is the future) a science fact convention, of desktop and
basement high-energy fundamental physics geeks and geekettes. Apart from its intrinsic fun, the story
conveys the peculiar melancholy of looking back on a con and realising that no matter how much of a
good time you had, there was even more that you missed. (All right: as subtle shadings of emotion go
this one is a bit low on universality, but it was becoming familiar to me, having just started going to
cons.) "Ship of Fools" was about the Y2K problem (which as we all know turned out not to be a
problem, but BEGIN_RANT that was entirely thanks to programmers who did their jobs properly in the
first place back when only geeks and astronomers believed the twenty-first century would actually arrive
END_RANT) and it was also full of the funniest and most authentic-sounding insider yarns about IT I'd
ever read. This Stross guy sounded like someone I wanted to meet, maybe at a con. It turned out he lived
in Edinburgh. We were practically neighbours. I think I emailed him, and before too long he