Rule 34

Interesting. The book is written in the 2nd person:You pick up the book, and start to read.You turn the pages, confused because you are reading about you,But its not really you, is it?You might miss where the story momentarily shifts from you to I,but you pay attention and notice it, because its

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relevant.

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Rule 34 is essentially a joke which suggests that if someone has a sexual kink there is porn to appeal to their deviation. In this novel our protagonist, Liz Kavanaugh, is a burned-out police supervisor whose unit trawls the internet looking at emerging memes inspiring real-life crime; this is not

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as much fun as it sounds.

Matters go into overdrive though when a very baroque murder draws her out of professional exile, particularly when there is a whole series of comparable murders taking place in what looks like a synchronized fashion. The linking factor is that these people were all involved in illegal online activities. So who is culling the world spamming community, and why? While there is much more going on then that, those are the questions that drive this book; besides the small matter of using whole, if basket-case, countries to front a financial scam.

If you've read Stross before you'll enjoy this work. If you enjoy near-future thrillers you'll enjoy this work. About my only caveat is that the nature of the professional criminal "John Christie" seems a little too vague in the end, but too say more would be to offer up a spoiler that I don't care to give.

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Multiple POVs, all second person. Don’t start if that will annoy you. A cop, several criminals, and some law-enforcement-adjacent people all struggle to figure what is going on with a wave of bizarre deaths among spammers. I like Stross doing Lovecraft better, but this did have the breezy

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information overload feel of a Stross story, crossed with the weird immediacy of second person.

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Stross, as usual, lost me on character somewhere in the middle, and on plot/tech/imagination near the end. I liked enough of the minor characters to make up for the characterization bit, and if he loses me on imagination, that's my fault.

Given the way our world seem to be spiraling out of control, Rule 34 seems to be a look at a plausible and very scary future.

Rule 34 is a sequel to Halting State, and is funnier and more successful in my eyes.

Definitely captures the essence of the 2010 Interwebs.

Stross tries to pack too many things into this near-future crime novel: maker culture, social networks run amok, cognitive neuroscience,financial shenanigans on a world scale, and a weird quote at the beginning about homosexuals in Scotland for some ironic tone-setting. (And if nothing in that list

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that grabs your attention, well, I'm just grazing the surface--plus, it's a short book!) Not one of my favorites. Its predecessor is better.

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An interesting take on how 4chan has affected the world. However, the end is lacking and predictable. When will authors learn to stay the course and break out of the expected?

I finished Rule 34 by Charles Stross last night. This is the book he
was finishing when I went to his reading of The Fuller Memorandum at a
nearby bookshop last year and he described it to me as Crime 2.0 (he
might have also told that to the whole world on his blog but I heard
it from his actual

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bearded lips (well kind of a goatee thing)).
Anyway, it had some pretty neat ideas. Stross' vision of crime 2.0 is
based around a world where materials and pattern files for 3D printers
and fabbers are regulated by law. The title of the book refers to an
Internet idiom that "if you can think of it, there's already porn for
it" which is a staple form of income for crime syndicates that can
arrange for local fabbing of illegal sex toys and weapons. Other ideas
that come into the mix are identity theft, using network analysis AIs
to find criminals and run investigations, and even a sock puppet
revolutionary government (the purpose of which is revealed as the
story unfolds).

While this book is kind of a followup to Halting State, the
similarities are few: they're both told in first person and they're
both about near future cybercrime but that's about it. I didn't find
it as charming as Halting State because the protagonists are a bit
culturally removed from my own experience, the "good guys"
protagonists are an indian/Arabic gay man and a lesbian aging police
woman (and yes, I admit it but I'm a sucker for a heterosexual romance
between a WASPy male geek and an overachieving independent woman as
depicted in Halting State and really, most of Stross' previous books).
Having said that, I reckon those characters and their friends and
families will grow on me when I reread this (which I think I will),
it's just a matter of having time to digest them aside from the plot
which is a bit complex and hard to follow. I spent a lot of this book
pausing to try and recap who characters were and what was going on.
The plot isn't exactly linear and I'm not sure I fully got how it all
fit together in the end.

The ending was pretty cool though and gracefully done using all the
existing plot elements developed throughout the story. This was
refreshing as I seem to be encountering more and more a form of story
telling where the ending seems to be made up on the spot by suddenly
pulling in some new random deus ex machina power to sweep everything
into a pile, scoop it up and throw it out the window. So, that's Rule
34: Crime 2.0 with all the usual Stross humor and observation we've
come to know and love.

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Bit fragmented and thin on ground-breaking ideas (compared to older Stross material) but basically entertaining read

A blurb on the cover from The Denver Post says, "Stross sizzles with ideas." They're exactly right. This book, like all of his others, left me feeling breathless. And maybe a little, um, dim. Like Halting State, Rule 34 begs for a re-read. I'm still not sold on the second-person narration, although

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I do grant that it makes a sinister kind of sense in the end. The characters were surprisingly relatable and the plot zipped along despite the occasional info dump. Not for the casual SF reader.

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Pretty good scifi, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. Good worldbuilding, a certain dry wit, many fun references to find. Second-person writing style is unusual - reminds me of a roleplaying game. Somehow seemed incoherent, and I was able to guess who-dun-it by a few pages in.

Scottish

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English seemed to be almost totally incomprehensible, but I suppose some of the Internet slang might be, too.

Still, not a bad book by any means, and I'll check out more from this author later.

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An entertaining near-future police procedural; quite inventive, though I kept noticing that Stross is the same author that gave us Singularity Sky - the implicit comparison is not favourable. Nevertheless, Stross when not quite at his best is still better than many SF writers at their peak, so

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don't be put off on that count.
The second-person narrative didn't grate too much after the first couple of chapters, which it could have done, so again there is some writing skill involved - but it still comes across as a gimmick. Luckily, there's plenty of humour and zeitgeisty internet memes to leaven the mix, even if I ended up accidentally Googling "de-gloving" as a direct result of this book. If you haven't, don't.

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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

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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.

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I'm still somewhat confused about this one, though I enjoyed the ride.
pProper review after a think, maybe.

You pick this book up at the library because the title cracks you up and you think you're cool enough to read it. You take it home and start to read but something immediately begins to nag at you. You can't put your finger on it, exactly, because you are too busy trying to puzzle out the 1337 speak

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and then it dawns on you that you are reading a detective novel written in second-frakking-person. Not only are you reading it, you are enjoying it, despite the fact that it's not only second-person, it's multiple-POV-second-person and it rushes by in a whoosh of violence and oddness. You think that it's set in the nearish future, and you're not really qualified to judge how accurate a forecast it is, but you dig the conceits presented. Except the second person, you really, really hate the second person. You find it well-written if hard to follow, and you are not terribly sure about recommending it, especially given the escalation of the horror-like elements as you rush headlong into the satisfying and truly macabre ending. You wonder if your review is too spoilery, and you decide that yes, yes it is, so you mark it as such. You hope the next book you pick up is first person. Or third. Or maybe you will read a book with no person at all, a vacuum cleaner manual, say. You giggle to yourself, glad you marked the spoiler box. You don't know how to rate this, really. But you give it 3 stars and wonder if you'll come back later to bump it up.

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Most cyberpunk thing I've read in ages, but entirely modern too.

This one needs a re-read, as I need to see how my understanding of the events changes on the basis of knowing the ending.

I'll not spoiler, but there's a surprise near the end as there's an active agent that was not expected, and I need to watch for things effected by that agent earlier in the tale.

I've thought about it long enough; despite the somewhat uncomfortable second-person perspective, I like Rule 34. A lot.

Stross has built an interesting near-future police force, and the plot delivers enough interesting twists to keep the pages turning.

Sequel to the novel Halting State. A detective novel set in the near future in Edinburgh, with a fascinating political theme.

great setting in a future so near we can recognize it. all that detail adds up, as Stross takes off-shore money-laundering, national debt problems, international government security agencies, and search-engine spambots and piles them all up into more than one criminal conspiracy and a very large

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headache for DI Liz Kavanaugh in Edinburgh. not for the faint-hearted, this one, because it's all in the details. but it's a rambunctious romp of a slightly-SF procedural all the same. a sequel to the marvellous Halting State. Stross is doing some really interesting stuff.

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I excitedly came back to the near future world of Halting State. Instead I was served a warmed over pastiche, an empty husk of an exciting novel, devoid of the charm of the earlier work.

It is hard to enumerate just what's wrong here. Stross tries and tries, and sometimes it nearly comes good. The

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overwhelming mood of the book is one of failure, of glimpsing success, tantalisingly close. It is still a decent workmanlike system of a book, but it fails to engage the reader in its own intentions.

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Stross channeling Richard K. Morgan minus the hip noir. There's a good story here somewhere but the style and attitude make it inaccessible. But maybe this is all on purpose. Maybe Stross is deliberately annoying me because he has something important to say. I just don't get what it is.

Stross is

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clearly one of the smarter, extrapolators of current trends and maybe he is onto something here. This is going back on the shelf for a future re-read.

To those thinking of starting on this book, beware. It'll take same effort unless you like being punished. There's a potential reward which I cannot attest to since I did not find it and must now go back to see if there is indeed one.

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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

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2nd person narrative, even though the viewpoint changed between chapters, the characters seemed distinct enough for this not to matter.

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