Rating: 
Summary: Meh ...
Review: A fun read, especially if you've got a degree in CS and/or are addicted to slashdot. The CS in-jokes and pop-culture references are pretty good, but get old after a while. Unfortunately, the characters are pretty thinly drawn (a complaint I had about Stross' Singularity Sky also). The main character is your typical geek who falls into a lot more trouble than he was expecting. The love interest is every 13 year-old geek's wet dream (she's beautiful and loves Knuth's books!). Everyone else in the book is completely forgettable or cliched (e.g. the "mad scientist" roomates Pinky and Brains).
The plot is uneven, slow in the first half and shifting into "action" mode in the second half. The mixture of a modern office atmosphere and Lovecraft reminided me of Spencer's Resume with Monsters, which IMHO held together much better.
I got introduced to Stross by his short story "A Colder War" which exists in the same Lovecraft meets the military-industrial-complex universe. The short story was a lot more streamlined and did not have the tedious amount of exposition about magic cum mathematics as the Atrocity Archives. A Colder War is available online, and IMHO a much better read.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: Charles Stross is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors, and this book is largely responsible. Great concepts, quirky humor, truly awful and terrifying situations, fast-paced ... what more could you ask for? Why are you still reading this review? Go and buy the book already!
Rating: 
Summary: Hilarious "hard dark fantasy"
Review: Charlie Stross has been making a name for himself over recent years for his extraordinary "Accelerando" stories, chronicling human and post-human civilisation towards and past the Singularity event at which technology becomes sentient and near-godlike. Another future world is being explored in the novel Singularity Sky and sundry short stories/future novels - also post-Singularity, and imbued with a pervading humour even through some quite horrifying passages.The Atrocity Archives is best read with this in mind: despite looking a bit like horror, this is really hard science fiction with a lot of humour and a very weird Lovecraftian twist regarding the nature of the world. It's geeky but cool, a clever take on the spy thriller, and the only connection it has with "A Colder War" is that it's Lovecraft-inspired spy fiction by the same author. (Indeed, other even sillier Lovecraft homages appear in his short story collection "Toast").
The one-star review below should be taken with a grain of salt: don't come to any book with brittle expectations and then complain that it's the book's fault when your expectations are dashed! The Atrocity Archives is quite unlike anything else out there at the moment, but those familiar with Stross, Cory Doctorow, or various other contemporary sf authors' up-to-the-minute genre-busting fiction will eat it up with gusto.
And the beginning passage, in which a succession of everyday events (such a pager going off in our hero's pocket) are made ominous by horror-inflected prose, is pure gold.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious "hard dark fantasy"
Review: Charlie Stross has been making a name for himself over recent years for his extraordinary "Accelerando" stories, chronicling human and post-human civilisation towards and past the Singularity event at which technology becomes sentient and near-godlike. Another future world is being explored in the novel Singularity Sky and sundry short stories/future novels - also post-Singularity, and imbued with a pervading humour even through some quite horrifying passages. The Atrocity Archives is best read with this in mind: despite looking a bit like horror, this is really hard science fiction with a lot of humour and a very weird Lovecraftian twist regarding the nature of the world. It's geeky but cool, a clever take on the spy thriller, and the only connection it has with "A Colder War" is that it's Lovecraft-inspired spy fiction by the same author. (Indeed, other even sillier Lovecraft homages appear in his short story collection "Toast").
The one-star review below should be taken with a grain of salt: don't come to any book with brittle expectations and then complain that it's the book's fault when your expectations are dashed! The Atrocity Archives is quite unlike anything else out there at the moment, but those familiar with Stross, Cory Doctorow, or various other contemporary sf authors' up-to-the-minute genre-busting fiction will eat it up with gusto.
And the beginning passage, in which a succession of everyday events (such a pager going off in our hero's pocket) are made ominous by horror-inflected prose, is pure gold.
Rating:
Summary: The BOFH wanders into a tale by H.P. Lovecraft
Review: For those of you who have read the Bastard Operator From Hell series and are sysadmins this book will be a completely fantastic read, for the rest of you it will just be fantastic. Bob Howard is nothing like the American author who wrote the Conan tales, he's a systems geek for a very dreary agency of the British government where paperclips are counted and where you'd get reprimanded for not putting a cover sheet on your TPS reports. One day Bob is asked to help out with a field operation, and that, and some quick thinking during a departmental training course, get him transferred from systems administration to occult field operations. From there things just get worse as he is sucked into a conspiracy to open a portal to an alternate universe to let in one of the elder gods or into an interdepartmental conspiracy to eliminate his department. Incredibly fun, there are lots of ideas in here that are just fun to play with after you put the book down.
Rating:
Summary: Not Charles Stross' best work...
Review: I really liked Charles Stross' "Singularity Sky", so I purchased
"The Atrocity Archives". "The Atrocity Archives" is a much
weaker book. Stross takes a few premises (magic exists as
as suppressed science, all of the major countries have groups
in charge of magic suppression, great scientists and mathematicians
have stumbled on the keys to this suppressed knowledge) and builds
a book without much in the way of characters or even plot. The
book is really just a sequence of episodes. The plot centers
around a guy who is basicly a system administrator who gets
drafted into the larger work of technology suppression and
The Fight Against Evil. The book reads like a collection
of stories, which perhaps it was.
Stross mentions that while he was writing The Atrocity
Archives, Tim Powers book "Declare" was published. "Declare"
has a similar plot, but a much stronger story line and stronger
characters.
Rating:
Summary: Terror from beyond the computer screen
Review: If you've read Tim Powers' Declare, this is a really different take on the same idea: Most major world events of the last century, especially the ones that have killed lots of people, are due to government efforts to both conceal and contain dangers far more horrific than the ones they're telling us about. The essential problem is that mathematicians and computer hackers, if they're good enough, can accidentally arrive at solutions that can open doorways to other dimensions, where things dwell that are utterly malevolent and which will consume our entire world if they get the chance. What are these monsters like? Lovecraft wasn't writing fiction, basically.
Bob Howard is a computer hacker who did the wrong kind of really good work and got forcibly recruited into the super-secret, but badly underfunded, agency that deals with this threat. Eventually, he's unlucky enough to get what he asks for-promotion to field work. Suddenly, Bob is dealing with demon-possessed terrorists, philosophy professors who've found a new and different way to get too close to the truth, and threats to the very fabric of existence. Life is isn't boring anymore. And that's all just in The Atrocity Archive. This book also contains a novella, "The Concrete Jungle," the further adventures of Bob Howard through the really dark side of the world.
Very, very good
Rating:
Summary: Sqamously good read
Review: In this world, sitting next to the computers in a secret government agency are the remains of a small sacrifice. Maybe the shuffling undead assistant that brought you tea is standing about, maybe the boss called you on the carpet earlier and you had to speak truths because you were bound by spell to... Stross wrote a book so good, so full of dark humor and great descriptive flashes, that I read it in a sitting. The setting is at once ridiculous and darkly real, not because of the subject matter (equal parts Lovecraft and Cold War thriller) is normal and expected-- far from it. Stross just writes scenes so well that they all hang together in a wonderful way. Even if it's not a great work of literature it is a great read.
If you read and enjoyed the attitude of a Quiller book, stayed awake too long reading Lovecraft, know who Don Knuth is, read about Alan Turing and have read the Atlantic Monthly article by Vannevar Bush you will order this book right now.
Rating:
Summary: Electrify Your Synapses with Stross' Livewire Lovecraft Show
Review: These two droll stories are amazing and hopefully herald the start of a cycle of "Laundry" tales. Stross' obsession with science, computers, internet technology, office management structures (!) and HP Lovecraft meshes into a dizzying fun reading experience. Somehow, massive exposure to all this information - cleverly turned on its head to meet the demands of the stories - makes your synapses sizzle and crackle, giving rise to the feeling that you are smarter. This is MUST READ stuff for Lovecraft fans, but if you like the work of Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, or Grant Morrison's THE INVISIBLES, then this is more or less guaranteed to flip your wig.
Rating:
Summary: Electrify Your Synapses with Stross' Livewire Lovecraft Show
Review: These two droll, amazing and entertaining stories hopefully herald the start of a cycle of "Laundry" tales. Stross' obsession with science, computers, internet technology, office management structures (!), occult history and HP Lovecraft meshes into a dizzyingly fun reading experience. Somehow, massive exposure to all this information - cleverly turned on its head to meet the demands of the stories - causes synapses to sizzle and crackle, giving rise to an illusory boost of one's own intelligence. Yes, Virginia, reading Stross makes you feel smarter, as others have observed.... This is Must Read stuff for Lovecraft fans, but if you like the work of Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, or Grant Morrison's THE INVISIBLES, then this is more or less guaranteed to flip your wig.
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