Rule 34 [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Charles Stross (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 5, 2011

"The most spectacular science fiction writer of recent years" (Vernor Vinge, author of Rainbows End) presents a near-future thriller.

Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh is head of the Rule 34 Squad, monitoring the Internet to determine whether people are engaging in harmless fantasies or illegal activities. Three ex-con spammers have been murdered, and Liz must uncover the link between them before these homicides go viral.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The act of creation seems to come easily to Charles Stross…[He] is peerless at dreaming up devices that could conceivably exist in 6, 60 or 600 years’ time.”
The New York Times

“One of the most intelligently and philosophically detailed near futures ever conceived. Dazzling, chilling, and brilliant.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“A savvy, funny, viciously inventive science fiction novel.” Cory Doctorow, author of For The Win

"Entertaining and propulsive storytelling." Locus

(x ) --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

About the Author

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He holds degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist. He is now a full-time writer.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover (July 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441020348
• ASIN: B007F7R0WM
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,362,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Stross, 47, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella, Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst).

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#62 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#88 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction

#62 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#88 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 99 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Follow-on from Halting State July 7, 2011

By James R. Caplan

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Charlie Stross is one of the new SF shining stars with an amazingly refreshing approach to his work. This sparkling novel takes place in the near future (15-30 years out)and is a follow-on to Halting State (Ace Books, 2008) but is not a sequel by any means and you don't have to read HS first. Only one character, Detective Inspector Liz Cavanaugh, returns from that story.

The plot is very difficult to summarize without spoiling it completely. So here are the skeletal details:
It is a detective novel, writen entirely from the characters' perspectives as it moves from character to character. It extrapolates everything excessive in our current culture and creates an almost dystopian Scotland of 2035. It is very sexually explicit. There is coincidence after coincidence. There is a secret behind the scenes that you only glimpse at first before it makes itself known. This revelation almost makes you want to reread the book because the story takes on an entirely new interpretation. Though very grisly, there are many humerous moments and you will find yourself laughing out loud through long portions of this book. Highly recommended, one of the year's best so far.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars pretty good near future non-dystopic SF book July 13, 2011

By C. Woody Butler

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Ok, I read this pretty much as soon as I got it - and I'm re-reading it now so it's probably to early to really write this review since this is a book that really takes multiple readings to wrap your head around. It's sort of like The Sixth Sense [Blu-ray] - you watch it and you know there's stuff going on that you don't quite see, but it's really cool and it drags you along, and when you're done and you go "Oh!" and it's so much cooler now because you understand and you go back and read it again and go "OH!!" at all those points where you knew there was something else going on but you weren't in the right place to see it. This is that kind of book.

This is a sequel to Halting State, but pretty much there's only one character from that book in this book, and she was just on the edges of Halting State, so really it's a standalone book in the same universe. It also feels like sort of a prequel to Accelerando but maybe that's just me, and that might even be giving too much away.

The basic story is sort of a police procedural (but not really?) combined with a "Life 2.0" or even maybe "Life 3.0" primer about how the world will be after all the bubbles burst and cheap auto-fabbing technology is available on the "village blacksmith" level. With pervasive computing made simple with virtual technology and pervasive observation by the government, and work assignments by smart engines (think amazon's mechanical turk, or crowd sourcing) because everything's so complex a person can't really manage the chaos, mix police, manic killers, auditors (a carry-over theme from Halting State), and a legal system to complex for a person to do the actual charging, into some frothy satisfying deep stoutish beer of wonder. And yes, there is a small subtheme of brewing beer in this.

To me this felt more utopian than distopian - the characters in the book might not have had great lives but there weren't killer androids lurking in the streets or police dragging people away on the flimsiest of excuses, people worked, they had what they needed, they had magic gadgets that could make most anything with the right magic spells you culd download from the internet (but keep your virus checker up to date!), so I'd think it's more better than worse ;).

There is some talk of kinky sex in this (ok, I know, I'm an adult, I should be able to just ride over this, but I wouldn't let my son read this yet, which is sad cuz he'd like alot of it I think) but no kinky sex scenes, as such, it was more like a horror movie - have kinky sex and get what's coming to you.

All in all - while it wasn't a total surprise the ending was pretty satisfying and pretty much promised at least one more sequel (I don't think he's killed this series yet!) which I'm looking forward too, especially if he folds this book's events in with some of the characters from Halting State.

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great SF, mediocre Stross August 12, 2011

By Robert Wierenga

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm giving this three stars because I'm grading on a curve -- this is mediocre in comparison to Stross's earlier work, although probably a 4-star when compared to other sci-fi. Since most people, at this point in his career, probably read Stross because he's Stross, that seems fair to me.

I'm a big-to-huge fan of a lot of Stross's other novels, especially the Eschaton (Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise) and Laundry (Atrocity Archives/Jennifer Morgue/Fuller Memorandum) series. I have not read Halting State, and didn't realize that Rule 34 was a sequel to Halting State until after I'd read Rule 34. So, full disclosure: my tepid response to Rule 34 might be because I wasn't familiar with the Halting State world.

I don't think so, though; Rule 34 seems like a collection of nifty ideas that fail to cohere into a good book. The first problem, for me, was the choice of a second-person narrative voice. I found it to be irritating, and almost literally tiring, and never really got used to it. There's a reason fiction is almost never written in that voice: it's inherently distancing and disorienting for the reader. I found it especially off-putting here, because it was combined with a narrative structure in which the "viewpoint," such as it was, appeared to jump from character to character (so the "you" was a constantly rotating around 10 or so characters). I'm sure this was a quite deliberate choice, and I'm sure that Stross is saying something about the substance of the novel with that choice -- spoilers prevent me from saying more -- but even though I get it, it still didn't work for me.

Second, the plot did not flow terribly well. It felt like the first 3/4 of the book was devoted to introducing the characters and setting the scene, leaving just the last 1/4 to "solve" the mystery that was preoccupying the characters. I thought the resolution was rushed and not terribly coherent. I understand the double twist at the very end of the book (I think), but I don't believe it, nor do I think it flows very naturally from what had come before.

It's still a Stross book, which means it's often very funny, and usually very clever. But I'd recommend starting elsewhere if you're new to Stross.