The Atrocity Archives
- 336
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“The Atrocity Archives” crosses office comedy with spy fiction and cosmic horror, with an IT technician for a hero. He works for a secret agency that deals with elder gods and parallel universes. Readers often need a second run at it because the opening is slow, and some find the technical jargon hard to follow; once it catches, they tend to enjoy it. The in-jokes delight some and strike others as nerdy showing-off.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The first novel in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross's witty Laundry Files series. Bob Howard is a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. His world was dull and safe - but then he went and got Noticed. Now, Bob is up to his neck in spycraft, parallel universes, dimension-hopping terrorists, monstrous elder gods and the end of the world. Only one thing is certain: it will take more than a full system reboot to sort this mess out . . .
Reading order · The Laundry Files
Full order & progress →- The Atrocity ArchivesThis book
7.67.6 / 10 - The Jennifer Morgue
7.87.8 / 10 - The Fuller Memorandum
8.08.0 / 10 - The Apocalypse Codex
8.08.0 / 10 - The Rhesus Chart
7.97.9 / 10 - The Annihilation Score
7.87.8 / 10 - The Nightmare Stacks
7.87.8 / 10 - The Delirium Brief
8.18.1 / 10 - The Labyrinth Index
7.97.9 / 10 - Dead Lies Dreaming
7.97.9 / 10 - Quantum of Nightmares
–Not ranked yet - Season of Skulls
–Not ranked yet - A Conventional BoyA Conventional Boy–Not ranked yet
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.5 across 363 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 71% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.8 | 36 | 10% |
| Hardcover | 7.5 | 327 | 90% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Atrocity Archives?
It has 336 pages — shorter than 74% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Science fiction — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
