It’s always a particular pleasure when you jump onboard a series of novels that have a lengthy back-catalogue. Charles Stross’s Laundry Files certainly qualify for that with 14 books so far. I’m indebted to the commenter on a web forum (Fark, I think) who recommended it.
The Atrocity Archives – published along with a novella, The Concrete Jungle, fills an interesting niche in the realm of modern Lovecraftian fiction. For starters it’s funny.
They are first-person narratives of Bob Howard, a system-admin and newly minted field agent for The Laundry – a branch of the UK civil service tasked with dealing with cosmic horrors.
The book was published in 2004 and is set in 2002-2003.
The blend of the mundane routine of the public service: training days, receipting, budgeting and office politics along with dark beings from other dimensions is rich vein to explore.
Stross himself began in tech and the book does fall into a little technobabble on occasion, but so long as you treat it as you’d find in Star Trek or Tom Clancy, you’d be fine. My suspicion of Clancy being an influence was confirmed in the author’s afterword where he was credited along with Len Deighton. And he made the point that the spy novels of the Cold War were in a way cosmic horrors themselves with the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the background unless things went just right for the protagonist.
I think if you shook up Clancy and Deighton along with Yes, Minister and The X-Files and maybe an introductory comp-sci textbook, you’d probably get something like this.
I intend to read more. Recommended.