The Atrocity Archives

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Science Fiction / Stross, Charles	4-week checkout	Due 05-07-2024
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Science Fiction / Stross, Charles	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024

Atrocity archive -- Concrete jungle -- Afterword: inside the fear factory.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Highly recommended submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on August 23, 2012, 3:23pm SPOILER ALERT WARNING!
In his first of "The Laundry" series, a sci fi spoof on James Bond novels, Charles Stross introduces us to his unlikely hero, Bob (not the character's real name because he's now a secret agent). Like most of his colleagues, Bob is a geek, like most of his colleagues, so geeks like me will appreciate the characters and all the jokes about them. Bob, along with roommates Pinky and the Brain (their code names/nick names as they are a gay couple) must save the day from demons. They work alongside zombies and look at outdated government posters warning about the dangers inherent in their work, such as "Loose lips sink ships" and "Do you suspect that your colleague is a dangerous demon from another dimension or a homosexual? Report him!" Yes, it's an average day, if wacky, for Bob, until he has to save the day from modern-day Nazis trying to take over the Earth via a portal from another dimension.
I highly recommend this and all other books by this author! He spoofs the British government, homophobia, sexism and much more in these intense yet hilarious novels.

Read and reviewed in 2009 submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 17, 2021, 11:49pm 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 he could put us in. It left me wondering just how in-crowd with the geeks you had to be just to understand the strings of words he put together. I couldn't read it. And that's rare. (Scott said the book is really divided into thirds, and the story really begin at the middle third. I just can't imagine plowing through the first third to get there.)

Nonetheless, Scott really thought I'd like Stross' other works, so I agreed to try one more. The Atrocity Archives is really good. The world in this book is geeky, and I'm sure I missed some in-jokes, but I didn't feel left out because of it, probably because the occasionally sardonic main character is something of a misfit as well.

The universe is ours, except that there is a top secret government agency keeping us safe from demons/aliens that can be called, purposefully or accidentally, through various mathematical and theoretical formulations. See, Ghostbusters plus Matrix, with a little Bond. The characters are incredibly funny, the twists truly unexpected, the horror occasionally a bit too graphic, and the universe fascinating. If you're looking for something new and mild horror is OK, I strongly recommend you give this a try.