On Her Majesty's Occult Service

Laundry Files #1-2

by Charles Stross

Bob Howard was just a typical hacker until he accidentally re-discovered the darkest secret of computational math and nearly summoned an Elder God. He soon found himself working at The Laundry - a bureau so secret even the government barely knows it exists - trying to fight eldritch horrors while fending off the dreaded paper clip audits

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, Humor, Science Fiction Fantasy

562 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

SF Encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/...

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...

Tor: http://us.macmillan.com/author/charle...

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.0 stars. This is an Omnibus Edition of the first two installments of "The Laundry" series by Charles Stross. See my individual reviews for The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue for a more detailed review of each. Overall, very good and worth reading but I liked the first book better than the second.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Bond meets H.P. Lovecraft, with a strong dose of Dilbert. Try being a geeky Bond-wannabe, saving the world from the tentacle monsters, while fending off the pointy-haired boss.

A lot of mileage is made with the requirement to fill in multitudinous forms in triplicate, having to account for every last paper-clip even when saving the world, and other tasks which any office drone (including myself) can identify. (As in Dilbert, when the boss proclaims that all passwords must contain letters, numbers, doodles, sign language, and squirrel noises).

This is a combined volume of the first 2 installments of the Laundry Files, The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. I had to order it on interlibrary loan, which is why I chose the combined volume, just being my usual efficient self. However, I think the two volumes could have used a bit more breathing room between them. TJM was a definite improvement over TAA (the use of Nazis in the first book put me in danger of getting my eyes stuck back in my head due to frequent eye-rolling).

I was amused and will probably continue on with it at some point. In the meantime, I have developed a strong desire for some calamari.

[Brian Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously... this book just earned itself a place in my TOP 5 FAVORITES. I can understand why many people might not care for it, since it meshes so many genres together; but that's exactly why I loved it! I'm so tired of cliched, predictable tales and stock players running their lines. You want something different? Exciting? Hysterical? Read this book.

I mean, we're talking about a hacker geek who gets conscripted into the British SuperBlack Ops group (MI-666?) because he was playing with a code that almost summoned a extra-dimensional monster into London. Whoops! Now working as an IT specialist and sometimes field agent for "The Laundry", Bob Howard runs around with a smartphone complete with a nextgen daughterboard filled with apps that allow him to used applied Non-Euclidean algorithms that access the omniverse and tap into sentient alien life as a proxy to do things like, oh... give him invisibility. And he usually carries a cybernetic Hand Of Glory for protection.

Yeah.

And by "alien life," I mean fun folks like Cthulhu and the rest of the Lovecraft gang. It seems there's been a treaty with the Deep Ones since before WWII, and Innsmouth is now a training ground for Occult Spies. Oh, and the USA has a version of The Laundry called "Black Chamber," who are almost as bad as Human Resources. See that's the other thing; besides being a mash-up of horror/espionage/technology thrills, it's also written with enough humor and absurdity to keep you thoroughly engrossed. I'm talking "Laugh Out Loud" moments here.

Will this book be over 50% of the heads of the people who try and read it? Probably. But 50% will get it, and 25% will love it. There's spy slang, computer terminology, hardcore mathematics, and major Lovecraft references. No, a mean a lot of all of those. But it's woven so well, told so wonderfully, characters so wacky... I absolutely loved it.

[J.D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Bond meets HP Lovecraft meets OFFICE SPACE, with hilarious results.

Bob Howard discovers that certain types of mathematics can open gateways into some very nasty dimensions. Once you discover that, you basically have no choice but to join up with The Laundry, Britain's anti-crawling-ancient-gibbering-horror agency. While battling Eldritch Horrors From Beyond Space and Time, Bob also has to contend with the bloody-minded (sometimes literally) bureaucrats of his own service. Occasionally a little too clever and obscure for their own good, The Laundry stories are still a lot of fun.

[Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over all I enjoyed this collection. Stross is very good at writing women, really! Jennifer Morgue was my favorite, I've always been a sucker for James Bond, and the twist is great.

[Roy Weedmark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Cthulhu mythos, so naturally, once I found this, I snatched it up. It's got a creative spin on the James Bond spy genre, but I feel it wasn't carried out to its full potential.
OHMOS is several books in one, each story getting better. My favorite happens to be the very last story in the book, and it is a creative take on the James Bond villain arc. However, this means I had to read through 2 other stories that were just okay.
My issues with the stories really boil down to just a few items. First off, OHMOS is very info dump heavy. So much in fact that it takes you completely out of the story. Pages upon pages of info dump. Second, the book glosses over the best parts. Right at the climax where our hero faces impossible odds, someone off screen just happens to take care of everything, and we never learn or get to see how.its almost as of the author couldn't decide on how the good guys win, just that they do.

[Meika · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine if THAT IT Guy from your office wrote a novel starring himself as James Bond, only retaining all the shitty qualities of That IT Guy (who is also basically Dilbert), with support from A Damsel In Distress (But she's smart! But She also gets dragged through an alternate universe by an alien, without the space suit that the guys have to wear, but they still find her tied up to a torture rack in a supernatural alien dungeon... NAKED, and she gets rescued out with hardly a scratch! Yay! So she can be a supportive listener when our Daring Hero comes back after seeing horrors indescribable. Wank wank. ... also she's a redhead.) And he leads a whole team of black ops dudes with nicknames, in space suits, through a cloak-and-dagger circle jerk.

I hate dilbert. I HATE That IT guy. And I resent every moment I spent reading his wet dream fantasy and I regret that I gave it a boost in the library's circulation stats. Ptooey!

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A interesting combination of the spy thriller with Lovecraftian horror and a bit of Stephenson techno-fiction. The book is a SF bookclub edition of two individually released novels, The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The first is the stronger of the two, cleverly integrating the genres while still reminding you of their strengths. It has both the mystique and thrills of Charles Stross' preferred Len Deighton spy novels, combined with the disturbing horror you'd find in a H.P. Lovecraft story. I'd honestly five star this book as a stand alone. Particularly rewarding is the backstory The Concrete Jungle, which won a Hugo.

The second is not as good a book, losing much of the horror nature of the first, while adopting a more humorous, perhaps satirical, look at a popular British movie character, with a bit more intelligence than an Austin Powers movie. Still, I missed the more disturbing aspects found in the first book, even if this one made me smile a little more. Three stars for this one, yielding a four star overall grade.

[Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! I loved it (or them). This volume contains the first two volumes (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue) of Stross' Laundry series as well as a couple of novellas. The series is a clever mash-up of science fiction, horror and espionage thrillers all told with laugh-out-load humor. Bob Howard is a hacker who is conscripted into the super-secret British Laundry agency when he was playing with code that dealt with Turing's last theorem (which disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis and permits NP-complete problems to be converted to p-complete ones, thus allowing real-time cryptology breaking and the generation of Dho-Nha geometries providing access to the multiverse where "here be monsters"). Once in the Laundry one can never leave (but at least it's not Microsoft!) and Bob is stuck in the IT department where he has to deal with internal politics, turf wars and software audits but eventually gets to do some field work trying to prevent or contain breaks allowing incursions from the parallel universes. Good characters, exciting stories and filled with fun word twists (rendering one metabolically incompetent, fecal-ventiltory intersections (when things go wrong)) and in jokes for anyone remotely associated with an IT department computer programming (Knuth's suppressed 4th volume in the Art of Computer Programming that deals with phase conjugate grammars for extra-dimensional summoning). I can't wait to read more of the series.

[Linda Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only beef with this compendium of stories is that the first book, "The Atrocity Archives" is rife with abbreviations, acronyms and organization names. There is a glossary in back, but I don't like having to use a glossary so much, and I forgot the meaning of an acronym soon after looking it up. But once I got the general idea and ignored those, I enjoyed the books and novellas. Some of the humor, pertaining to the British government, had me chuckling out loud.

[Grahm Eberhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give this book 3 stars but the world these stories take place in rates 5 stars. The mix of James Bond & H.P. Lovecraft with a touch of Douglas Adams is awesome and there are lots of good ideas and hilarious bits but the novels themselves drag on too long. The shorter stories were much more entertaining. I'd love to read a collection of tales set in this world where a demonic summoning is only an Android app away and the UN has a secret treaty with the Deep Ones.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a reread but it turns out I had never actually read The Jennifer Morgue before, so that was a nice surprise! The Laundry books are great fun- crammed with references to everything from Lovecraft to Fleming and more. Also, they're just way more plausible (yeah, okay) than most urban fantasy and if you occasionally would prefer not to have to work really hard at suspending the disbelief, they're refreshing.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an omnibus of the first two novels and short stories in Charles Stross’s Laundry series of spy novels set in a world where magic is a form of applied mathematics and Lovecraftian monsters lurk just across dimensional boundaries. They are in fact much neater than that description sounds, and you should read them.

[Alien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good, lots of fun action and a good amount of absurdity. some of the math/programming stuff went over my head, but my lack of knowledge didn’t really get in the way of understanding the plot or action.

All in all a great book (despite (because of?) the implied octopussy pun in The Jennifer Morgue)

[Jim Pefferly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Combines computers and the occult - there really is a thin line. Follows the exploits of an agent in the Laundry - England's Occult management service. It combines James Bond with HP Lovecraft - an interesting read.

[Gail]

Some people are Douglas Adams, and some are not.

Got through most of this, but the final story looks as if it's about rescuing someone from inside a video game and I think I'll pass. (Even though I have no problem with the Fforde books and people trapped inside a book.)

[Shawn Manning · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried. God knows I tried. It has everything I like in a book. Humor, Lovecraft & cartoon references. I'm still not sure if it's me or just the timing is off or what, but I could not muster any enthusiasm for this.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is two of his novels combined: 'The Atrocity Archives' and 'The Jennifer Morgue'. I highly recommend this author to anyone who loves really smart writing. Stross is one of the smartest wrtiers I've come across in decades.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bit Lovecraft, a little bit geek...

[Spencer B · Rating 4 out of 5]

HP Lovecraft meets James Bond meets Dilbert sprinkled with Neal Stephenson. Loved it.

[Tine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This had a wonderful mix of tech nerd, fighting the bad guys, and the unexplained.

[Ed Nemo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An oustanding compilation.

[Tim Rons · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was just okay.

[Patrick Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

HP Lovecraft meets Office Space meets John LeCarre. Too much fun to put down! Read about 300 pages in a day.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an omnibus of the first two books of The Laundry Files. This is a fun series that pushes a significant number of my buttons -- eldritch horror, cyclopean bureaucracy, and a healthy portion of serious science fiction in something that could be full of urban fantasy handwavium. As I rather enjoyed the first, I was pleasantly surprised that I found the second even better. It showed what could be done when we didn’t have to introduce either the world or the characters.

There were several laugh-out-loud moments while listening to this alone, which I find is always a mark of success. The James Bond send-up bits in the second book were great, and loaded the story with Easter Eggs for folks like me who grew up on the films. It reflected the Roger Moore years particularly well, which were part of my golden age of Bond. I also appreciated that they made the frame fit within the world, so the satire was grounded as well as fun.

[Robyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book. I wanted to like it - spy thriller meets the occult. How could it not be good? I struggled to get through this and almost stopped multiple times. Though skimmed the last 200 pages so did I really finish this?

[Andrew Kaiser]

Such an odd and entertaining series of books. Fantasy meets modern tech meets conspiracy theories. Readers might wish for more volumes to focus on their favorite character, but I’m always entertained. Sort of what Daniel O’Malley’s Checquy series hopes to be.

[Doctor Science · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[David H.]

Why I didn't finish this: I got halfway through the first chapter and I just couldn't get past the tone and the writing.

[DaNela · Rating 1 out of 5]

i just couldn't get into this book and decided to stop reading it.