The Atrocity Archives

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The Atrocity Archives
Author	Charles Stross
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Golden Gryphon Press
Publication date	May 28, 2004
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	295 pp
ISBN	ISBN 1-930846-25-8
Followed by	The Jennifer Morgue

The Atrocity Archives (2004, ISBN 1-930846-25-8) contains two stories by British author Charles Stross, consisting of the short novel The Atrocity Archive (originally serialized in Spectrum SF) and The Concrete Jungle, which won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novella.

The stories are Lovecraftian spy thrillers involving a secret history of the 20th century. Horror elements such as the Nazis using higher mathematics to open "gates" to other dimensions are combined with humorous elements satirizing bureaucracy. The protagonist of both stories is a computer expert named Bob Howard forced to work for a secret British intelligence organization called "The Laundry".

A sequel entitled The Jennifer Morgue, patterned after the James Bond movies, was released in November in 2006.

Stross's earlier story A Colder War also mixes elements of Lovecraft and espionage, and is sometimes mistaken as a tie-in with the Bob Howard stories, however the fictional background and assumptions are quite different.

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Another work of speculative fiction that tackles many of the same themes (albeit from a Catholic perspective) is Tim Powers' Declare. In the afterword, Stross notes that friends warned him against reading Declare while he was working on The Atrocity Archives due to the strong parallels between the two works.

In the introduction to the Science Fiction Book Club 2-in-1 edition of Atrocity Archives with The Jennifer Morgue, Stross mentions that his inspiration for the spy in these novels is closer to the out-of-place bureaucrats of Len Deighton than to the James Bond model.