The Atrocity Archives
by Charles Stross, Lucius Shepard · first published 2004
59% recommend36% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Funny genre mashup of spy thriller, office comedy and Lovecraftian horror, narrated by an IT grunt in a secret British agency. Suits programmers and sci-fi fans, and works as the starting point for the Laundry series.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.
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…captures computing more accurately. On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to…
on “The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)” ↗…are described in a way that lets non-technical users image a system that at least has roughly the right inputs and outputs. I find that Charles Stross does this very well, particularly in Accelerando, Atrocity Archives, and Jennifer Morgue. From Atrocity Archives: "he'll have to enlist GCHQ and a scanning tunneling microscope to find it under all the 0xDEADBEEF spammed across the hard disk platters." Even without…
on “Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.” ↗Believe it or not, there's a novel that combines pretty much all these things: Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives." If you're into sci-fi, you need to check this out. It's a bizarre but hilarious mashup of James Bond, Slashdot, Office Space, and H. P. Lovecraft.
on “Lake Vostok Reached” ↗Most anything by Charles Stross, especially the Laundry series (Atrocity Archives, Jennifer Morgue, etc)
on “Ask HN: Sci-Fi novels?” ↗…economic growth. However, capitalism in its current form of all-consuming consumerism, a system that must eat everything including itself, I'm not so sold on. Just finished reading the Laundry Files (Atrocity Archives/Charles Stross) thanks to a recommendation on HN. One of the terrible beasts mentioned in the book is a creature that eats all the information in its universe, rushing the universe to entropy death. The…
on “Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid” ↗Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives and others in the Laundry series. Not foolishness, but a good sense of humor. For foolishness, try Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures.
on “Ask HN: Any book recommendations for Geek Humour?” ↗Oh, a little more Stross: the Laundry books, starting with The Atrocity Archives. The British Secret Service has a division which guards against Lovecraftian occult horrors --- and your narrator is one of its I.T. grunts.
on “Ask HN: What sci-fi books are you reading?” ↗Odd coincidence that I literally just finished reading The Atrocity Archives about ten minutes ago. Great book, loved it. Thought the series might have been the inspiration for the movie Cabin in the Woods, but seems not.
on “H.P. Lovecraft – Against the World, Against Life (2004) [pdf]” ↗…Ed Yourdon 15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden 16. The Philip K. Dick Reader 17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll 18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli 19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene 20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross 21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates
on “Ask HN: What are some must read books for computer programmers?” ↗for a novel, how about Charles Stross' "The Atrocity Archives" - somewhere much colder and more frightening.
on “Hitler’s Antarctic base: the myth and the reality [pdf]” ↗…by Charlie Stross, one of my favorite science fiction authors. Charlie is one of us, a unix/web guru before he became a full time author and, I believe an HN regular. Take a look at Accelerando or The Atrocity Archives.
on “"Nothing like this will be built again" - A Nuclear Reactor Tour” ↗…episodes and forget the underlying destination or continuity. It's the only way I can carry on when there's been two books that really didn't work. Well, more one book and one ending that failed hard. Atrocity Archives and the other Bob books were some of the most entertaining, delightfully observed comedy fiction I've read. Nightmare Stacks didn't really join up, but was a rollicking good tale, and some interesting…
on “Lessons learned: writing really long fiction” ↗I'm about to read /The Rhesus Chart/ by cstross. If you aren't up to date, don't start there, start with /The Atrocity Archives/.
on “Ask HN: What Books Are You Reading?” ↗…your interpretation of him being salty about tech moving too fast. You dismissal sounds a little shallow: there's more to sci-fi than AI, and he doesn't just write sci-fi - his Merchant Princess and Atrocity Archives books are fantastic.
on “We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus” ↗Stross next to Gibson and Stephenson... hmm. I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line. I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to the succinct…
on “Snow Crash Revisited: Grokking a Satire of Mimesis” ↗