Down on the Farm

Name: Down on the Farm
Author: Charles Stross

expanded short fiction 2008 The Laundry Files

Record

First published	2008
Original language	EN
Work type	short fiction
Canon status	expanded
Reader rating	3.97 (3,678 ratings, collected 2026-10-28)

Synopsis

Bob Howard is sent to investigate strange goings-on at the Funny Farm, the Laundry's own secure psychiatric unit, where agents broken by their work, or who know too much to be let go, are kept well away from writing implements and diagrams with the wrong sort of angles. His manager insists the job needs someone relatively new, an agent fresh enough not to attract the inmates' professional attention. Ostensibly answering a cry for help from one of the patients, Bob has to work out whether the trouble is the institution's usual strangeness or something far more serious, and finds that the truth is weirder than either.

Where it sits

Universe: The Laundry Files
Series: The Laundry Files core; position 12 of 15 in the series' recorded order
Author: Charles Stross

Notes

Novelette first published online by Tor.com in 2008; set between The Jennifer Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum.
From the series record (The Laundry Files): The main sequence about the Laundry, Britain's secret occult intelligence agency, from Bob Howard's first field mission to the agency's end.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.

Publication order, within the series The Laundry Files: position 3 of 15: previous The Jennifer Morgue (2006) · next Overtime (2009)

Sources

← The Laundry Files dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.