The Atrocity Archives
core novel 2004 The Laundry Files
Record
| First published | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.89 (28,005 ratings, collected 2026-10-28) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781930846258 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Bob Howard, a computer specialist who stumbled onto mathematics that can open doors to other worlds, has been drafted into the Laundry, the secret British agency that deals with occult threats. On his first field assignment he must protect Dominique "Mo" O'Brien, an Irish logician whose research is coming dangerously close to bending reality. The trail runs through the Black Chamber, the agency's American counterpart, a terrorist cell hunting her work, and the Atrocity Archive, the classified record of the Nazi occult programme, to a frozen parallel universe where a being that feeds on heat has already destroyed one Earth and now wants ours. The book also contains the novella The Concrete Jungle, in which Bob investigates a surplus of concrete cows in Milton Keynes and uncovers a surveillance network capable of turning people to stone, misused in a power struggle inside the Laundry.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Laundry Files
- Series: The Laundry Files core; position 1 of 15 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Charles Stross
Awards (verified)
- Hugo Award (Best Novella), 2005: won; Awarded to the novella The Concrete Jungle, first published in this book.
- Locus Award (Best First Novel), 2003: finalist; Locus reader-poll placement, ranked 5, for the magazine serial of the short novel The Atrocity Archive, before its book publication.
- Locus Award (Best Novella), 2005: finalist; Locus reader-poll placement, ranked 2, for the novella The Concrete Jungle, first published in this book.
Notes
- Contains two Laundry stories: the short novel The Atrocity Archive, first serialised in a magazine in 2001-2002, and the novella The Concrete Jungle, which won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novella. The novella is not registered as a separate work because it was first published in this book.
- 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 1 of 15: next The Jennifer Morgue (2006)
- Internal chronology, within The Laundry Files: position 1 of 14: next Dead Lies Dreaming (2020)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Laundry Files
- Wikipedia: Charles Stross bibliography
- Reader ratings: Laundry Files series page
- ISBN-13 form of the recorded ISBN-10 0553378465 (same edition)
- Science Fiction Awards Database: Charles Stross
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