UBC #12: The Atrocity Archives

[truepenny]

UBC #12
Stross, Charles. The Atrocity Archives. Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press, 2004.

I enjoyed The Atrocity Archive and its companion piece, "The Concrete Jungle," but what really made me sit up and take notice was the afterword, "Inside the Fear Factory," which talks about spies and hackers and horror and the Cold War and how they all go together. The afterword couldn't exist without the stories, but possibly because of their present-tense first-person narrator--who doesn't know nearly as much about his cultural history as Stross does--the stories can't really come to grips with their own intellectual background.

The best paragraph in the book is one that straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. From the afterword:

There's an iron tripod buried in the basement of the Laundry, carved with words in a alien language that humans can only interpret with the aid of a semisentient computer program that emulates Chomsky's deep grammar. Unfortunately the program is prone to fits of sulking, and because it obeys a nondeterminate algorithm it frequently enters a fatal loop when it runs. There is no canonical translation of the inscription. Government linguists tried to decypher the runes the hard way; all those who tried wound up dead or incarcerated in the Funny Farm. After a systems analyst suggested that the carving might really be the function binding for our reality, and that pronouncing it with understanding would cause a fatal exception, Mahogany Row decided to discourage future research along these lines.
(Stross 264)

Situated as it is in a discussion of our cultural and literary history, this paragraph is doing a tremendous amount of work, and it does it effortlessly. It illuminates both sides at once, both the fiction and the cultural work the fiction does.

Comments

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of the language virus McGuffin at the heart of Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, actually.

[brainstormfront.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll be seeking out THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES on your recommend alone and based on that excerpt. Thanks very much from a reader whose hopes are so often dashed by underwhelming fiction reads.