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. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. Imagine a world 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. (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. Read it and see.Ĭharlie has written wisely and well in the Afterword about the uncanny parallels between the Cold War thriller and the horror story. To summarise would spoil, and might make the writing appear to make light of the worst of human accomplishments. Not, in this case, because the words are gory, but because the history is all too real. 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. The horror of this prospect is, in the story, linked to the horrors of real history. Whatever then walked the Earth would not be life, let alone human. If the secret got out and (consequently) other things got in, life would become impossible. 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. 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. Its basic premise is that mathematics can be magic. Its form is that of a horror thriller with lots of laughs, some of them uneasy. “THE ATROCITY ARCHIVE” IS A SCIENCE FICTION novel. Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson, and Len Deighton. Three authors in particular made it possible for me to imagine this book and I salute you, H. Finally, I stand on the shoulders of giants. 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. 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.
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