The Atrocity Archives

Feb 09, 2013 Tfitoby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantastical, sci-fi

A genre bending debut from Stross that takes its cues from Rankin and Holt as well as Morgan and Stephenson, Deighton and Le Carre - Highly recommended.

Read on the plane from London to Vienna and whilst being bored to tears by Vienna

So Vienna is dull, a complete waste of time for anyone looking for a vibrant, friendly and warm city. On the plus side it gave me the chance to sit in the sun drinking coffee and finish reading this great book.

I'd always thought Stross would be a difficult read, henc...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Miquel Codony rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and direclty make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreck unbelievable havoc, where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that that in this world there is an administered division of labour, among the magicians them selves and those who coordinate their activities. It's bureaucratic and also (therefore) chaotic, and it's full of people at desks mutte

...more

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Jun 29, 2012 Apatt rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Charles Stross is an author I want to like. I like his blogs, I like his personality and honesty (in so far as one can gauge such things based on the author's writings, interviews and such). The only snag is I am somewhat ambivalent about his fiction. I don't doubt that he is a talented writer of science fiction. He comes up with some great ideas and is quite popular within his chosen genre. Unfortunately from the three books I have read so far there is something about his fiction writing style...more Charles Stross is an author I want to like. I like his blogs, I like his personality and honesty (in so far as one can gauge such things based on the author's writings, interviews and such). The only snag is I am somewhat ambivalent about his fiction. I don't doubt that he is a talented writer of science fiction. He comes up with some great ideas and is quite popular within his chosen genre. Unfortunately from the three books I have read so far there is something about his fiction writing style that does not appeal to me. His prose style comes across as cocky, hip and chaotic. He often switches to infodump mode in the middle of his narrative, filling them with scientific terms, jargons, geekspeak, neologisms and general techno-babble. I often find it hard to distinguish the real and the imagined terms among them. Generally I find that his writing is lacking in clarity, often veering between flippant and technical and back, and this plays hell with his narrative. Yes, I imagine a lot of people find his writing clear as a bell, I can only speak for myself.

From the synopsis The Atrocity Archives should have been more fun than it turned out to be. Basically this is a spy thriller-sci-fi-supernatural horror hybrid, sort of a cross between le Carré spy fiction, The X-Files and Cthulhu Mythos. It is centered on a super secret British spy organization called The Laundry that "clean up" and protect the country from ghastly supernatural incursions from other dimensions. The edition of the book that I read contain two distinct stories the original short novel "The Atrocity Archives" and the novella "The Concrete Jungle", the later is more entertaining and tightly written than the former. There are multiple instances of excessive exposition in this book (TMI!), some of these infodumps are more interesting and comprehensible than others. Although the book is a mashup of several genres it reads more like sci-fi than anything else, all the supernatural elements have a scientific or pseudo-scientific basis. I like his little infodump about plutonium and nuclear bombs, learning something from fiction is always a bonus. His witticisms and sense of humour provide the element of levity I expected but this is less prominent than I thought it would be. I love the fun twist on the "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" idiom, and the satire of bureaucratic red tape in an office.

"In the Laundry we supposedly pride ourselves on our procedures. We’ve got procedures for breaking and entering offices, procedures for reporting a shortage of paper clips, procedures for summoning demons from the vasty deeps, and procedures for writing procedures. We may actually be on track to be the world’s first ISO-9000 total-quality-certified intelligence agency."

That stuff is gold! Extra points also for a Monty Python reference elsewhere in the book. For some reason the book is written in first person present tense, I imagine this is supposed to make the story seems more immediate and unpredictable, it does no harm I guess but does not really enhance the story for me. Characterization is on the flat side as the protagonist/narrator spends more time explaining technical details than expressing his feelings, some of the other characters are interesting but basically they are just there to move the plot along.

Previously I have failed to finish Stross' famous Accelerando where I was not expecting his snarky prose style and became too annoyed with it to get very far into it, then I read Singularity Sky which I quite enjoyed and found the prose to be more readable. After reading The Atrocity Archives I still feel a bit ambivalent about him as an sf author. I will probably read more of his books in future as I like his ideas and humour, I may even give Accelerando another try. I rate this one 3.5 stars (4 stars for "The Concrete Jungle" novella).(less)

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Jan 26, 2008 Belarius rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Horror/Spy/Comedy Fans

Shelves: fiction-finished, speculative-fiction, reviewed

Every so often I come across a book so laden with obscure references that only my own particular predisposition to trivia sees me through to the other side. Charles Stross has accomplished just such a feat with The Atrocity Archives, a bewildering, fascinating, and very funny look inside the bureaucratic world of top-secret British occult espionage.

If I had to capture the tone of the Atrocity Archives in one sentence, I'd describe it as three parts Men In Black, two parts The Office, and two par...more Every so often I come across a book so laden with obscure references that only my own particular predisposition to trivia sees me through to the other side. Charles Stross has accomplished just such a feat with The Atrocity Archives, a bewildering, fascinating, and very funny look inside the bureaucratic world of top-secret British occult espionage.

If I had to capture the tone of the Atrocity Archives in one sentence, I'd describe it as three parts Men In Black, two parts The Office, and two parts of the "Lovecraft Mythos." The stories (as the book is actually comprised of two separate narratives) center on The Laundry, the ultra-secret branch of Her Majesty's Government responsible for keeping the Things Beyond Our Reality from invading and destroying the world. The comedy of the book draws heavily from the juxtaposition of supernatural horrors (from Nazi occult torture engines to bodysnatching dimensional travelers) with the mind-numbing dreariness of government office politics (from paper clip audits to matrix management).

The brilliance of Stross' world is also the thing most likely to confound the average reader: the book's reliance on a tightly-woven tapestry of fairly obscure esoterica. The reader has half a chance of being on top of the constant references if they (a) have read the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, (b) have also read the complete works of Lei Deighton, (c) have taken at least one upper-level computer science course, (d) have a broad familiarity with mythological creatures from a half-dozen cultures or more, (e) have read A Brief History Of Time once or twice, (f) know their way around the lexicon of a Crowley-style occultist, (g) know twentieth-century European history fairly well, and (h) watched the Saturday morning cartoons of the mid-90s. But even that might not be enough.

Like Men in Black, The Atrocity Archives is an action comedy at heart, so knowing the background of every little tidbit being thrown the reader's way isn't necessary. The books does a good job of holding the reader's hand while explaining the basics of modern magic (which turns out to be a mix of applied mathematics and physics) and the alternate history surrounding the occult cold war currently raging. But the references come so fast and furious that I honestly don't know how this books would look to the uninitiated. Which is a shame, because (knowing what I know) the story is consistently engaging and often hilarious.

I enjoyed Stross' world quite a bit, and I can firmly recommend it to anyone who would also enjoy it. The only trouble is that, as richly borrowed as that world is, I'm not exactly sure who, precisely, to recommend it to. (less)

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Jul 15, 2010 Mike (the Paladin) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, urban-fantasy

*This is an audio Ebook by the way. It's what I had access to through the library, but then I like audio books as well as text, at least for some fiction.*

I'd never heard of these... they ended up on my "to be read list" because someone "here" had read them. I keep adding books faster than I can read them. (Thank you Stephen).This is actually Atrocity Archives and The Concrete Jungle in one "volume" (are Ebooks volumes?).

I don't know if I can accurately describe these/this books/book. The influe...more

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Feb 24, 2012 Ric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jumpin' Jehosophat, did I just have an encounter with Tim Powers and The Anubis Gates? Is The Atrocity Archives not a reincarnation of that 80's~~70's~~ cult book? But I could just swear that is what I just read on finishing this, Charles Stross's maiden offering in this series. The similarity in style and sheer wackiness are striking. Stross is decidedly more technological. But the stream-of-consciousness flow of thoughts and references is deja vu inducing.

The volume also includes the much more co

...more

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Dec 20, 2008 Ron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dark-humor, espionage, disturbing, hackers, horror, magickal, mindblowing, pulp-fiction, thriller

Starting from an absolutely brilliant premise -- that there's a point where higher mathematics and Lovecraftian monsters meet, and computer hackers are as likely to tap into that realm as sorcerors -- Charles Stross digs deep into the bureaucracy of intelligence operations to come up with one of the niftiest plotlines about left-over Nazi occultism ever. Sensitive readers may be offended by some of the interpretations Stross gives to the Third Reich's activities, but other than that this is an e...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Bobby rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

I'm about 140 pages into this and so far my opinion is rather low. If it's meant to be funny, it's not particularly so. Certainly there is no sense of dread or horror as pertains to Lovecraft's body of work that Stross seems to be paying homage to - though I think he was aiming for something far more slapstick - perhaps a Douglams Adams/Terry Pratchet take on the Cthulhu mythos. Thus far, Stross isn't succeeding in my view. It may also be that the main hero - Bob Howard, strikes me as just the s...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Nicholas rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, reviewed

LOVED this book, but it's incredibly specialized. As a professional computer geek who loves eldrich horrors, spy novels, and all things British (even their bureaucracy); this was a real treat. If you can't fit yourself into those categories, I'm not sure this would be the book for you.

Told as a sort of first person tumble down a particularly frightening rabbit hole, there is a particular kind of humor that permeates the whole thing. If you can laugh at UNIX jokes, life as a cubicle slave in a go...more LOVED this book, but it's incredibly specialized. As a professional computer geek who loves eldrich horrors, spy novels, and all things British (even their bureaucracy); this was a real treat. If you can't fit yourself into those categories, I'm not sure this would be the book for you.

Told as a sort of first person tumble down a particularly frightening rabbit hole, there is a particular kind of humor that permeates the whole thing. If you can laugh at UNIX jokes, life as a cubicle slave in a government office, and the banalities of using the worst of the things that go bump in the night as technology tools...then this is the book for you.

If jokes about computers from the early 90's and MEMEX machines from before the dawn of the internet aren't your thing...then this is going to fall flat for you time after time.

It also reads like a new-wave episode of Doctor Who. Things from beyond space and time threatening our very existence and defeated not by bombs, guns, and soldiers; but by everyday nerds doing smart things bravely instead of loud things with a bang.

The book is actually a novel and a Hugo winning Novelette sold together under the name of the novel included. I would honestly say I found the Novel significantly more engaging than the Novelette and I'm surprised it won an award. It's not a bad effort by ANY stretch, but the characterizations were not a strong, though this is more an artifact of length than quality.

It may just be that I didn't care for the female that accompanied the protagonist...even though she's less of a wet blanket than the "tethered goat" from the novel. Personality clash maybe? Or maybe I just didn't get how it was that she went from "woman of action" to "shell-shocked and angry" even though she allegedly already KNEW about the things that were so shocking. Might just be that I'm not down with angry Detective Inspector with a gun. I don't know. It wasn't bad but it just didn't work as well for me.

That said, the Novelette was still better than about 90% of the science fiction / horror / technospy stories in the history of publishing; so when I say it didn't work as well, please remember that the bar was incredibly high.

If you're a computer geek, love Doctor Who, enjoy H.P. Lovecraft, OR just like spy novels then The Laundry Series might be your cup of tea. If you laugh at old Monty Python sketches and are ALL of those other things...then this might well be your new "favoritest book of ever!!!" and I encourage you to head over to Amazon and Kindle it this instant.(less)

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Aug 29, 2010 Donna rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010, science-fiction, scifi-fantasy-ebook-club

Bob Howard is a desk-bound computer geek who would like to get out in the field. He works at the super secret division of the British intelligence service that deals with the occult. In this world, computers and magic somehow work together in ways I can't even begin to explain.

And that is the problem I had with this book. I read a lot of SciFi and Fantasy and I think I'm good at embracing whatever world the author has created and going with it. I'm fine with Stoss's world; the idea of technology...more

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Jan 17, 2008 Kirt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Okay, the hardback book for The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross actually contains two novels -- "The Atrocity Archives" proper, as serialized in Spectrum SF, and a novella surrounding the same main character called "The Concrete Jungle".

Let's start with "The Atrocity Archives" proper.

I liked it. It's sort of an alternate history spy thriller with H.P. Lovecraft elements thrown in to turn the stakes up to 11 with some cosmic horror.

In essence, the premise of the book is that Turing discovered...more Okay, the hardback book for The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross actually contains two novels -- "The Atrocity Archives" proper, as serialized in Spectrum SF, and a novella surrounding the same main character called "The Concrete Jungle".

Let's start with "The Atrocity Archives" proper.

I liked it. It's sort of an alternate history spy thriller with H.P. Lovecraft elements thrown in to turn the stakes up to 11 with some cosmic horror.

In essence, the premise of the book is that Turing discovered the mathematical equations that can be used to contact other dimensions right before he died. So it becomes possible to contact dimensional beings -- anything from a Cthuloid horror to something that resembles a traditional Christian demon -- using a computer, if you know the right maths. Sure, you can use a a virgin sacrifice, but most of the time you can do it just as well, or better, with an electric pentacle or a set of ionized lasers. That said, in this world the Holocaust was part of an brute-force attempt by the Nazis to open a BIG gate to our world, a sort of occult Manhattan Project that, lucky for the world, failed in the end.

Fast-forward to the present day. The book focuses on Bob, an employee of The Laundry, which in essence the occult secret intelligence agency for the UK. Because of the nature of magic and its connection to computers, Bob is a combination secret agent, civil servant, occultist and UNIX system administrator -- mostly the last two in equal measure. He's a grumpy yet likable smartass, like a lot of REAL computer gurus are -- he has none of that "3L1T3" stupidity going down, because Stross worked in IT and so he knows what he's talking about and has as much contempt for "script kiddies" as I do. (A script kiddie would be real dangerous in this world -- it's possible to run occult programs on your Palm Pilot and summon stuff up without having any understanding of the occult principles involved.)

Stross wrote the book because he saw a similarity between horror stories and espionage stories, and the two fuse types of story DO together quite well. Sometimes you can see the seams, though -- in part because he tries to weld in a third theme, connected to computers and IT drudgery. Generally it works quite well, but sometimes you can see the story pulling itself in three different directions. (Similarly, because the novel was originally serialized, Bob tends to repeat himself a lot when explaining certain things.)

My only quibble, aside from the above, and this is really tiny, is that I'm confused by the status of Lovecraft in this world. Stross leans heavily of Cthulhu Mythos lore. Mistakonic University, the Deep Ones, Abdul Al Hazred and Dunwich (as in "The Dunwhich Horror") all seem to exist in this world. But it's also heavily implied that geeks are familiar with Lovecraft's stories in a sort of humorous way, just like in the real world. So I guess Lovecraft wrote the same stories but he was sort of "tapping into" alread-existing things in the background. But it isn't really explained, just sort of hinted here and there, and as a Lovecraft fan, it kinda rankles.

That said, all of the above nitpicks are minor. The story holds together quite well, and keep me reading right to the end. It's skillfully written and engaging.

Plus, what can you say about a book where someone tries to use a magickal device designed to turn people to stone to disarm a nuclear bomb?

I actually liked the novella at the end better than the main story, as the Big Bad was all too human -- in a lot of ways, it was more disturbing than the more strictly Lovecraftian situation in the core story. Having read the core story gives the novella more nuance and context, however, making it a richer story overall.(less)

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Oct 03, 2007 Rick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Charles Stross' first novel, the alternate-reality-hard-science-fiction-Lovecraftian-thriller The Atrocity Archive, was originally serialized in the British magazine Spectrum SF in 2002. That novel and a shorter story set in the same universe were recently published as The Atrocity Archives.

In Stross's world Alan Turing, the father of cryptography whose theories are still used in modern encryption, has completed the "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning," better known as the...more Charles Stross' first novel, the alternate-reality-hard-science-fiction-Lovecraftian-thriller The Atrocity Archive, was originally serialized in the British magazine Spectrum SF in 2002. That novel and a shorter story set in the same universe were recently published as The Atrocity Archives.

In Stross's world Alan Turing, the father of cryptography whose theories are still used in modern encryption, has completed the "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-Dimensional Summoning," better known as the Turing-Lovecraft theorem. Turing's theorem can open interdimensional doorways that enable otherworldly nasties to enter this world. Before Turing's findings could be made public, most of the civilized world's covert governmental organizations suppressed his work.

Out of this event emerges the Laundry, a top secret U.K. governmental agency, created to monitor and control unlawful uses of Turing's work. Almost all of its employees are mathematicians who have cracked the Turing-Lovecraft theorem and been caught at it. Their choice: Join Laundry or die.

In the first longer story, The Atrocity Archive, Bob Howard, an insubordinate desk jockey, stumbles across a plot involving Nazis, secret societies, terrorists and an Unspeakable Evil bent on destroying the Earth. His life is further complicated by office politics, two crackpot roommates calling themselves Pinky and the Brain who tend to blow things up, and his developing feelings for the beautiful mathematician Mo. All this lunacy ultimately leads to a climax on an interdimensional world against an evil more terrifying than any Nazi.

Charles Stross masterfully guides the reader through this complex, strange new world of quasi-cyberpunk ideals, horror tropes and Len Deighton-esque espionage with clarity and humor. There is a scene when Stross uses almost nothing but acronyms to describe the inner workings of the Laundry such as OCCULUS (Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations) and LART (Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool).

The Atrocity Archive is much more than a parody of espionage thrillers. Stross is well versed in technology and mathematics. He uses this to his advantage in explaining how things work. Most of his explanations are interesting and informative.

Then there is the Lovecraft connection. Writing in the 1930's, H. P. Lovecraft pioneered the idea of fictional ancient creatures from different dimensions terrifying the denizens of Earth. While his work tended to the florid and bombastic, Lovercraft's influence on popular culture is large as seen most recently in the hit movie Hellboy and the fiction of Stephen King and many other writers. Although a clear antecedent of the plot of The Atrocity Archive, Stross' prose is nothing like Lovecraft's. Written very much in the style of a contemporary thriller, Stross' moves his story along at a breakneck pace, only pausing long enough for a humorous interlude or a technical explanation.

The second story, The Concrete Jungle, appears here for the first time. In this shorter tale, Stross further explores and satirizes the inner workings of governmental office politics. While amusing in its own right, the novella was a let-down after the roller coaster excitement of the first story.

Charles Stross's hip, fluid prose typifies the New Weird as he effortlessly slides between genres and tropes. Science fiction, thriller, adventure, romance, and horror, this one has it all in one neat package. With an introduction by Ken MacLeod and an afterword by Stross exploring the distinctions between thrillers and horror fiction, The Atrocity Archives serves as an excellent introduction to a unique literary movement.

(This review originally appeared on RevolutionSF.)
Link: [http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.h...](less)

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Apr 24, 2013 Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fantastic sci-fi/fantasy book. I put off reading it for far too long as I was that it is very 'Lovecraftian.' While I like the idea of Lovecraft's books, I am not a fan of his writing style, so I was waiting until I had slogged through some of them to get the most of this highly-recommended book. As it turns out, you don't need to be versed in Lovecraft at all.
On the other hand it touches a lot of high-level theoretical concepts from all manners of fields, so being passingly familiar with eso...more

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Apr 24, 2008 Psychophant rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: alternate-history, humour, reviewed, series

This is a book for a quite narrow reader subset, those who like HP Lovecraft style while keeping a sense of humour.

If Lovecraft or Cthulhu say nothing to you, this is not for you. If you want to take a very British romp through the twin horrors of Bureaucracy and Horrors out from Outer Space, this is it. Stross clearly loves both subjects, and meshes them faultlessly and funnily.

The reason this receives only four stars, despite being an almost perfect take on its subject, it is because it delibe...more

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Mar 04, 2009 Sueij rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Sueij by: Scott

Wow, Ghost Busters meets The Matrix, with a very small amount of James Bond thrown in. This book was fun, readable (see below), and hard to put down.

Scott has gotten on a Charles Stross kick, and I asked him to pass along the best book by this almost-new-to-us author. (We read Iron Sunrise and both liked it.) Scott passed on Accelerando. I read the first 50 pages and had to put it down. It's all context and no story. It felt like Stross was just playing with the reader to see how weird a world h...more

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Jun 16, 2013 Migdalia rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi-comic

This is the first book in The Laundry Series by Charles Stross. The stories are spy thrillers involving a secret history of the 20th century, and based on themes from HP Lovecraft. Horror elements - such as the Nazis using using science and math to open "gates" to other dimensions in order to escape their fate in this one and regroup in order to battle another day - are combined with humorous elements satirizing bureaucracy. The protagonist is a computer expert named Bob Howard who works for a s...more This is the first book in The Laundry Series by Charles Stross. The stories are spy thrillers involving a secret history of the 20th century, and based on themes from HP Lovecraft. Horror elements - such as the Nazis using using science and math to open "gates" to other dimensions in order to escape their fate in this one and regroup in order to battle another day - are combined with humorous elements satirizing bureaucracy. The protagonist is a computer expert named Bob Howard who works for a super-secret government organization called The Laundry. He's the IT guy, but because of his uncanny ability to be at the wrong place at the right time, he continually finds himself in field situations. However, because those field situations are supposed to be top secret and cannot be discussed, referenced in any way, or recognized for expense reporting, this puts him at consistent odds with his supervisor and her boss. Somehow, the field work which is life-or-death work is greatly preferable to being in the office with those two harpies.

When Stross doesn't get too deep into the science and math explanations, it's a fun read. The problem is that he can't help himself. Unlike Jasper Fforde who knows how to describe things much more simply (and his books are way more complicated), Stross gets lost in the description. Also unlike Fforde, he doesn't give his audience enough credit for having the knowledge and education to understand what's going on. Hey, sci-fi is not an Avon Paperback genre. If you don't have some basic knowledge, you shouldn't be surprised that you don't get a lot of stuff. Stross should let the reader make that call. This book is not necessarily an impossible read, but Stross digresses a lot - in the sense that he spends a lot of time explaining things instead of letting the action do the telling. You end up getting lost in the description and then going back in a "Now, what was the point again?" way. It's the first book in the series; so, it could be that the writing gets stronger and the plot gets tighter. We'll see. This was an okay read, and there are hints that the writing can get better; so, it's worth checking out the other books in the series. However, be forewarned: It's longer and wordier than it has to be.(less)

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Jun 13, 2013 Carpentermt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross was originally a production from Golden Gryphon Press. The book is in its second printing but 1st editions may still be found for those of you who care about such things. It is a beautiful hardcover; all of Golden Gryphon's books have great production qualities. I have a copy of Eternal Lovecraft and it has similar appealing features. Binding is cloth with a nice slip cover with art by Steve Montiglio. The painting depicts some arcane appearing machine cre...more The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross was originally a production from Golden Gryphon Press. The book is in its second printing but 1st editions may still be found for those of you who care about such things. It is a beautiful hardcover; all of Golden Gryphon's books have great production qualities. I have a copy of Eternal Lovecraft and it has similar appealing features. Binding is cloth with a nice slip cover with art by Steve Montiglio. The painting depicts some arcane appearing machine creating a gate into another world, very well done and very appropriate to the subject of the book.

There is an introduction by Kevin MacLeod and a detailed author's note at the end, both of which are enormously informative and as entertaining to read as the books iself. The book in fact contains a novel, The Atrocity Archives, and a novella, The Concrete Jungle, which carries on with the same characters from The Atrocity Archives. AA was originally serialized in a UK SF magazine, and was reprinted here; I am
not sure, but I think it may have been expanded some for the novel version.

For those of you who don't know him, Charles Stross has written, in my opinion, one of the best mythos stories ever, A Colder War. This story is available to read free online on his website and also in his story collection Toast. I believe it will also appear in The Cthulhuian Singularity whenever that worthy collection sees the light of print. Now I am struggling to come up with comparisons here, the story is that good. It sort of fits in with Cody Goodfellow's Radiant Dawn, or even more, the Delta Green fiction, where the Lovecraftian truth of the
universe is known by the governments of the nations and they try both desperately to conceal it from their citizens, and use this horrible knowledge as a weapon. The soviets have a handful of shoggoths and the means to free Cthulhu, and the US has access to some extradimensional gates. I find the story wildly original, marvelously written, absolutely true to Lovecraft and also carrying a perfect sense of horror. So it was with great anticipation that I turned to The Atrocity Archives.

Some spoilers may follow.

First, I really enjoyed reading this book and can recommend it without hesitation. But I am having a very hard time deciding what the heck it is that I am recommending! I read the novel and novella before the introduction or the author's note, and came to a conclusion that although this work lives and breathes in Lovecratft's worlds it is not really a mythos novel at all, not the way A Colder War is. The author's note just confirmed my suspicions! Most interesting is that Stross had not read Tim Power's Declare or any Delta Green before finishing AA, so it is entirely his own conception.

Briefly, all the mythos entities etc are real, intelligent and malignant alien entities that exist in alternate universes (ah, the old multiverse concept!), who may have access to our universe if the proper ritual is performed. It turns out that there is a scientific and mathematical basis for this ability to open gates , and it has been systematized, and this knowledge is a closely held governmental secret. All the occultism has now become much more mundane. I'll quote an example; "In the case of the great circuit of Al-Hazred, the terminator was originally a black goat, sacrificed at midnight with a silver knife
touched only by virgins, but these days we just use a fifty microfarad capacitor." Being a computer geek helps you create/understand/master the mathematical circuits you need. Mundane, yes, but the danger to the summoner remains, particularly if you are trying to summon or manipulate a more intelligent alien entity. In fact the AA refers to the record of The Holocaust, where the Nazis tried to use an enormous
blood sacrifice of millions to open the gates to supernatural aid that would have won the war for them (similar in concept but greater in scale than DG's Karotechia). But nowadays everything is run by a labyrinthine, unnavigable and intractable civil service bureaucracy. And so this novel really is more a cloak and dagger spy novel, where the trappings are not so much James Bond gadgets as ancient geases, sacrificial gates and hands of glory as standard issue occult weapons. Honestly, there is no Lovecraftian feel at all! Anyone who seems to be stumbling onto the science or ritual necessary to manipulate reality this way is the forcibly recruited by the government for national
security reasons.

The hero is Bob Howard, a hacker/computer geek turned field agent, who goes spook hunting to track down what seems to be the remnants of a cell devoted to the Nazi dream of opening a gate so the ice giants, some malignant entity can come through and finish the war properly for once and all. Someone a bit like Q issues him some occult gear, he never goes anywhere without a laptop or palmpilot, he rooms with some computer geeks who are busy creating nameless gates in the basement apparently for the heck of it, he basically has a small cubicle to call his own and supervisors who are quite petty. All in all superbly written and great fun. He meets a British expatriate named Dominique
who is of course strikingly pretty, a brilliant mathematician, a
computer geek and who falls for him. Of all the characters she was the least successful, partly because in spite of all these qualities attributed to her she never rose above the level of window dressing, the damsel in distress who needed to be rescued. High tech, low tech, extradimensional tech, this book was a corking good read. But read it with mindset that it is a spy novel and you catch the flavor better. I liked the novella The Concrete Jungle equally well. I certainly hope Mr. Stross continues Bob Howard's adventures in future books!(less)

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Jun 01, 2013 Banks rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Espionage meets HP Lovecraft. However, the spies in this case have more problems with bureaucracy than foreign agents. A humourous, enjoyable mash up of the two genres. A bit too much technobabble for my liking (I found it distracting) but some pretty creative ideas in the two stories in the book, particularly with the supernatural elements.

The book has two stories: The Atrocity Archives & The Concrete Jungle

Atrocity Archives (first story and the bulk of the book) gets 3 stars. It was uneve...more

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Apr 10, 2013 H rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is a Lovecraftian spy thriller. There, I said it. I don't think I've ever seen three words encapsulate a book so well, but at the same time explain so little.

The premise behind the book, briefly, is that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors are real, and they can interact with our world. They can also be summoned using mathematics and computers, using various theorems proven by Turing before his death. The British intelligence has a secret agency (known as the Laundry ) which is

...more

This book is a Lovecraftian spy thriller. There, I said it. I don't think I've ever seen three words encapsulate a book so well, but at the same time explain so little.

The premise behind the book, briefly, is that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors are real, and they can interact with our world. They can also be summoned using mathematics and computers, using various theorems proven by Turing before his death. The British intelligence has a secret agency (known as the Laundry ) which is in charge of preventing them from materializing or being summoned by cultists, although it does so with typical bureaucratic inertia. The protagonist, Bob, is a lowly IT grunt, which here means he is in charge of keeping the servers running and summoning/dismissing abominations.

Read H.P. Lovecraft. Take a computer science course. Work for the government. I would recommend that the reader does at least two before starting this book, or a lot of the humor (there is humor) and action won't make as much sense.

The plot seems like a Cold War spy thriller (car chases, mysterious agents, classified documents) mixed with office/government comedy (filling out forms, attending meetings, mid-level managers), with the threat of uncertain doom in the background. The juxtaposition is funny and fits well. As for the actual plot, I feel like you are reading this book, and its immediate sequel, more for the novelty. I can't say that the plot is bad, so much as it falls flat on reflection. Spy things happen, ancient evils are averted, but I can't say that I was blown away by it. Part of the problem may be that the first-person narrator comes off as too much of an office worker when he should be an agent. A car crash or something might happen, followed by a couple of pages of "oh shit" or description. Perhaps it's just exposition heavy, but I felt like the pace was really slow at times.

.

The characters are very interesting, and not just in a amusingly bureaucratic way. Some of them are menacing, mysterious, or insane. The climax was very well done, and very...descriptive. I think I would recommend this to most of my friends, although it might not be a good fit for many.

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Jan 09, 2013 Kate rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fantasy, horror, humour, owned, sci-fi

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I really, really wanted to love this book.

I really, really couldn't.

It's not just that it made me feel that I'd been dropped into a series of graduate-level seminars on everything from computer science to machine learning to the philosophy of choice to World War II history. No, that was actually sort of enjoyable, in a "wow, I'm out of my intellectual depth" kind of way.

My problem was with how it was done.

The book was, largely, a series of infodumping lectures on various aspects of computing, i...more I really, really wanted to love this book.

I really, really couldn't.

It's not just that it made me feel that I'd been dropped into a series of graduate-level seminars on everything from computer science to machine learning to the philosophy of choice to World War II history. No, that was actually sort of enjoyable, in a "wow, I'm out of my intellectual depth" kind of way.

My problem was with how it was done.

The book was, largely, a series of infodumping lectures on various aspects of computing, information science, and philosophy - which could have been really enjoyable, given Stross's writing style and the dry humour that leavened the whole thing. Unfortunately, said infodumps weren't terribly well worked into a coherent narrative, and they were too laden with jargon and intellectual name-drops to make for an enjoyable reading experience for me. I don't mind being made to feel out of my intellectual depths by a novel, and I don't mind being challenged - I do mind not being able to actually keep up without having immediate access to an entire academic library. And glossing over the technical/infodump sections wasn't an option; you got the distinct feeling that you were missing something critical to the story.

And that story...again, I SHOULD have liked this. The idea of mathematics and the act of observation being responsible for what we call magic, and the idea that mathematics can create summoning circles for eldritch horrors - that was great. The modern interpretation of the Hand of Glory, for instance, was great. And while the plot was terribly thin, the characters were absolutely amazing - complex, strange, and fully realized with just a few brushstrokes. Bob, the everyman arcane computer technician, and his frustration with the bureaucracy surrounding his job even when he moves into fieldwork, is simply fantastic, as are his roommates.

But the biggest problem with the novel was the editing - or lack thereof. While I realize that the story was originally published as a serial, that's no excuse. Those characters? Referred to inconsistently (is it Pinky and the Brain, or Pinky and Brains, or both?). Several times, characters popped up as mere sidenotes, only to return later as integral characters...who acted nothing like the people we'd originally met in other circumstances, with no explanation for this, even as a hand-wavey "oh, that job you thought he did, that was just a cover."

The worst was what would have ordinarily been a minor glitch - who called whom? - that, in this case, changed the entire tenor of the novel and basis for events. I couldn't stop thinking about that and flicking back pages to see if I was crazy or if the glitch actually happened for the rest of the novel.

Which may have had something to do with my ability to concentrate on the more challenging academic passages, come to think of it.

This SHOULD have been a challenging, engaging, enjoyable novel about mathematically summoning eldritch horrors and then dealing with the attendant paperwork.

Instead, it was a hot mess.(less)

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Jan 07, 2013 Timothy Ferguson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Assume the Cthulhu Mythos, the elder gods trying to break into reality to suck our brains, are real. Imagine the British Secret Service found definitive proof that this was the case. What would they do?

Bob, the main character, is part of the Laundry, the British Secret Service’s answer to the X-Files. He is a secret agent, but he can do magic — literal proper magic – with computers. He’s also a real secret agent in the, as Stross points out, in the way James Bond is not. Between world-saving adv...more

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Nov 02, 2012 Jan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-sci-fi

To be perfectly honest, I hated this book for about two-thirds of it. I probably never would have finished it if it hadn't been my book club book. I grumbled my way through it, fantasizing about giving it two stars on here.

There was a lot of mathematical and scientific stuff that sounded like mumbo jumbo to me (I discovered later that these things were real, just unknown to me). I also felt that a lot of it was boring, although I got the distinct impression that it was supposed to be, in order t...more

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Aug 15, 2012 April rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book, the first in a wonderful series, made me a Charles Stross fan immediately. He has such fun combining Cold War spy scenarios with Lovecraftian goth and computer tech/sys admin bureaucracy. And I have such fun reading it. Poor Bob, computer geek extraordinaire with that kind of snide, can't take anything seriously viewpoint that comes from being smarter than most people, but also smart enough to know his limitations, gets dragged into The Laundry. The Laundry is a top secret operation t...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Nancy Oakes rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lovecraftian-horror, sci-fi-fantasy, weird

Take a helping of HP Lovecraft, toss in a layer of spy fiction, add a hefty dose of computer hackers & math nerds as well as the absurdity that can exist among bureaucrats who manage a cubicle-filled office, and you've got The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. The title of the book covers not only the main story "The Atrocity Archive," but also "The Concrete Jungle," a novella that starts with one too many cow sculptures at Maynard Keynes, as well as an interesting essay by Stross entitl...more Take a helping of HP Lovecraft, toss in a layer of spy fiction, add a hefty dose of computer hackers & math nerds as well as the absurdity that can exist among bureaucrats who manage a cubicle-filled office, and you've got The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. The title of the book covers not only the main story "The Atrocity Archive," but also "The Concrete Jungle," a novella that starts with one too many cow sculptures at Maynard Keynes, as well as an interesting essay by Stross entitled "Inside the Fear Factory."

Bob Howard works for a super-secret government agency called The Laundry. He's a computer guy who does stuff like fix sick Beowulf clusters, calibrates tarot permutators and does security audits of collecting card games to ensure that "stoned artists" in Austin Texas don't accidentally come up with a "great node." A year earlier he'd applied for a job in active service, and as the novel opens, he's getting his first crack at it. His assignment is to break into a company called Memetix (UK) Ltd., where a mathematician has succeeded in duplicating the Turing-Lovecraft theorem. It's in the world's best interest that the theorem is kept under wraps -- because certain mathematical computations can rip "honking great holes in spacetime," and once that happens, those things that live in the angles of different universes can make their way into ours. His mission is successful, and some three months after a mishap during a training class lands him a suspension he is sent back out into the field again. He ends up in Santa Cruz, where he is supposed to talk to a gorgeous scientist named Mo who is not allowed to leave the United States because of the nature of her work. When she is kidnapped and Bob intervenes to help her (which is against SOP) he ends up with a head injury and a flight back home. Shortly afterwards, Bob gets a new job in the Laundry under Angleton, his new boss -- and is assigned to accompany Mo (now back in the UK) to Amsterdam -- and all hell literally breaks loose.

"The Concrete Jungle" finds our hero once again wrapped up in a job for Angleton -- where he is ordered to go to Maynard Keynes and count the cows. His findings lead to the possibility that someone is playing around with "gorgonism," and may be planning to unleash its power via hacked CCTV networks.

Both "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle" are great fun. Both make fun of the bureaucratic crap people in government jobs have to deal with -- budgets, paperwork for the sake of filling in paperwork, timekeeping and managers who have nothing better to do with their time than to make life tough on the employees and demand accurate paper clip counts in case of an audit. Bob's weird roommates at Chateau Cthulhu are also a good source of laughs. Beyond the humor of it all, Atrocity Archives combines spying, the occult and Lovecraftian horror into something very geeky and at the same time very original.

If you've got a geeky or irreverent sense of humor, this book should be just up your alley, especially if you also happen to be a fan of Lovecraftian-type horror, occult fiction and the occasional Cold War spy fiction novel. Perusing reviews, a lot of people have commented on the long time it takes to get into the story in "The Atrocity Archive," but I didn't care -- I was highly entertained; in all honesty, much more so by "The Atrocity Archive" than "The Concrete Jungle." Don't miss the essay at the end of the book -- it's well worth spending some time on.
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Jun 26, 2012 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bus-reads

I wish Goodreads would allow you to rate by half stars... my rating should be 3.5...

What a delicious book; a fantastic combination of spy thriller (ala Le Carre and Deighton); mingled with the claustrophobic, cranial horror of H.P. Lovecraft; and infused with enough tech jargon as to qualify as a hacker's delight. Imagine if you will that Alan Turing not only invented the computer, but was also able to untangle complex algorithms that unlock doors to countless outer dimensions which coexist with...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the best books I've read since the Hitch hikers triology. (Not couting any recent discworld books.) But as is the case with Terry Prachett's work, I can't love everything, even though I want to.

This and all the Laundry Files books are great. Bob Howard is smart, and geeky and brave but in the greatness-thrust-upon-him way; very likable.

As opposed to MacX (sp) the hero of some of his short stories is smart and geeky but also creepy and weak. And it's hard for me to care what happens to h...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-sf

You don't apply for a position at the Laundry. If you are a math genius, you stumble onto a particularly dangerous equation. If you are a computer whiz, you work out some algorithms that higher ups prefer to keep secret. If you are just a man on the street, you see too much -- say a cow turned into stone by a security camera -- and you are in whether you like it or not.

It turns out that magic has always been real, but very few ever stumbled onto its working methods or knew what to do with them...more You don't apply for a position at the Laundry. If you are a math genius, you stumble onto a particularly dangerous equation. If you are a computer whiz, you work out some algorithms that higher ups prefer to keep secret. If you are just a man on the street, you see too much -- say a cow turned into stone by a security camera -- and you are in whether you like it or not.

It turns out that magic has always been real, but very few ever stumbled onto its working methods or knew what to do with them when they did. Computers, advanced physics, and the math that supports them mean that magical formulae get discovered more frequently, and dangerous doorways into other universes can be accidently or maliciously opened by those who do. This is seldom a good idea. What's out there are beings more or less as H.P. Lovecraft described them only much worse.

This is the first in what is so far a three book series on The Laundry. It is a mash-up of spy fiction, The X Files, and The Office. Bob Howard is a young man who maintains the aging computers for The Laundry, but he wants to do field work. He gets his chance and finds himself spending hours standing in the rain, flying to California where he has to fight off some tentacled horror on a stairwell, and finally stepping into another universe via a portal in an Amsterdam B & B. He must also attend endless meetings and fill out tedious paperwork. Not even protecting life as we know it is as glamorous as it sounds.

Stross is known for hard sf novels that gather considerable praise but also leave readers disgruntled by the amount of computer talk that goes on. I assumed the science talk in The Atrocity Archives was all gobbledegook in keeping with the occult atmosphere. I pretended the incomprehensible passages were dialog from Monty Python. Then I started looking some of the words up on my dictionary app, and most of them were there with very real if obscure meanings. So there could be levels of comedy available only to geekier or wiser readers than myself.

Stross's novel could easily become a pretty good British TV series that would then be made into a dreadful SyFy Network series. What keeps this first book lively is the voice the author gives Bob. He is a smart and funny narrator, and the humor in the story comes more from his attitudes and observations than elaborate set pieces with outrageous creatures. (less)

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Jan 21, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror

In The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross perfectly blends Lovecraftian horror into a spy thriller. But don't think James Bond, though they have their own special gadgets, think bureaucrats mired in office politics and meetings who must battle bean counters as often as monsters.

Stross' protagonist, Bob Howard, is a Gen X hacker who gets drafted into the Laundry, the code name for the UK government agency which protects England from nasty beasties from beyond. It turns out all that complex math th...more

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Jan 11, 2012 Keith Stevenson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is an odd initiative by Orbit: not a novel, not a collection of short stories but two novellas and an essay by Charles Stross. Looking at the imprint page, I approached the work with some degree of trepidation. This is the pre-Iron Sunrise Stross. If the aforementioned Dan Brown has taught me anything it’s to be very wary of the so called ‘back-catalogue’.

Bob Howard is the IT go-to guy in the Laundry, an organisation where you have to sign the Official Secrets Act before you can even know o...more This is an odd initiative by Orbit: not a novel, not a collection of short stories but two novellas and an essay by Charles Stross. Looking at the imprint page, I approached the work with some degree of trepidation. This is the pre-Iron Sunrise Stross. If the aforementioned Dan Brown has taught me anything it’s to be very wary of the so called ‘back-catalogue’.

Bob Howard is the IT go-to guy in the Laundry, an organisation where you have to sign the Official Secrets Act before you can even know of its existence. Like most of the employees, Bob was press-ganged into service when his studentish dabblings with polynomial theory threatened to unleash enough dark energy to flatten Leeds. After months of boredom, his request for active duty is accepted and he finds himself in the type of situation that switches from uncomfortable tedium to underpant-staining terror in the firing of a synapse. The back story to the Laundry neatly marries real-life WWII events such as Bletchley Park’s code breaking efforts, Alan Turing’s work and SOE operations in Europe with a secret battle to stop squamous things From Beyond invading our realm and possessing and/ or eating us. In ‘The Atrocity Archive’ Bob is drawn deeper into the Laundry’s machinations as he goes up against a plot to assert pan-dimensional Nazi supremacy. In ‘The Concrete Jungle’, the use of Gorgonism as a national security tool goes horribly wrong.

The mix of Lovecraftian themes, dimension-hopping Nazis, bureaucratically hidebound yet super-secret government departments and high-tech computer geekdom married with unspeakable eldritch powers is an infectious one. And the ‘truth’ behind the Jewish holocaust in ‘The Atrocity Archive’ is both gruesome and effectively realised. The jokes are so-so and some of the situations predictable, most notably Bob’s ongoing rubber-stamp battle with sometime supervisor Harriet. Stross is still flexing his writerly muscles here looking for a more definitive voice. The essay at the end makes some interesting points about the nature of horror, but seems by inference to accord more weight to the stories in The Atrocity Archives than they really deserve. They’re just not that profound. What they are however is a fast-paced romp, and an enjoyable one at that. The Atrocity Archives is followed by another Bob Howard book, The Jennifer Morgue.(less)

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Oct 19, 2011 glimpsedafar rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, horror, reviewed

I'm a big fan of Charles Stross from other works of his, predominantly his trademark "drinking from a firehose" approach to technological world-building (as evinced in Accelerando, etc.) and his more recent novels starring DS Sue Smith (Halting State, Rule 34). The Atrocity Archives is my first dip into his so-called "Laundry universe" and I'm of two minds about it.

The good news is that his writing remains lively here, peppered with the typical witticisms and sparkling geek touches I've come to...more

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