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The Concrete Jungle

English, published in 2004
28,767 words (84 pages)
No. 2005 in the Hugo Awards and Nominees series
Website: www.antipope.org
This work is copyrighted.

Reprinted with permission from The Atrocity Archives.

Excerpt

irited, like children, excitable and bickering; hardly a match for the order of my troopers and I. We showed them how it was done! Together with the Mehtar at our head, kestrel on his wrist, we rode out into the cold bright dawn and the steep-sided mountain valley.

     We rode for the entire morning and most of the afternoon, climbing up the sides of a steep pass and then between two towering peaks clad in gleaming white snow. The mood of the party was uncommonly quiet, a sense of apprehensive fortitude settling over the normally ebullient Chittrali warriors. We came at last to a mean-spirited hamlet of tumbledown shacks, where a handful of scrawny goats grazed the scrubby bushes; the hetman of the village came to meet us, and with quavering voice directed us to our destination.

     "It lies thuswise," remarked my translator, adding: "The old fool, he say it is a ghost-bedevilled valley, by God! He say his son go in there two, three days ago, n

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2009.03.16
P. Rail

I was impressed by the authors knowledge of tech details (HTTP requests, packet sniffers and the like). His Orwellian paranoia around surveillance cameras clearly drove this story. I admit the unexpected blending of mythic creatures into the story was a novel idea. I realize it was intended to be short, but I would have appreciated more dialog to tell the story.

2007.07.02
R Stephan

Stross is hot. He showed it with Accelerando. No less with this shortish novel that can be described either as Espionage Satire or Occult SF. He is hilariously funny, knows every bit he's talking about, and in this works, touches on important subjects such as Surveillance Society and Who Watches The Watchmen? Read him.