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Book Review: IT Manager Battles The Undead In The Atrocity Archive

You don't have many IT-manager action heroes in science fiction. Sure, you have a lot of hackers, breaking into networks and subverting authority. But not a lot of science-fiction heroes save the universe in between staff meetings, working the help desk, and rebooting the file server.

Not until Bob Howard, the hero of The Atrocity Archive, by Charles Stross.

Howard is an IT manager for the Laundry, a supersecret British government agency that defends the world from occult threats. In the world of The Atrocity Archive, computer programs are powerful tools to invoke magical spells. In The Atrocity Archive, Howard saves the world time and again with the help of a Palm Pilot loaded with magic spells; a severed, mummified hand that's been hexed into a superweapon; and a Leatherman Multitool. All the while, he has to fend off challenges from his managers, Bridget and Harriet, who think saving the world from star-eating terrors is no excuse for taking undocumented sick time and failing to make it to staff meetings.

The Atrocity Archive is great fun. Stross knows his computer science: He has a postgraduate degree in computer science and worked in graphics supercomputing and Unix around London before switching to Web consulting. He got caught up in the dot-com boom, writing software for a startup company in e-finance, before bailing out in 2000 and becoming a Linux columnist for the U.K. publication Computer Shopper.

I recommend Stross' novels and short fiction to any science-fiction fan, but I always feel a special connection to them because of our shared professional background -- not just in the tech industry, but in tech journalism. In his "Hidden Family" series of novels, a Boston-based tech journalist gets transported to a parallel universe; like her, I was once a Jewish tech journalist living in Boston (only one of those conditions has changed -- I'm still Jewish and still a tech journalist). Novels in that series are The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, The Clan Corporate, and the soon-to-be-published The Merchants' War.

He describes his novel Accelerando as a saga following three generations of a dysfunctional family through the Singularity and beyond, as told by the family's pet robot cat.

I recommend Stross' work highly; I've read almost all of it and enjoyed all I've read. My favorites are the Hidden Family series and Accelerando.

Bob Howard will ride again; there's a sequel coming out later this year, The Jennifer Morgue.

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