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

materialised out of cyberspace and we had a beer and began an intermittent conversation that hasn't

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 Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives


stopped.

He had this great idea for a novel: "It's a techno-thriller! The premise is that Turing cracked the NP-
Completeness theorem back in the forties! The whole Cold War was really about preventing the
Singularity! The ICBMs were there in case godlike AIs ran amok!" (He doesn't really talk like this. But
that's how I remember it.) He had it all in his head. Lots of people do, but he (and here's a tip for aspiring
authors out there) actually wrote it. That one, Burn Time, the first of his novels I read, remains
unpublished--great concept, shaky execution--but the raw talent was there and so was the energy and
application and the astonishing range of reference. Since then he has written a lot more novels and short
stories. The short stories kept getting better and kept getting published. He had another great idea: "A
family saga about living through the Singularity! From the point of view of the cat!" That mutated into
the astonishing series that began with "Lobsters," published in Asimov's SF, June 2001. That story was
short-listed for three major SF awards: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Sturgeon. Another, "Router," was
short-listed for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award. The fourth, "Halo," has been
short-listed for the Hugo.

Looking back over some of these short stories, what strikes me is the emergence of what might be called
the Stross sentence. Every writer who contributes to, or defines, a stage in the development of SF has
sentences that only they could write, or at least only they could write first. Heinlein's dilating door
opened up a new way to bypass explication by showing what is taken for granted; Zelazny's dune
buggies beneath the racing moons of Mars introduced an abrupt gear-change in the degrees of freedom
allowed in handling the classic material; Gibson's television sky and Ono-Sendai decks displayed the
mapping of virtual onto real spaces that has become the default metaphor of much of our daily lives. The
signature Stross sentence (and you'll come to recognise them as you read) represents just such an upward
jump in compression and comprehension, and one that we need to make sense not only of the stories, but
of the world we inhabit: a world sentenced to Singularity.

The novels kept getting better too, but not getting published, until quite recently and quite suddenly
three or four got accepted more or less at once. The only effect this has had on Charlie is that he has
written another two or three while these were in press. He just keeps getting faster and better, like
computers. But the first of his novels to be published is this one, and it's very good.

We'll be hearing, and reading, a lot more from him.

Read this now.

Ken MacLeod
West Lothian, UK
May 2003




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