The Atrocity Archives

What Hacker News says

1. sangnoirNov 2023
   > I'm gonna shit on scientific and technological progress, because I can't have a career as a sci-fi writer if the -fi parts become real too fast

   This is not a fair characterization: cstross wrote several novels about singularities or set in post-singularity universes decades ago - before the current LLM hype. I suspect he has thought more about a/the singularity than those he is criticizing in TFA. He even wrote blog posts about why he doesn't write singularity-related stories anymore (six[1] years before Transformers, and the "Attention is All You Need" paper). Those timelines do not match your interpretation of him being salty about tech moving too fast.

   You dismissal sounds a little shallow: there's more to sci-fi than AI, and he doesn't just write sci-fi - his Merchant Princess and Laundry Files books are fantastic.

   1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...

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2. zabzonkMay 2023
   for a novel, how about Charles Stross' "The Atrocity Archives" - somewhere much colder and more frightening.
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3. mellavoraNov 2022
   I agree with your point that strong "mutual aide"/kin institutions often (but not necessarily) lead to low economic growth.

   And clearly surplus extraction + capital accumulation (leading to productive investment) strongly enhance economic growth.

   However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on.

   Just finished reading the Laundry Files (Atrocity Archives/Charles Stross) thanks to a recommendation on HN. One of the terrible beasts mentioned in the book is a creature that eats all the information in its universe, rushing the universe to entropy death.

   The analogy to bottomless consumerism is too obvious in my mind for me not to draw it.

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4. NeedMoreTeaMar 2019
   Same, as one badly constructed book (or season of a TV series) can ruin the whole lot if they're all sequential.

   It's become so much of a trope that it's become a pet hate. I actively avoid buying any that is "first of..." now, no matter how famous you are. The few times I break this rule, I generally regret it. Most trilogies are just a book, heavily padded. So I simply won't buy unless all are written, and well reviewed. Then, do I buy all or none.

   There are just a tiny few that deserve it. Archer's Clifton Chronicles, Follett's Century Trilogy, Stross' own Merchant Princes (1-6 anyway, skip the new ones) were all marvellous and fully deserved a series. Yet most are unworthy. Song of Ice and Fire - great idea, so much padding and so little direction. Good book, awful series. I forget where I gave up. Cornwell's The Saxon Stories was mostly great, but I preferred the battle by battle progression of Sharpe without having to achieve perfect continuity or care much what order I read them.

   Much prefer the random peeks into a universe approach of Sharpe, Discworld, or Follett with the Kingsbridge series where there's hundreds of years between the books. Or Adam's HHGTTG leaping all over the galaxy with continuity that can leave Marvin in a car park for a millennium. Even Charles Stross reads far better if simply ignoring Laundry Files as series. Lots of unconnected episodes and forget the underlying destination or continuity. It's the only way I can carry on when there's been two books that really didn't work. Well, more one book and one ending that failed hard.

   Atrocity Archives and the other Bob books were some of the most entertaining, delightfully observed comedy fiction I've read. Nightmare Stacks didn't really join up, but was a rollicking good tale, and some interesting new characters.

   Labyrinth Index on the other hand, was disjointed and unfinishable (The only book from Charles, one of my favourite authors, I can't finish). It should have been a book of Alex, Bob or Cassie. Anyone but Mhari, who might have worked here if given a red shirt to die spectacularly in chapter 2. She's not even anything like the Mhari as created in previous books.

   The only way I can react to that is simply ignore as series, tuning out continuity, or stop buying.

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5. mindcrimeMay 2017
   Gosh, there's so many. But these come to mind:

   1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

   2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

   3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

   4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

   5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

   6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

   7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

   8. Code - Charles Petzold

   9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

   10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become Book - Peter Morville

   11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

   12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

   13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

   14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

   15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

   16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

   17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

   18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

   19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

   20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

   21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

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6. qwertyuiop924Aug 2016
   I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately.

   On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.

   "You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.

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