If youโve spent a lot of time online youโll know what the title means, but itโs helpfully explained early on if not. If youโve spent any time watching news items about technology then the kerfuffle over 3D printers and Google Glass canโt have escaped your notice (if it has, somehow: link, link, link, link – although if youโre that insular and out-of-touch, why are you looking at a website?).
Right, so projectโฆ ohโฆ ten years ought to do it, and Edinburgh cop Liz Kavanaughโs 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-oneโs 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 youโll 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?) Thatโs not whatโs happening here. The narrator lets one first-person reference by three-fifths of the way through the book but thatโs all the help Iโm giving you. Itโs up to you if you find the solution Utopian or Dystopian.
Along the way thereโs even more thought gone into this bookโs evaluation of what a devolved Scotland would have to deal with than the SNPโs thumping great White Paper, and not all of itโs as rosy as their notion. Devo-Max has backfired badly, although most people in the book prefer it to the available alternatives. Itโs 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 โThe Streisand Effectโ or Marvin Minsky, or indeed a street-map of Edinburgh (there is a neat skewering of Rebus and Taggart along the way). Thereโs 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 thereโs a lot of borderline sick humour and, under that, a meditative quality that the pace and flurry of references canโt 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 Gibsonโs Pattern Recognition so you can see whether thatโs aged well.
By Tat Wood