Literary candy: Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives"

I'm really enjoying "The Atrocity Archives". It's a mix of classic spy novel, cypherpunk, "Office Space", and Lovecraft. Some choice snippets:

The [Turing-Lovecraft] theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing  hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms -- translation: all your bank account are belong to us -- and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct -- except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe that we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes are things that listen and talk back -- see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, etcetra. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics -- computerized or otherwise -- draws them forth. (And you thought that running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of those other universes don't play by our rule book?

And another:

"Is that a copy of Knuth?" She homes in on the top shelf. "Hang on --  volume four? But he only finished the first three volumes in that series. Volume four's been overdue for the past twenty years!"

"Yup." I nod, smugly. Whoever she's dating won't have anything like that on his shelves. "We -- or the Black Chamber -- have a little agreement with him; he doesn't publish volume four of The Art of Computer Programming, and they don't render metabolically challenged. At least, he doesn't publish it to the public; it's the one with the Turing Theorem in it. Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning. This is a very limited edition -- numbered and classified."

If this book keeps up, it may find itself as one of my all-time favorites.