Review: "A Colder War" by Charlie Stross (2000)

Posted on February 25th, 2008

“A Colder War” is an alternate history novelette that places the Iran-Contra Affair square within the Cthulhu Mythos.

Roger Jourgensen is first a CIA analyst, then a field spook/lackey who is privy to the biggest secret in the world: that shoggoths, Cthulhu, and Lovecraft’s other horrible weak-godlike agencies exist and are kept under wraps only through an international secret treaty known as the Dresden Agreement.

If you know a little Cold War history and have read H. P. Lovercraft’s “Mountains of Madness,” you will be impressed by the numerous, but natural, references to both in this story. Jourgensen is tapped by Ollie North for a super-secret special group doing covert work smuggling heroin through the temples of the Elder Gods. The group is also trying, but failing, to contain the proliferation of these weapons of universal destruction.

The shoggoth balloon goes up and Jourgensen is evacuated through a portal to another world along with some bigwigs as they attempt to figure out if the world can still be salvaged.

Stross’ characteristic humor is present in spots, and of course the satirical alternate history itself is humorous at times. Stross reaches for, but does not grasp, Lovecraft’s sense of nameless dread even though some of the plot turns here are more explicitly harrowing than much Lovecraft tended to write. Instead Jourgensen generally comes across as either worried-but-resigned, or just plain resigned.

As an aside, this is a separate storyline to the future of Stross’ Atrocity Archives, although both mix Lovecraft and espionage.

You can read it online here at Infinity Plus, but you might want to copy and paste it into a word processor because, while it has good contrast, there was something about the blue-on-blue on that page that got to me.

Tags: Review
Filed under Free Stuff, Review, Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF), Stross, Charles |

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