Charles Stross – Rule 34

l21/04/2015

If youโ€™ve spent a lot of time online youโ€™ll know what the title means, but itโ€™s helpfully explained early on if not. If youโ€™ve spent any time watching news items about technology then the kerfuffle over 3D printers and Google Glass canโ€™t have escaped your notice (if it has, somehow: link, link, link, link – although if youโ€™re that insular and out-of-touch, why are you looking at a website?).

Right, so projectโ€ฆ ohโ€ฆ ten years ought to do it, and Edinburgh cop Liz Kavanaughโ€™s cleaning up the mess (some of it literal) after what seems to be a horrible auto-erotic death, Anwar Hussein finds that a spell in prison seems to qualify him to be the new Scottish Embassy official for a dodgy Eastern European nation no-oneโ€™s heard of who export bread-mix, and a hired assassin’s finding that nothing is going to plan. These three braided narratives interlock and answer the first few questions while raising many more.

The big one youโ€™ll be wondering is why is the whole book in the second-person present tense? Strossโ€™ previous book was also like that, but Halting State was done as a shout-out to text-led computer games of the 80s (anyone else play The Hobbit on a ZX Spectrum?) Thatโ€™s not whatโ€™s happening here. The narrator lets one first-person reference by three-fifths of the way through the book but thatโ€™s all the help Iโ€™m giving you. Itโ€™s up to you if you find the solution Utopian or Dystopian.

Along the way thereโ€™s even more thought gone into this bookโ€™s evaluation of what a devolved Scotland would have to deal with than the SNPโ€™s thumping great White Paper, and not all of itโ€™s as rosy as their notion. Devo-Max has backfired badly, although most people in the book prefer it to the available alternatives. Itโ€™s a sly, gleefully nasty book with a neat line in train-of-thought allusions; very little anyone says or thinks is completely invented but some of you might need to have Google handy for things like โ€˜The Streisand Effectโ€™ or Marvin Minsky, or indeed a street-map of Edinburgh (there is a neat skewering of Rebus and Taggart along the way). Thereโ€™s a risk that this sort of thing could date rapidly but the energy of the book might keep it fresh for longer than most. Along the way thereโ€™s a lot of borderline sick humour and, under that, a meditative quality that the pace and flurry of references canโ€™t quite mask.

This sort of not-quite-journalism, not-quite-made-up near-future SF is hard to pull off. Elsewhere in the library we have William Gibsonโ€™s Pattern Recognition so you can see whether thatโ€™s aged well.

By Tat Wood