The Atrocity Archives

MH Thaung reviewed The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Fun series starter

No rating

I’ve been meaning to read this for a while and was pleased to find it delivered what I expected: an entertaining mix of technology, bureaucracy and eldritch horrors (you can decide if the last by definition encompasses the other two…)

The narrative is in Bob’s first person, present tense point of view. I wasn’t especially taken with him as a character, though I wasn’t so put off as to bail out. He always managed to have the skills or items needed to meet the challenges before him, or some associate intervening at the right moment.

The office politics were boldly drawn. I wouldn’t have minded more subtlety, a bit more behind the scenes manipulation and gaslighting rather than the (office equivalent of) straight-up moustache-twirliness that came across. We were never really left in doubt of the outcome.

Overall, a fun series starter.

PaperbackReader reviewed The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Review of 'The Atrocity Archives' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It would be disingenuous to give this 5 stars, because although I thought it was excellent, I'm fairly sure I should've done some preparatory reading before tackling this. Charles Stross has officially made me feel dumb. The complexity of the data in this book (and, if this is any indicator, in all the following books) is daunting to someone of my layman-level comprehension. Magic-as-math, math-as-magic, and I'm over here feeling underqualified to read this. :)

Woger the Shrubber reviewed The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Review of 'The Atrocity Archives' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I'm hooked on this series for the dry wit. What the world needs now is more annoyingly competent heroes.

Keith Stevenson reviewed The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Review of 'The Atrocity Archives' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

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 …

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.