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31 pages, ebook
First published July 1, 2000
He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It'll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realised just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter's faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.Though come to think of it, I spoke too soon saying it was free of satire. Much of the story's themes about American military culture and Reaganite politics, from the ridiculous code names for Mythos knowledge ("SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE") to how silly talk about "Morning in America" sounds in a world with mi-go and shoggoths and Cthulhu who waits dead but dreaming, are obviously satirical, albeit of the whistling-past-the-graveyard sort.
With frequent allusions to both Dr. Strangelove and At the Mountains of Madness, this novelette covers much of the same thematic terrain as The Atrocity Archives, which I read a couple of years ago. Marrying Cold War-era existential angst and paranoia to Lovecraftian existential angst and paranoia seems chocolate-and-peanut-butter obvious in hindsight, but (AFAIK) it was Stross who thought of it first and his insight serves him well.
The story is gloomy, claustrophobic and unsettling: it feels like the best of John Carpenter's work, with just enough revealed to let the reader's imagination fill in the horrible blanks.