The Atrocity Archives

By Charles Stross
Arthur C. Clarke is known for various things, at least some of which are true. If you wanted to make a list of science fiction writers who had a real impact on the world of today, then you pretty much have to give it to Clarke. Or at least you need to come up with something pretty damned impressive to beat geostationary communications satellites, and off the top of my head I can't.
In the SF community he's known for a set of laws, the only important one being "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". There's a reworking of this, which I think pre-dates Stross, but whatever, "sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science". Or in this case, mathematics.
The world of The Atrocity Archives is one in which Alan Turing did not simply invent computers, he came up with the maths underpinning magic, where the Final Solution was an attempt (successful in its own way) to gain the favour of the elder gods, and the process by which a basilisk's gaze can change carbon into silicon is sufficiently understood that it can be used to turn your webcam into a lethal weapon.
Magic is not regulated by a secret society of magicians, except that it is; those magicians being henpecked civil servants working for a division of the Secret Service known as The Laundry.
Its fun and yet at the same time slightly flat. Stross writes in a style emulating Len Deighton's Harry Palmer stories, which I have never read and so can't say how well he does. The only other thing I've read by Stross was Accelerando (free to download under a CC licence) and that to seemed to have a lot of characters who spoke in almost exactly the same voice. A deadpan narrator's sometimes no bad thing.
But despite this, quite fun.
TAA is made up of a titular short novel, involving an attempt to return exiled Nazi sorcerers to Earth along with the entities they made pacts with in the dying days of World War 2, and a shorter story in which a government plan to turn every CCTV camera in the country into a death ray goes a bit wrong. Well it would, wouldn't it.
Two sequels out there, will probably get round to them at some point.

And so the looming GRRM question looms. 2 months time. A Dance With Dragons. On order for the last three years. I probably could reread the first four books if I got on with it. But do I really want to read nothing else in so short a time?