The Atrocity Archive

The Atrocity Archive is a novel by Charles Stross, the first novel in The Laundry Files, a series that blends Lovecraftian sci-fi horror, British spy fiction pastiche, and bureaucratic office comedy. It was originally serialized in Spectrum SF (2001-2002), then released as The Atrocity Archives (Golden Gryphon Press, 2004), accompanied by the Laundry Files short story "The Concrete Jungle". 
Like most of the Laundry Files books, The Atrocity Archive is narrated by Stross's character Bob Howard, an employee of the secret British occult agency known as The Laundry. It is set, according to the author, in 2002.Charlie's Diary, "The Laundry Files: An Updated Chronology," by Charles Stross.
== Inspiration ==
In his acknowledgements, Stross writes: "Three authors in particular made it possible for me to imagine this book and I salute you, H. P. Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson, and Len Deighton."The Atrocity Archives, "Acknowledgements," by Charles Stross. Neal Stephenson is a leading writer in the cyberpunk mode of science fiction, best known for his 1992 novel Snow Crash.Wired, "Snow Crash Is a Cyberpunk Classic." Len Deighton is a British spy novelist known for novels like The Ipcress Files with a "sardonic working-class hero."The Guardian, "Why Len Deighton’s Spy Stories Are Set to Thrill a New Generation", by Vanessa Thorpe, May 2, 2021.
Stross has explained that the idea for the book began in 1992 with the question, "How do you put the horror back into H. P. Lovecraft?... You mate it with something that truly is horrifying." This led to his short story "A Colder War," a "sort of sequel to At the Mountains of Madness" in which various global powers sought to steal alien supertechnology, the tools of an extinct race, and put them to use as weapons.... World War Three breaks out, Cthulhu himself is deployed as a weapon from the crypt in the Urals, everybody dies horribly, or worse, wishes they could die.Stross felt that this merger of Mythos with Cold War paranoia "worked really, really well as a horror story.... But, while I wanted to do more with this idea, I couldn’t do it in that particular setting. It was too dark."
He decided he needed to leaven the horror by "add[ing] some snarky humor to it," leading him to the idea that he would take a somewhat grungy, down-at-heels, peeling-paint British government agency, dealing with something obscure and quite terrifying, and parachute into it somebody who is totally inappropriate, utterly unsuited to that sort of office culture.Lightspeed Science Fiction & Fantasy, "Interview: Charles Stross," November 2014.
== Premise ==
The Atrocity Archive introduces the premise of the Laundry Files series, which is that the eldritch horrors described by Lovecraft are real, they gain access to our reality through applied higher mathematics, and there is a branch of the British secret service dedicated to protecting an unsuspecting public from these occult threats. 
Howard explains: Everything you know about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little problem that this isn’t the only universe we have to worry about.... We live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology,The MIT Press Reader, "The Many-Worlds Theory, Explained," by John Gribbin, May 20, 2020. all possible parallel universes coexisting. The opener of the gates to these other universes is maths: When we carry out a computation it has side effects that leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there are listeners; sometimes we can coerce them into opening gates. These listerners are sometimes known as External Intelligences, or EIs: "What the mediaeval magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved."
== The Laundry ==
The implication of The Laundry Files' premise is that there exist "forces so sinister that a momentary relaxation of vigilance would see all that is human blotted out." This vigilance is provided, in the United Kingdom at least, by the Laundry.
The Laundry are "loyal servants of the crown and defenders of the human race against nameless gibbering horrors from beyond spacetime." Howard provides a thumbnail history: "The Laundry used to be part of an organisation called SOEWikipedia, "Special Operations Executive."—indeed, the Laundry is the sole division of SOE to have survived the bureaucratic postwar bloodletting of 1945." The SOE's Q Department was the unit tasked with combating the Nazis' occult forces; it got its nickname from the fact that "back in the Second World War, they were based in a requisitioned Chinese laundry in Soho." 
It was originally led by Claude Dansey, a real-world British intelligence officer described as a "former SIS dude, didn’t get on well with the top nobs." In Stross's alternate history, he "was stuck in charge of SOE"; in actual history, his hostility to SOE was notorious.Coldspur, "Claude Dansey's Mischief," by Tony Percy, June 30, 2021.
Much of the humour in the Laundry Files books comes from the fact that "the Laundry is first and foremost a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like any other government agency." Howard must cope not only with eldritch horrors but with bureaucratic infighting, management fads, and the inevitable paperwork.
But in other ways, the Laundry is very much unlike other government agencies. "It is a Very Bad Idea to violate Laundry security policy," Howard notes. "Because Security is staffed by things that you really don’t want to get mad at you—in fact, you don’t even want them to notice you exist."
== Setting ==
Much of the novel is set in a modern-day England that closely resembles our own, because the weird forces threatening our universe are carefully kept secret by institutions like the Laundry.
Dansey House: The Laundry's main headquarters is Dansey House, "a Victorian rookery of cabbage-coloured plasterboard walls and wheezing steam pipes somewhere in Hackney." (Elsewhere in the novel, Howard describes a secret entrance to the HQ in the "one public toilet in Mornington Crescent station"--which is near Camden Town, quite some distance from Hackney. This may be an example of Howard changing details in his story for security reasons.) 
Dunwich, Norwalk: The "village that used to be called Dunwich" is a Laundry training center, not to be confused with the other Dunwich. "There are no roads in or out of Dunwich; the Ministry of Defence took over the entire village back in 1940 and redirected the local lanes, erasing it from the map and the collective consciousness of Norfolk as if it never existed." The whole area is slowly crumbling into the North Sea.
Manchester: Site of the Laundry's "own invisible college."
== References ==
Category:Novels
Category:Charles Stross works