Rule 34

Stross is back in form with the sequel to Halting State, a grimly humorous cyberpunk police procedural set in Tomorrow's Scotland, where nobody knows what an honest job is anymore, and household appliances are murdering spammers.

I won't spoil the book, but Stross is at his best when he takes Big Ideas, twists them upside down, and shows you how they could happen. In Rule 34, he on the relationship between the police state and the Panopticon, and how at the end of the day, our system of laws requires a technological architecture capable of enforcing what the politicians put in place. Business, crime, and government are melding together in Stross' world, something which seems all too familiar given the revolving door between Wall Street, show more the White House, the CIA, and a shallow grave in Central Asia. And Detective Liz's memetic crime unit seems like something that we already need, given public hysteria about synthetic drugs like Spice and Bath Salts (or maybe we could, you know, legalize drugs that have a long history of Not Totally Fucking People Up, instead of putting police and black chemists in a Red Queen's Race, with ordinary drug users the losers.)

The style is dense, packed full of internet-speak and Scottish brogue, but it's Stross's native tongue and the style fits perfectly. It's a throwback to old-school cyberpunk eyeball kicks, and a welcome diversion from the usual fair. The soapboxes rants at the end are a new and useful perspective on security and power. show less

Stross treats us to another tour de force of just-over-the-horizon speculative thinking, with interesting, rich characters doing familiar things with recognizable tech in a slightly skewed, bizarre world. I think that's what he does best and he does it well. So there's that.

The story is a police procedural with a nicely involuted plot, great pacing, plenty of tension, and convincing dialog s altogether a good read. But the basic plot premise, well hidden until the end, though interesting, didn't seem up to the task of carrying all the narrative weight, and so the resolution left me feeling -- well, unresolved.

Stross' choice of second-person narrative can be difficult, at times. My biggest problem is the difficulty figuring out which character is currently the perspective character when I pick up the book after having set it down to go to sleep or work, but it's a bit odd and off-putting in general, though at least it was easier to keep track of characters in Rule 34 than it had been in Halting State. It think it might work much better for me if these books were written entirely from the perspective of a single character, or at least only switched perspectives between second-person on the same character every time and omniscient third-person when needed.

Perhaps Stross is trying to evoke some of the jangled nerves and distracted attention of show more his characters with this second-person narrative that switches between characters every time there's a new chapter, but if so he might want to consider whether making the reader feel like that (especially the distractedness) is conducive to pulling a reader into his writing, which this book failed to do for me until about two thirds of the way through. Perhaps, instead, he is using second-person perspectives to quickly give readers a stake in characters, which might be a good idea to help create some sympathy for the characters, but the downsides of shuffling through different characters that way outweigh the upsides for character sympathy for me, and in fact interfere with it. Perhaps he's trying to avoid a lot of character-thought exposition in third person while still delving into the way the characters feel in a straightforward manner, and recognizes this does not work so well in first-person perspective when jumping between characters a lot. Perhaps this is just an attempt to do something out of the ordinary and, thus, use second-person perspective as a cheap trick to try to get some critial acclaim. I just don't know, but it does not work all that well for me.

Then, of course, there's the problem that Stross spends probably sixty percent of his book's word count on explicit narrative exposition in huge blocks of "you think such-and-such about this aspect of your life" text. It was not until I got fairly close to the end that I finally felt some of the "rising action" current of the story sweeping me along as one expects from a dramatic work of fiction, when the plot started coming together in a way that intrigued me (despite a premise that should have intrigued me from the beginning), and when I started really caring about characters in the novel -- in fact, Liz Kavanaugh, who felt very much like the hero and primary protagonist of the novel, was someone I never actually developed much sympathy for, or interest in. I find myself liking her off-again love interest and a schmuck of a hapless tool in the midst of the plot most of all, one of whom got very little (but highly effective) time as perspective character at all. His treatment of some subjects also shows his biases, amply demonstrated in his other science fiction writing, in ways that ignores the possibility of alternative perspectives on some interesting subject matter altogether, which always frustrates me.

The story's finish, by the way, injected a (not terribly surprising) "twist" of sorts that felt ham-handed, and did not get the set-up it deserved.

In the end, I've come to the conclusion that the reason to read Charles Stross science fiction is not good story development (it's fine, I suppose), or great depth of meaning (its plot is basically just that of a near-future approaching-singularity version of the standard detective novel, honestly), brilliant plotting, addictive characters that really pull the reader in, or an evocative narrative style, all of which I found missing. The reason I finished this book, and will probably read the next, is Stross' treatment of technological advancement, which is at least interesting. show less

I just finished re-reading Ready Player One, and the dark future it paints is a cake walk in comparison with the snap shot we get of Scotland in the not very distant future at all. I loved RPO it was a wild ride of 80's games, music, and movies and while it was a lot more fun to read then this, Rule 34 is clearly the better book. With lots of flawed and interesting characters and a frighteningly familiar world and great writing like "you don't need to mix the metaphor to drink the cocktail" and "they squawk and cackle like nuns at a wife swapping party". With writing like that you don't need a hero to cheer for, with Stross's real human characters the story comes alive and the killer is a surprise. Do the police always get their man?

This is the first Stross novel I've read, so I can't compare it to anything else in his oeuvre. He has talent – his description of a futuristic world running on fumes is snarkily wise, his meanderings through the clogged bureaucracies of said world will resonate with anyone who's dealt with immovable organizations, and he delves into the dark side of human nature with the jaded poise of a seen-it-all underworld guide.

So the talent is there – the execution isn't.

The first half of the novel is setup, exposition, flashbacks, digressions into bureaucratic procedure and geopolitical history – and then more setup, exposition, etc. Stross could've moved all of his pieces onto the board and explained their capabilities in half the time. show more Why didn't he? Guess he had to fill up some pages to make the novel look satisfyingly thick.

The chapters were sometimes short, with nothing much happening. A character will ponder something, then the chapter ends and we jump to another character...who may also be pondering something. Again, a lot of this stuff could've been cut.

The second half of the novel picks up the pace. The devious and convoluted plot begins to make sense, both to the reader and to the determined law enforcement officials trying to clean up the mess – well, it makes sense to a degree. Odds are you'll still have to closely review all the novel's events – or perhaps reread the book – to understand everything.

On a basic level, the characters aren't exactly revolutionary (there's the female officer living in professional purgatory, the short-fused superior officer, the psychopathic fixer/hitman and so on) but Stross throws enough new stuff into the (bread) mix to make them memorable. John Christie in particular is one character who worms his way into your mind; any author who wants to have a true, dyed-in-blood-and-madness bad guy in their tale should study how Stross crafts him.

I can't decide if I'll try another Stross novel. If he contained his excesses, his writing would be insanely good. I'll have to read some reviews to see if his other books have promise. show less

Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.
But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of show more huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.

I nominated this book to be read by my on-line book club, and from people's initial comments, it seemed not to be a very popular choice. Most people found the second person annoying at least to start with, or found that having so many viewpoint characters meant that they couldn't relate to any of them. People though there was too much technical detail and found the Kyrgyzstan and Issyk-Kulistan politics confusing, and a couple said that it would be better as a short story. On the other hand, this book did lead to a lot more discussion than most of the other books we have read, with people asking and answering questions about ATHENA and MacDonald's role in the story, and a couple of people commented that although they found it a chore to read, they found themselves thinking about it and talking to other people about it a lot after they finished. So it was a good choice for our book club after all.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and the main thing that I found confusing was about the Issyk-Kulistan bonds, which I had to go back and re-read again after I finished. After re-reading that section it did make sense, so I was probably rushing too much the first time. The second person viewpoint ceased to bother me about half way through and my early thoughts about second person being like a game master talking about what your game character is doing weren't far off the mark as it turns out. By the mid-point I was wondering how the author could possibly expect his readers to accept so many unlikely coincidences happening, and it was surprisingly satisfying to find out that there probably wasn't a single coincidence in the whole book. And now I will have to re-read Halting State to find out if that is the case that caused Liz's career to derail so spectacularly, as I can't remember much about the plot of the earlier book. show less

Fun. Playing with known memes and extrapolating, creating a near future vision of a strange yet familiar world. Did I mention fun? He is very good at capturing the work relationships, the internecine work politics.
The three main characters stories all dovetailed nicely, and I enjoyed the use of the 2nd person narrative, even though the viewpoint changed between chapters, the characters seemed distinct enough for this not to matter.