Summary
This satiric Lovecraftian horror/SF thriller collects two related, previously published novellas, "The Atrocity Archive" and the Hugo Award-winning "The Concrete Jungle." George Smiley's Circus has nothing on the Laundry, the super-secret British intelligence agency where Bob Howard works. After mathematician Alan Turing proved that certain mathematical equations could summon unearthly forces from other universes, the government founded the Laundry both to codify such summonings and to ensure that others did not deliberately or inadvertently tear holes in the space-time continuum. Laundry operative Bob Howard can just about manage to triumph over the slimy tentacled beings from another dimension that he confronts on a regular basis...but the bureaucracy and nasty office politics prove to be more difficult and dangerous obstacles.
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Media Reviews
"[A] neat mix of horrific fantasy...with contemporary SF. Add aspects of spy thrillers and Dilbertian office comedy....[S]narky and fun....[A] very breezy, fun, and imaginative novel....[G]reat fun....[D]efinitely to be recommended." -- Rich Horton
-- sfsite.com
"With often hilarious results, the author mixes the occult and the mundane, the truly weird and the petty....[W]onderful fun."
-- Publishers Weekly
"[A] bizarre yet effective yoking of the spy and horror genres....Stross's genius lies in devoting fully as much time to the bureaucratic shenanigans of the Laundry as he does to its thamaturgic mission." -- Paul Di Filippo
-- Washington Post Book World
"[T]he most droll horror novel in a long time. Much of the action is completely nuts, but Stross manages to ground it in believability through his protagonist's deadpan reactions to both insane office politics and supernatural mayhem....[S]cience fiction's more pleasant surprise of the year so far." -- Michael Berry
-- San Francisco Chronicle
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Pr
Published date: 2004
Size: 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Weight: 1.05 pounds
Pages: 295
Publisher's Notes
The father of modern computer science, Alan Turning paves the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when used by Nazi Germany's Ahnenerbe-SS to perform a summoning, results in an unexpected evil brought to Earth through a portal to an alternate universe.
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