Customer Reviews

Rule 34

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Unlike the "Halting State" prequel which I thought too tied up in the virtual world, "Rule 34" spends more time on society and technology in a near-future sci-fi universe. Mr Stross paints a believable picture of a world where the Net permeates everything and takes current hot tech topics like DRM, 3D printing, Augmented Reality to their logical conclusions. This is the near-future, more readable "Diamond Age" showcasing a number of technologies and societal changes we're quite likely to see in the next decade.

Rule 34 highlights the science fictional nature of 2011, where people really do have robot vacuum cleaners. Much of our present reality was not as easily imagined back in, say, 1976, and Rule 34 revels in that aspect of today, updated, of course, by a further decade or two. Augmented reality glasses and makerbots are, at their heart, less radical than the internet and its resulting globalization. Other Stross novels -- most notably, Accelerando -- have played with the idea of the Singularity, an idea that Stross argues is mistaken. Here, he highlights the Singularity we have already passed through.

Rule 34 is also a fun read, with memorable characters, and a compelling use of the second person narrator.

Rule 34 is a near future police procedural novel by Charles Stross.

Disclaimer: Charles Stross writes this whole novel in 2nd person. It drove me up the wall. It's jarring, irritating and made the novel hard to read. If he never writes in 2nd person again I'll be happy as a clam. When I likely read another of his novels it will be despite this.

Rule 34 also marks the third book in a row I've read that was set in the UK. But this time it's Edinburgh Scotland. The title comes from the popular internet meme that states "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions." Probably because one of the three main POV characters, Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, works in the division of the Edinburgh police department that stalks the internet in search of illegal porn. Considering there is some porn today that would make me want to scrub my mind with steel wool, this is not a pleasant job. The other prime POV characters are Anwar Hussein, a former small time crook now part of a scam that involves him being the honorary consul representing a small central asia breakaway republic. And the Toymaker, a functioning paranoid schizophrenic who also happens to to be the front man for a international criminal organization called..er..The Organization.

The book focuses on a series of murders that involve strange coincidences and malfunctions involving common household items that also just happen to be killing many of the prime movers in the spam underworld. All roughly on the same day. The book does an excellent job extrapolating what police procedure might look like 20 years from now, with everything in the cloud, a smartphone in every pocket, and practical applications of virtual reality used to track and present data visually to all the police working on a case. The book starts fairly slow, with none of the major or minor POV characters interacting, but progresses like a whirlpool, moving faster and drawing the characters closer together until they start crashing into each other while the plot reaches it's climax.

Aside from the use of 2nd person I quite enjoyed this book and would recommend it. A solid 4 stars on the Amazon scale.

Another fun book from the talented Stross. Set in the same near-future as Halting State, the book features same kind of concerns with the impact of information technology on life. In this case, Stross has a clever take on the idea that expanding and increasingly interdigitated computing across the world will generate some new form of intelligence, the so-called Singularity. Stross is quite skeptical of this idea in its usual form and develops a clever and plausible alternative idea. This version of emergent intelligence is based more on expert systems and algorithms than a narrower view of consciousness as the defining feature of intelligence. As in Halting State, Stross brings this idea forward using a murder mystery - police procedural format. Written somewhat more clearly than Halting State, this is Stross' usual clever combination of genre fiction models and innovative ideas.

Fueled by spammers unchecked and out-of-control, an Internet-dominated society has created a dangerously twisted future so brilliantly captured in "Rule 34," a new age Orwellian nightmare of cyber crime, Big Brother surveillance, and artificial intelligence of Sky Net proportion. Taking place in the unlikely but effective Edinburgh, Scotland setting a decade or two forward, detective inspector Liz Cavanaugh, relegated to a kind of crime fighter's purgatory, heads up the Rule 34 squad - a team tasked with the unenviable task of separating harmless Internet fantasies from those breaking the law. But when a notorious spammer is apparently and inexplicably murdered with the use of a Soviet era colonic irrigation machine - the first of a series of bizarre deaths triggered by malevolent acts of inanimate objects - Liz and her motley crew wade into a world as frightful in the politics as in the denizens lurking in the electronic ether.

"Rule 34" is the perfect science fiction techno thriller: dark, threatening, and surreal, yet credible as a forecast of the possible trajectory of the consequences as the wizards deploying technology for crime continue to outdistance the brains and resources of those tasked with preventing it - just as law enforcement today is virtually powerless against ruthless drug cartels fulfilling the demands of habitual users. Author Charles Stross' Scottish-tinged prose is cynically and irreverently edged - think Cory Doctorow told by Charlie Huston - wrapped around a dark wit poking subtle fun at the consequences of incompetent governments and their controls and regulations run amok. The science is clever - "The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim" and ponders the enigma of "If we know how it works, it isn't Artificial Intelligence." And not to be outdone by writers majoring in drama rather than technology, Stross struts some serious character development, hacking out a wonderfully flawed cast stacked with sexual ambivalence, unbridled depravity, and surprising poignancy.

If captured in a Twitter-byte of less than140 characters: "Rule 34" is a well-balanced blend of mystery, thrills, and technology, aimed at a niche audience but appealing to a wider readership.

So you feel kinda bad because it's been a year since you last ordered a book from SFBC. You'd not heard of Charles Stross and didn't know about the Hugo and the Locus, and Rule 34 sounds interesting so you order it and start to read it.


The first thing you notice is that it's written in second person narrative, a narrative mode you'd never seen before. It draws you right in to the story and you feel you know DI Liz like a sister. You feel like Stross has done a good job of setting the story in a near future Edinburgh which fully plausible as it's just enough like the world's current mess that you relate completely but different enough that you find it compelling.

Each successive character shows you more of the future world the characters must live in, and as the viewpoint shifts to each in turn, you feel yourself relating to and sympathizing with each in turn, even the monstrous ones. By the middle of the second chapter, you were fully hooked, and knew you would try to read it straight through.

Two-thirds of the way in, you have the sense that the end is not going to be pretty for some of these characters. They live gritty lives where if you aren't a cop it's hard to make an honest living, and if you are you're in as much danger form your own corporate bureaucracy as you are from the criminals. Each new twist renews your interest and suspense in wondering how it will all turn out. You weren't expecting it to end as it does, but when it does, you say, aha! Of course.

So by the end, you're really pleased that you read the thing and you suspect that Stross may be due another Hugo. The techno and socioeconomic extrapolations from the present are wholly believable. The story is suspenseful. The characters compel your sympathy. The manner of the deaths Liz must investigate are like nothing you've seen before. You can't help but compare this world with that of Neal Asher's Polity, with the ubiquity of computers and computer surveillance, and computer manipulation of people's lives. You feel like Earth Central's antecedents could have gotten their start here. You want to read more of Stross's work, soon.

Stross is one of my favorite authors. Saturn's Children was a good read, and Halting State was flat out brilliant. Rule 34 is even better.

Each chapter takes the second person viewpoint of a different character, and is told in the second person. This is an uncommon approach, but Stross pulls it off and after the first few chapters it seems natural.

Each character appears unrelated at the start and their actions gradually start to affect each other. Each sees how events progress from a different angle and are unable to piece things together, but if the reader is attentive patterns start to emerge. This makes for a really fun read.

Like Halting State, Rule 34 is also set in a reasonable near future. We see 3D printers, self-driving cars, police life-logging everything and filtering massive amounts of data to make a case, and spam. Always spam. New tech is not just dumped into the world either, Stross has deeply reasoned out the effect on society. He does not just show how things might be different twenty years from today, but how people might differ.

A must read.