Rule 34 (Halting State Book 2)

Charles Stross dramatizes some of the most interesting technical trends of anyone writing just now. I started with his Laundry series for fun reads, and have enjoyed branching over to his "hard" science fiction. Both novels in this series present an interesting view of what technology might mean for policing, from a feet-on-the-street point of view. "Copspace" will enter the common vocabulary just as Gibson's cyberspace has.

Be forewarned, the two novels in this series are written to represent English, Scottish, and other UK slang, idiom, and pronunciation. This makes the content a bit of thick reading for some.

I like Stross - mainly the Laundry series - but this book was very annoying to read.

1. It is written in the second person. I hate that.
2. Some of it is written in Scottish dialect, which is hard to read.
3. The POV characters are very unsympathetic, even the supposed heroine.
4. The plot revolves around very unpleasant gang-related bondage murders.

5. The book is set in 2023 but there is constant reference to 1990s/2000s geek stuff (like internet memes). Come on, that will ALL be long forgotten in 2023. Will wikipedia and Skype still be around then? One doubts it...

6. Stross takes a lot of cheap shots at Americans and Christians, and none of this is relevant to the plot. At least in the Apocalypse Codex, Stross's clear disdain for Americans and Christians made some sense in terms of the plot, but here his snide remarks are completely gratuitous. I guess he is a smarmy Brit and he just can't help it.

In sum I regard this as one of his weaker efforts. Definitely read a few chapters before buying it. I was glad I picked it up from the library rather than buying it.

You like the second person style. At first the "you" thing seems a bit affected, but you get used to it, even when the point of view shifts. You like the energy in the writing. You don't read a lot of sci-fi but this one has a mystery flavor, which appeals.

You like the way Rule 34 starts because it's near-future stuff and not much has changed except there's a heck of a lot more monitoring of everybody's communications and the police, clearly, have quick access to whole reams of info and data on, well, everyone.

You wish you had read "Halting State," which preceded this book in theme and characters, but that's okay--you're quickly in the middle of some strange doings and some very unusual and colorful characters, including the washed-up detective Liz Kavanagh and The Gnome, a highly amusing player who is certainly a touch of genius.

(At this point, you must concede that you read this book on Audio CD and Robert Ian Mackenzie is positively brilliant with the Scottish touches he gives to the voice of The Gnome.)

You admire Stross' colorful style. Yes, humor aplenty. Some very funny lines that don't sound right out of context--they work because they contrast with all the darkness that is going on around.

The themes are interesting--computers, porn, sleaze, spam, Internet commerce, drugs, smuggling, nanotechnology, police and government surveillance, privacy, entertainment--and the writing and characters pull you straight along, though you wished you had polished up on your Internet terms like `botnet' and `memes' and the like. (Keep your Wikipedia handy for this if you are not up on this verbiage.)

Stross seems so in control and on top of his vision and the three central characters so sharply drawn that you are near the big finish before you know it, though you find the resolution a bit standard and ordinary when you were expecting something as fresh as the set-up.

In the end, you give it four stars but think that if you're a sci-fi buff you'd probably give it five.

Who picks the atrocious cover art for Charles Stross' books?!
This is solid Stross -- a well-imagined world in a possible future that raises questions about the nature of humanity while giving insightful social commentary, all the while moving forward with an engrossing plot and featuring plenty of cool technological flourishes.
Not as mind-bending as Glasshouse or as thrilling as Accelerando, but definitely worth reading if you're a Stross fan.

Not as good as Halting State, though still an enjoyable ride. Its biggest weakness is its ending, which hinges on an idea introduced late and somewhat umotivatedly in the book, and which leaves us with as many unanswered motivation questions as it solved. Chief among them, who set the AI up this way, why, and how.

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.

My favorite rule of the internet! so i must confess that i skimmed the preview and it was meh... if you name your book after a meme like rule 34 I expect some truly disturbing/amazing fetishes and tepid bondage just doesn't cut it. Latex, fishnets and an enema machine really? Where's the exotic dancers dressed up as emu's and the giant mechanical kazoo played by clenching ones liquid filled rear accompanied by a chorus of pigs trained to grunt in g-minor??????

On a serious note, story and writing style not interesting enough to grab my attention for even the length of the preview

In 2023, the police conduct 24/7 surveillance of the Internet as a crime prevention method in order to capture illegal porn peddlers. Edinburgh PD Detective Investigator Liz Kavanaugh heads the Rule 34 Crime Investigation Unit that monitors the Net for illegal activity usually extreme porn although she loathes her position.

Three similar homicides occur around the world. Because each is tied to BDSM and drugs, Kavanaugh leads the inquiry into the Scottish murder of dealer Michael Blair. To the DI, this is the case that will revise her dying career. However, her investigation seems to get increasingly murkier as she and her team discovers strange seemingly unrelated clues to the murder that ties to the felonious Toymaker and others with official protection as well as her former lover.

A few years have passed since the events of the Halting State, but if anything the Stross world has grown darker with a deeper nod to Huxley's 1984. Vividly bleak while extrapolating the philosophy of those who want small government with a Big Brother "patriotic" morality oversight, the story line focuses on society monitoring and censoring the internet. The second case viewpoint adds to that sense of detachment and grimness but the key to this exciting unique police procedural is the enforcement of Rule 34 makes or breaks careers.

Harriet Klausner

I enjoyed this. Great characters and a nice explanation 80% in on AI, Social Networks, et al. Paints a nice picture of when we all be using a Layar-type app on our phones to supplement information as we walk through life.

FABULOUS!! A dizzying dash through a near future dystopia, with an assorted cast of very human (and often perplexed by the complexity of the plot) protagonists desperately trying to keep up with an increasingly accelerated pace of events - Charles Stross really keeps up the pressure in a book jam-packed with his extrapolation of many of our current technological & societal issues.
At times so funny I had to literally laugh out loud. Stross is so terribly witty - I love his black humour.

I didn't think that anything published so far this year would be as excellent as Embassytown - this book was a wonderful suprise.

A must-read.

I found something to laugh or giggle over every five pages or so. I found it useful to construct a character relationship diagram as I read the book. It would have been difficult to keep the 20+ characters and their relationships straight without one. Have fun!

I couldn't get through this book. There were several problems.

First, there is a fair amount of sexual material in this book, though should should be obvious by the book's description. (I bought it, however, by accident on Kindle and was caught by surprise.) In the very opening of the book we're taken to a crime scene where a deceased is tied up on bondage gear, still plugged into some kind of "enema machine", and some more details that I can't describe here. The sexual content is worked into even character descriptions such as the intense look on one character's face being compared to the same look he gets while masturbating in the bathroom at a local pub. --Mind you, I don't mind sexual content in the general sense. For example, there is quite a bit of it in some Peter Hamilton books that I didn't mind. But in this book, I found it vulgar.

The book is also written an unusual point of view. "You are so-in-so. You are sitting at a desk, at a job that you hate, hoping that the reader's will come to like you. Your phone is ringing. You hope it's something interesting to add spice to your boring life." I didn't care for reading in this point of view. Additionally, I couldn't get through all the Scottish jargon.

Next, all the characters I met before I finally put the book down where generally unhappy, and in many cases unlikeable. Characters need to have conflict, but if I don't like them, what do I care if they overcome their challenges? And as an example of unlikable, one of the characters is a criminal, alcoholic Muslim who cheats on his wife with men. Maybe that's supposed to paint him as conflicted, but I found it generally distasteful at best, and maybe even a jab at the Islamic religion at worse--though I didn't read enough of the book to say one way or the other.

I stopped reading--I think it was around chapter three--when we're introduced to a new character who is thinking about someone, referring to them as "that f*ing c*nt". Much like the sexual content, I don't mind cussing in the general sense, and have done a fair amount of it myself, but I found this off-putting for some reason. Once I realized that I didn't like the world I was reading about, I didn't like the characters, and I didn't like the way it was written, I deleted the book from my library. In fact, the only reason I got as far as I did is because I'd bought the book on accident via the Kindle store and decided to give it a try instead of canceling the order right away.

Other readers might not have the same objections that I have about this book. And it has, somewhat to my surprise, a lot of positive reviews. My advice is to read a solid chapter or two before you buy it. You should know by then if it's something you want to continue reading.

Warning: It's written in the second person. This leads to very ham-handed segments where he tries to describe you to yourself. Literally "Let's look at you. You are a tall, middle-aged man ... "

He tries very hard to cram in all sorts of edgy topics while at the same time using language like "manhood" for penis, which makes it hard to take him seriously. He jumps around a lot on subject matter which means you have to read quite a few chapters before you know what the hell he's trying to get at and how all of this connects. It's possible there was a reasonable payout eventually, but I got half-way through the book and couldn't take the ridiculousness anymore.

Fast moving, never boring. With Black-water so recently in the news,its no stretch to imagine former fighter pilots going rouge and becoming mercenaries.
Some of the dog fights will probably evoke orgasmic dreams for pilots reading this book. I'll definitely read the sequel.