Afterword:
INSIDE THE FEAR FACTORY
FICTION SERVES A VARIETY OF PURPOSES. AT ITS heart lies the simple art of storytelling—of transferring ideas and sequences of events and pictures and people from the storyteller's head to that of the audience solely by means of words. But storytelling is a tool, and the uses to which a tool can be put often differs from—and is more interesting than—the uses for which the tool was designed.
Fiction is spun from plausible lies, contrived to represent an abreality sufficiently convincing that we do not question what we hear—and there are different forms within fiction. Consuming fiction is fun, an activity we engage in for recreation. So why, then, do we have an appetite for forms of fiction that make us profoundly uneasy, or that frighten us?
The chances are that if you've got to this afterword, you've done so the long way round—by reading "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle." This book is a work of fiction, a recreational product. Nobody forced you to read it by holding a gun to your head, so presumably you enjoyed the experience. Now, at risk of demystifying it, I'd like to pick over the corpse, dissect its three major organs, and try to explain just how it all fits together.
Cold Warriors
I'd like to begin by painting an anonymized portrait of one of the greatest horror writers of the twentieth century—a man whose writing was a major influence on me when I wrote these stories.
D. was born in London in 1929, of working class parents. A bright young man, he was educated at St. Marylebone Grammar and William Ellis, Kentish Town, then worked as a railway clerk before undergoing National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he studied art, achieving a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Working as a waiter in the evenings, he developed an interest in cooking. During the 1950s he travelled, working as an illustrator in New York City and as an art director for a London advertising agency, before settling down in Dordogne and starting to write. His first novel was an immediate success, going on to be filmed (in a version starring Michael Caine); subsequently he produced roughly a book a year for the rest of the twentieth century. D. is somewhat reclusive, and was notorious at one point for only communicating via Telex machine. He may also hold the record for being the first writer ever to produce a novel entirely using a word processor (around 1972).
D.'s work is coolly observed, with a meticulous eye for background detail and subtle nuance. His narrators are usually anonymous, their cynical inspection of organisation and situation infused with a distaste or disdain for their circumstances that some of the other characters find extremely annoying, if not ideologically suspect. The world they find themselves trapped in is a maze of secret histories and occult organisations, entities that overlap with the world we live in, hiding beneath the surface like a freezing cold pond beneath a layer of thin ice. And hovering in the background over it all is a vast grey pall, a nightmare horror of impending Götterdämmerung; for the great game of D.'s protagonists, breezily (or depressively) cynical though they might be, is always played for the ultimate stakes.
D. is, of course Len Deighton, perhaps more commonly regarded as one of the greatest masters of the spy thriller (who, with such works as The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain, is considered by some critics to be the equal or even the superior of John Le Carré). And the background to his novels, the world that infused them with tension and provided the stakes for the desperate gambles he described, was the Cold War.
The Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1991 with the Soviet coup that led to the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Today, just a decade or so after it ended with a whimper instead of a bang, it is increasingly hard to remember just what it was like to live with a face-off of such enormous proportions between two powers that represented the Manichean opposites of industrial civilization. But those of us who grew up during the Cold War have been as permanently scarred by it as any child who watched the events of 9/11 live on CNN; because the Cold War applied a thin varnish of horror atop any fictional exploration of diplomacy, spying, or warfare.
Going back to the origins of the Cold War is a difficult task; its roots grew from a variety of sources in the fertile, blood-drenched soil of the early twentieth century. What is not in question is the fact that, by 1968, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had assembled—and pointed at each other on a hair-trigger—arsenals unprecedented in the history of warfare. During the First World War, all combatants combined expended on the order of eleven million tons of explosives. This was equivalent to the payload of a single B-52 bomber or Titan-2 ICBM of the middle period Cold War, before smart weapons and precision guidance systems began to replace the headsman's axe of deterrence with a surgeon's scalpel.
Many of the children of the Cold War era grew up doubting that they'd ever reach adulthood. Annihilation beckoned, in an apocalyptic guise that was nevertheless anatomised far more precisely than the visions of any mediaeval mystic. We knew the serial numbers, megatonnage, accuracy, flight characteristics, and blast effects of our nemesis, lurking sleeplessly beneath the waves or brooding in launcher-erectors scattered across the tundra under a never-setting sun.
One of Len Deighton's skills was that he infused the personal dilemmas and conflicts of his protagonists—little men and women trapped in seedy, poorly paid bureaucratic posts—with the shadow of the apocalypse. Cold War spy fiction was in some respects the ultimate expression of horror fiction, for the nightmare was real. There's no need to hint darkly about forbidden knowledge and elder gods, sleeping in drowned cities, who might inflict unspeakable horrors, when you live in an age where the wrong coded message can leave you blinded with your skin half-burned away in the wreckage of a dead city barely an hour later. The nightmare was very real indeed, and arguably it has never ended; but we have become blasè about it, tap dancing on the edge of the abyss because the great motor of ideological rivalry that powered the Cold War has broken down and we're all business partners in globalisation today and forevermore.
Spy fiction, like horror fiction, relies on the mundanity of the protagonist to draw the reader into proximity with the unnatural and occult horrors of alienation. We are invited to identify with the likes of Harry Palmer (as Deighton named him in the film of The Ipcress File—significantly, he has no name in the original novel), a low-level civil servant whose occasional duties, in between filing paperwork, involve visiting nuclear test sites, shepherding weapons scientists, and hunting agents of the alien power. Slowly sucked into a ghastly plot by the slow revelation of occult, secret knowledge, Palmer is bewildered and confused and forced to confront his worst fears in a world that the novelist slowly discloses to be under a nightmarish threat from beyond the consensus reality imposed by our society.
We've also become blase¨ about the apocalyptic nightmares of an earlier age.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the great pioneers of the spy thriller. Born in 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, he was the child of well-off parents. However, when Lovecraft was three years old, his father was institutionalized, and Lovecraft suffered a variety of psychosomatic ailments that prevented him attending school. Despite these problems he was self-educated, taking an interest in science as well as literature. After a nervous breakdown in 1908, Lovecraft lived at home with his increasingly deranged mother. Writing rapidly, he became a self-published amateur journalist, and in the late nineteen-teens began to send out his stories for publication.
Lovecraft brought a cool, analytical eye to the pursuit of espionage. In his writings we frequently encounter the archetype of the scholar as spy, digging feverishly through libraries and colossal archives in search of the lost key to the cryptic puzzle. In At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft prefigures the late twentieth-century techno-thriller brilliantly, with his tale of highly trained agents of an imperial power infiltrating a forbidden icy continent—not a million miles from the brooding ice plateaux of Siberia—in search of secret knowledge, at peril of death at the hands of the vigilant defenders of the new order should they come to their attention. Echoes of Lovecraft's obsessions abound in the more developed thrillers of the Cold War, from Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra to the fervidly luscious garden of biological horrors in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (the book, not the film).
Are we confused yet? Just in case, I'll summarise. Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War—era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H. P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret information to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.
(Before I stretch this analogy to breaking point, I am compelled to admit that there is a difference between the function and purpose of horror and spy fiction. Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe. So, although the basic dynamics of both horror and spy fiction rely on the same sense of huge, impersonal forces outside the control of the protagonists, who might initially be ignorant of them, the outcome is often different.)
The Game of Spy and Dagon
The fictional spy is very unlike the spy in real life.
Every so often, Western intelligence agencies advertise in public for recruits. The profile of the professional agent is that of a government employee: quiet, diligent, punctilious about filling out forms and obeying procedures. Far from having a mysterious past, prospective employees of secret agencies have to provide a complete and exhaustive list of everywhere they've ever lived, and their background will be picked over in detail before the appointment is approved. Far from being men of action, the majority of intelligence community staff are office workers, a narrow majority of them female, and they almost certainly never handle weapons in the line of duty.
The picture changes when you contemplate non-Western organisations such as the Iraqi Mukhabarat, agencies of states that contemplate internal subversion with the cold eye of totalitarian zeal. It changes in time of open warfare, and it changes again when you examine Western agencies concerned with counterterrorism and organised crime duties, such as the FBI. But the key insight to bear in mind is that in reality, the James Bond of the movie series (and, to a lesser extent, Ian Fleming's original literary wishfulfillment vehicle) is an almost perfect photographic negative of the real intelligence agent. He is everything that a real spy cannot afford to be—flashy, violent, high-rolling, glamorous, the centre of attention.
So why are spies such fascinating targets of fiction?
Answer: because they know (or want to know) what's really going on.
We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways—the most benign projects have unforeseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.
It is therefore both an attractive proposition (and a frightening one) to believe that someone, somewhere, knows the score. It's attractive when we think they're on our side, defenders of our values and our lives, fighting in the great and secret wars to ensure that our cosy creature comforts survive undisturbed. And it's terrifying when we fear that maybe, just maybe, someone out there who doesn't like us, or even doesn't think like us, has got their hands on the control yoke of an airliner and is aiming dead for the twin towers of our Weltanschauung.
That's not just a tasteless metaphor, by the way. One comment that surfaced a lot in the second half of September 2001 was, "I thought at first it was like something out of a Tom Clancy novel." Tom Clancy is one of the leading exponents of the mega-scale techno-thriller, the bigger-is-better offshoot of the spy novel and its obsession with gadgets and tools of the trade. For an instant, the fabric of the real world seemed to have been ripped aside and replaced with a terrible fiction—and indeed, the 9/11 hijackers thought that they were sending a message to the hated West. It was a message that shocked and horrified (and maimed and murdered); and part of the reason it was so painful was that it struck at our assumption that we knew the score, that we knew what was going on and that our defenders were awake and on the ball.
Sometimes the paranoia can strike too close to home: writing in the near future is a perilous proposition. I began writing "The Atrocity Archive" in 1999. For Bob's trip to California and his run-in with some frighteningly out-of-their-depth terrorists, I went digging and came back with an appropriately obscure but fanatical and unpleasant gang who might, conceivably, be planning an atrocity on American soil. But by the time the novel first came into print in the pages of the Scottish magazine Spectrum SF, it was late 2001—and editor Paul Fraser quite sensibly suggested I replace Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida with something slightly more obscure on the grounds that, with USAF bombers already pounding the hills of Afghanistan, bin Laden didn't appear to have much of a future. (In retrospect, I got off lightly. Who can forget the wave of late-eighties cold war thrillers set in the USSR in the mid-nineties?)
As for the war in Iraq, I make no apologies. The novel was written in 1999—2000, and should be taken as set in 2001, before the events of 9/11.
On the other side of the narrative fence from our friend the spy stands our enemy, the destructive Other. The Other comes in a variety of guises, but always means us ill in one form or another. It might be that the Other wants to conquer and subjugate us, enforce our obedience to a religion, ideology, or monarch. Or the Other might simply want to eat our brains, or crack our bones and suck our marrow. Whatever the goal, it is defined in terms profoundly incompatible with our comfort and safety. Sometimes ideology and alienation overlap in allegory; the 1950s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers was superficially about invading aliens, but also served as a close metaphor for Cold War paranoia about Communist infiltrators. Meanwhile, The Stepford Wives tore away the mask of an outwardly utopian vision of a conformist community with everyone in their place to reveal a toe-curlingly unpleasant process of alienation worming its way beneath the skin.
There is this about horror: it allows us to confront our fears, dragging the bogeyman out of the closet to loom over us in his most intimidating guise. (The outcome of the confrontation depends on whether the horror is a classical tragedy—in which the protagonist suffers their downfall because of a flawed character and hubris—or a comedy—in which they are redeemed; but the protagonist is still tainted with the brush of horror.)
And there is this about spy fiction: it allows us to confront our ignorance, by groping warily around the elephant of politics until it blows its trumpet, or perhaps stamps one gigantic foot on the protagonist's head. (Again, the outcome depends on the tragicomic roots of the narrative—but it still all hinges on ignorance and revelation.)
And now for something completely different.
HAX0R DUD35
The fictional hacker is not a real computer geek but a four-thousand-year-old archetype.
There have been trickster-gods running around administering wedgies to authority figures ever since the first adolescent apprentice took the piss out of his elder shaman. From Anansi the spider god through to the Norse trickster-god Loki, the trickster has been the expression of whimsy, curiosity, and occasional malice. Our first detailed knowledge of polytheistic religions comes from the first agricultural civilizations to leave written records behind. Early agricultural societies were conservative to a degree that seems bizarrely alien to us today: they balanced on a Malthusian knife-edge between productive plenitude and the starvation of famine. Change was deeply suspicious because it meant, as often as not, crop failure and starvation. The trickster-god is the one who makes a constant out of change; stealing fire, stealing language, stealing just about anything that isn't nailed down and quite a lot that is, he brought our ancestors most of their innovations.
Let's fast-forward to the present day, where a bewildering rate of change is actually a norm that can be counted upon to continue for decades or centuries. While we don't have trickster-gods and death-gods and crop-gods anymore, we do have narratives that serve the purpose of accustoming us to the idea of almost magical social dislocation.
The hot core of recent technological innovation—"recent" meaning since 1970—has been the computer industry. Driven by the inevitable progression of Moore's law, we've seen enormous breakthroughs, the likes of which haven't been seen since the rapid development of aviation between 1910 and 1950. Computers are a pervasive technology, and wherever they go they leave a sluglike trail of connectedness, information-dense and meaning-rich with the distillate of our minds. Unlike earlier technologies computers are general-purpose tools that can be reconfigured to do different tasks at the press of a button: one moment it's a dessert topping, the next it's a floor wax (or a spreadsheet, or an immersive game).
Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of the realm of computing. They go where they're not supposed to, steal anything that isn't nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it. There is a refreshing immediacy to their activities because they move at the speed of light, cropping up anywhere they wish.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Real hackers—computer programmers in the sense that
the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s—are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they're more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke. All engineering disciplines generate a shared culture and jargon. The computing field has generated a remarkably rich jargon, and a shared culture to go with it. In some cases the sense of tradition is astonishingly strong; there are clubs and mutual support groups, for instance, for those people who choose to lovingly nurse along the twenty-year-old minicomputers they rescued from scrapheaps, rather than abandon them and move what software they can to a new generation of hardware.
At the other end of the spectrum are the script kiddies and warez dudes, the orcish adolescent otaku who trash other people's work machines and try to take over chat networks in a fit of asocial misspelled pique. These are the real and mildly destructive hackers who generate most of the newspaper headlines and outrage—tweaking the codebase of moronic email viruses, hanging out online and moaning endlessly, swallowing the image reflected back at them by the magic mirror of the tabloid press.
But if we return for a moment to the fictional hacker, not only do we discover the archetype of the trickster-god lurking just round the corner, but we also discern the outline of our spy/horror protagonist hunched over their keyboard, trying to dig down into the network of dreams and fears to understand what's really going on.
Every science-fictional depiction of a hacker at work seems to be about pulling away the rug to reveal a squirming mass of icky truths hiding beneath the carpet of reality. From John M. Ford's Web of Angels onward, we've had hackers exploiting networks to find the truth about what's really going on. Sometimes the hacker archetype overlaps with the guy-with-a-gun (as in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction or William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic), or the gamer-with-a-virtual-gun (in film, Mamoru Oshii's Avalon), or even both (Hiro Protagonist, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). Mao remarked, "power grows from the barrel of a gun"—both in real life and in fiction—and if guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power. In fact, when you get down to it, what the fictional hacker has come to symbolize is not that far away from the fictional spy—or the nameless narrator of one of H. P. Lovecraft's strange tales of exploration and alienation.
Hacking the Subconscious, Spying on Horror, Revealing Reality
There's an iron tripod buried in the basement of the Laundry, carved with words in an 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 nondeterministic algorithm it frequently enters a fatal loop when it runs. There is no canonical translation of the inscription. Government linguists tried to de-cypher 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. The metafictional conceit that magic is a science has been used in fantasy—or science fiction—several times. James Gunn's The Magicians is explicitly based upon it. Rick Cook managed to squeeze several books from the idea of a socially clueless programmer stranded in fantasyland and forced to compete with the magi by applying his unfair expertise in compiler design. There is something about mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about it—in the philosophy of mathematics.
Plato spoke of a realm of mathematical truth, and took the view that unearthing a theorem was a matter of discovery: it revealed its truth to us like a shadow cast upon the wall of a cave by a light source and a reality invisible to our eyes. Later Descartes used similar reasoning and a weasely analogical excuse to split the world into things of the spirit and of the flesh. If the body was clearly an organic machine, someone had to be in a driving seat controlling it through a switchboard located (he believed) in the pineal gland.
The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical research was a disaster for the idea of an immortal soul. Mind-body dualism sounds good, until you realise that it implies that the body's sensory nerves must in some way transfer information to the soul, and the soul must somehow affect the dumb matter with which it is associated. When the best microscopes could barely resolve nerve fibres, this was not a problem: but the devil lies in the detail, and with electron micrographs taking us down to the macromolecular level of cytology, and with biochemistry finally beginning to explain how everything works, the brain was revealed for what it is—a mass of fleshy endocrine cells squirting their neurotransmitter messages at one another in promiscuous abandon. There is precious little room left for a soul that can remain hidden but nevertheless influence the flesh.
But. Let us take Plato's realm of mathematical abstraction seriously; and with it, let us adopt the Wheeler model of quantum cosmology—that there exists an infinity of possible worlds, and all of them are real. Can we, by way of the Platonic realm, transfer signals between our own sheaf of human-friendly realities and others, infinitely distant and infinitely close, where other minds might listen? What if, in other words, the multiverse is leaky? What sort of people might first discover such information leakage, and to what use would they put it, and what risks would they encounter in the process?
This is the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century, an age of spooks and wonder, of conspiracies and Cold War, an age in which the horror of the pulp magazines lurched forth onto the world stage in trilliondollar weapons projects capable of smashing cities and incinerating millions. This is not the era of the two-fisted hero-scientist putting the finishing touches on his spherical exploration machine before setting off on a flight to Galaxy Z. Nor is it the age of the mad scientist in his castle basement, laboriously stitching together the graveyard trawl while Igor flies a kite from the battlements to bring the animating power down to the thing on the slab. It is the decade of the computer scientist, the fastthinking designer of abstract machines that float on a Platonic realm of thought and blink in or out of existence with a mouseclick.
We can get some ideas about the lives and occupations of these people by extrapolating from the published material about the intelligence services. James Bamford's Body of Secrets, a deep and fascinating history of the US National Security Agency, offers some hints from outside—as do other histories of the cryptic profession, such as David Kahn's The Codebreakers and Alan Hodges's masterful biography of Alan Turing—for if any agency gets its hands on tools for probing the Platonic realm, it will be a kissing cousin of the kings of cryptography.
We can draw some other conclusions from the unspoken and unwritten history of the secret services. Why, for example, was the British Special Operations Executive disbanded so suddenly in 1945? One version is that the rivalry between SOE and the established Secret Intelligence Service was bitter, and after the 1945 election SIS lobbied the new government to disband SOE. But we know that when other similar organisations have disbanded they have left ghosts behind. US Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets ending up in Room 3416 of the Munitions Building, there to become the core of the Army's new Signal Intelligence Service.
British governments are less forthcoming—many of Whitehall's deepest secrets are stored in boxes labelled for release no less than a hundred years after the events they describe—but we can guess at similar revenants of SOE surviving the winter of the war, just as we know that many of the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking operation ended up in Cheltenham, at the new (and unimportantsounding) Government Communications Headquarters. SOE was deeply engaged with resistance operations against the Nazi occupation of Europe during the Second World War; if by some chance the Ahnenerbe-SS were sheltering ghastly secrets, it is unlikely that the subsequent custodians of such knowledge would have joined their comrades mustering out of service at the end of the conflict.
We can extrapolate somewhat from the post-1945 growth of the intelligence agencies. Back in 1930, when William Friedman became the first chief of the US Army Signal Intelligence Service, the new successor to the Black Chamber had just three employees. By the year 2000, Crypto City—the NSA headquarters in Maryland—had a population of 32,000 regular workers and an annual budget on the order of seven billion dollars. The much smaller Government Communications HQ (GCHQ)—Britain's equivalent of the NSA—still has a budget measured in the high hundreds of millions. Information is power, and these agencies wield it without much restraint on the purse strings and without substantial external oversight. We can assume that even a relatively small 1945-vintage occult intelligence operation would have grown over the years into a sprawling organisation with either a huge central office or, possibly, multiple secure sites dotted around the country.
Finally, this brings us back to the Laundry. The Laundry squats at the heart of a dark web, the collision between paranoia and secrecy on one hand, and the urge to knowledge on the other. Guardians of the dark secrets that threaten to drown us in nightmare, their lips are sealed as tightly as their archives. To get even the vaguest outline of their activities takes a privileged trickster-fool hacker like Bob, nosy enough to worm his way in where he isn't supposed to be and smart enough to explain his way out of trouble. Some day Bob will grow up, fully understand the ghastly responsibilities that go with his job, shut the hell up, and stop digging. But until then, let us by all means use him as our unquiet guide to the corridors of the Fear Factory.
Afternote: Two Frequently Asked Questions
While I was writing "The Atrocity Archive," my friend Andrew Wilson (science fiction reviewer for The Scotsman) kept telling me: "For God's sake, don't read Declare by Tim Powers until you finish the novel."
Powers is a remarkable writer, and in Declare he explored an arcane world remarkably close to that of "The Atrocity Archive." The points of similarity are striking: rogue departments within SOE that survive the end of the war, operations in the British secret intelligence community that focus on the occult and run independently of anything else for a period of decades—even a protagonist who, with a special SAS team, tries to take on a supernatural horror.
Luckily for me, I listened to Andrew. He was right: if I'd read Declare it would have derailed me completely. And that would have been a shame, because in tone and attitude the two novels are very different. Declare is perhaps best read as an homage to John Le Carré, whereas the outlook of "The Atrocity Archive" is perhaps closer to Len Deighton, by way of Neal Stephenson. Declare is about disengagement and the abandonment of former responsibility; "The Atrocity Archive" is more interested in coming of age in a world of ghosts and shadows. Declare is about the secret services that waged The Great Game; "The Atrocity Archive" is about the agencies that fought the Wizard War. The two novels are sufficiently far apart that they stand on their own merit. I'll just leave the topic by saying, if you liked this book, you'll probably enjoy Declare.
About six months after the scare over Declare another friend said, "Hey, have you ever heard of Delta Green?"
I used to be big on role-playing games, but it's been close to two decades since I was last involved in the scene to any extent. So the whole Chaosium phenomenon had passed me by. It turns out that Lovecraft's horrors have found a fertile field (or swamp) in the shape of the game Call of Cthulhu. In Call of Cthulhu, gamers role-play their way through one or another 1920s-era scenario that usually involves solving bizarre mysteries before something hideous sucks their brains out through their ears with a crazy straw. "Delta Green" is an almost legendary supplement to Call of Cthulhu that attempts to bring the mythos role-playing game up-to-date. There's a rogue intelligence agency battling to prevent infestations of extradimensional horrors… sound familiar?
All I can say in my defense is, no: I hadn't heard of "Delta Green" when I wrote "The Atrocity Archive." "Delta Green" has such a markedly American feel that "The Atrocity Archive" is right off the map. (Which is odd, because in tone if not in substance they feel a lot closer than, say, Declare.) So I'll leave it at that except to say that "Delta Green" has come dangerously close to making me pick up the dice again.
Charles Stross Edinburgh, UK April 2003