Rule 34 [Paperback]

Rule 34 is a near-future novel about how bad the internet could get after the next generation of spammers and fraudsters have come through. A police detective, an ex-con, and a shady criminal illuminate a tangled plot in a book fizzing with ideas.

Rule 34 is a follow up to Halting State, but is a loose sequel at best, and you can definitely read it without reading Halting State. What it does do is take the theme Stross started in Halting State - the weird possibilities for crime in the internet age - and take it to the max.

Stross weaves together three main characters, plus some interesting extra eyes to illuminate the story. Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh runs a dead-end police unit specialising in stopping the fallout from the worst and weirdest of criminal memes the internet has to offer. Anwar Hussein is a Asian-Scottish ex-con, previously collared by DI Kavanaugh for some white-collar crimes. In need of a legal job to satisfy probation, he becomes Consul for a dubious Eastern European no-one has ever heard of, mostly because it didn't exist last year. Finally, the Toymaker is a very dubious representative of a faceless criminal group, in Edinburgh to upgrade their business to the latest model.

In previous books Stross has shown he can throw far-future ideas around with verve, or give us sardonically humorous Lovecraftian fantasy, but Rule 34 fizzes with ideas that resonate with the contemporary world. He gives us an Edinburgh policed by gritty old-school cops using data-mining, VR CopSpace glasses, and wikis, while riding Segways to crime scenes to save money. The internet the criminals use is the cesspit of nonsense and filth we know and love today, just more so.

What Stross shows us is that crimes of the future won't be committed by black-clad hacker-heroes in cyberspace, but will just be weirder, wilder, grimier versions of the back-street deal, the spam email, and the cheap knock-off, all perpetrated by a mix of local lowlifes meeting in the pub and botnet-owning spammers. Throughout, Stross throws away more ideas as casual asides than some authors can get into entire books.

Rule 34 hides some real humour in its cutting observations of what today's world might evolve into far too soon. The main characters are engaging: Kavanaugh is world-weary but forcing herself to believe she can do some good. Anwar is a man struggling with contradictions while trying to do the best he can, and I genuinely cared for his plight, although I think he needed a little more development. The Toymaker is a cypher, and his backstory didn't really grab me, but he does the job of unpleasant criminal co-ordinator well.

The overall plot (which I'll avoid spoilers for) is a twisting timorous beastie, with murders, spam and messed-up relationships creating a nicely confusing tangle before coming to a strong conclusion. A lot of the content and language is distinctly mature - Stross has really pulled out the stops on this one.

I wasn't expecting to give this five stars, but the book gave me no choice but to read it and not stop. This is what happens when Stross applies the cleverness of the Laundry series to the exploding ideas factory of his brain, producing speculative fiction of the highest order, that happens to be totally entertaining at the same time.

"Rule 34" is a kind-of sequel to Stross's earlier Halting State - that is, it's set in the same future, and features some of the same characters (including DI Liz Kavanaugh, who plays a more central role here than in the other book). The most striking similarity is that the book is all (apart from a bit at the the end) done in the second person ("You wake up and realise that you're late for work. Hurrying, you get dressed...") There is a reason for this in the story. It is different from that in "Halting State", which is set in the world of computer games, where second person comes naturally ("as you walk along the dark corridor, you see a glowing shape...") and when it is revealed, a lot suddenly makes sense.

I was slightly ambivalent about the second person stuff at first because in "Halting State" it took me a little while to adjust to. Here, though, it works well from the start. I don't know if this is because there is that reason for it deep in the DNA of the narrative, if it's because of previous familiarity or just because Stross has got better at using it (I think it is actually a very difficult way to write) but whatever, I think that here device really helps the narrative drive along: we follow at least three major characters and a number of minor ones, and sticking to "you" makes it easier to get inside their heads without that check to the narrative you sometimes get when switching. So, lots of points here for matching style to narrative shape (or whatever the proper technical term is).

Another thing the book gets very, very right is its convincing description of the near future. The book is set, I'd guess, about 10 years ahead, so it has to be credible both in terms of recent history and of day to day details - not just the existence of technology but how it's actually deployed. The latter is particularly well done, with ubiquitous augmented reality and a well worked out criminal scene around illegal fabbers (3D printers) using pirated templates to produce a range of stuff from ripped off parts for domestic appliances to some pretty distasteful "toys" (see the books's title). That might have been enough for any other author but Stross thinks through the consequences of this. How would that criminal operation be organised? Where would the feedstock for the fabbers come from? He's always good at these details, but in "Rule 34" they feel particularly well worked through. There's an amusing incident where one of the fab operators downloads a rather nasty pieces of malware which mucks up his product, and we see the operational difficulties for Lothian & Borders police of carbon rationing (the idea of a police Seqway haring along with blue lights flashing and siren blaring had me in fits of giggles).

So, the book is technically very good, it's future is credible, what about plot, what about characters? They're well done too. All the central characters are well drawn and convincing (of course it's useful here that Liz has a hinterland established in "Halting State") - nastily so in the case of Christie, who is a really, really warped killer. (There is some pretty unpleasant stuff around Christie: being in his head is not a nice experience). The plot twists and turns nicely. The lead in is a very suspicious death (described as a "two wetsuit job") which soon becomes part of a trend (Kavanagh's squad is devoted to following up Internet spread criminal - or just plain weird - memes) but it isn't the murder case itself that is the main point of the story, more the origin and motivation of the perpetrator. It's hard to say more than that without giving too much of the story away. The plot doesn't have quite so many wheels within wheels as Stross's earlier books often did (though I'm glad they're not wholly absent - the abovementioned bread mix is one of them, and the reader is left to do some thinking about who was doing what to whom). I noticed the same thing with his last book, The Fuller Memorandum - I don't know whether it's an evolution in his writing style or conscious self-restraint in those particular books. Either way it makes for a tauter story, and in my view, this is the best he's written so far, by some way.

Strongly recommended.

...please mind the gap.

It may be that you think your thoughts are your own. Your idea of what constitutes right and wrong, law and order, man and machine -- entirely yours. Your social networks: unique. Your identity: perfectly private, except perhaps to those individuals and entities you care to share yourself with. You have another think coming.

The loosest of loose sequels to the Hugo and Locus award-nominated 2007 novel Halting State, Charles Stross' Rule 34 takes the near-future setting of its impressive predecessor and seeds Edinburgh's streets with such wicked yet winsome filth as to give Warren Ellis a run for his money.

It begins in no uncertain terms, with what seems a malfunction: an antique enema machine which leaves one Michael Blair, "a spammer with a speciality in off-licence medication" (p.12), rather more thoroughly... purged, shall we say, than he may have intended; for when down-on-her-luck Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh arrives at the scene of the crime, he has lain foetal and decomposing in a pool of his own excretions for days.

Immediately Liz senses something about the site is not quite right, and when from far and from wide the body count of cybercriminals-turned-victims begins to mount, her instincts are borne out. It's little wonder. She's good polis, after all -- though her disdain for office politics has had her career five years down the toilet; five years and counting. So it's an uphill battle Liz has on her hands, getting the Edinburgh brass to grasp the fact that her case could be but the first flush of a far larger scheme. Christ, it could be the crime of the century - perhaps it is - and still the management wouldn't give a fig.

Her job is made no easier by Rule 34's other central characters. Just out of the big house and trying to eke out an existence on the straight and narrow, family man Anwar is beside himself when - out of the blue - a friend hooks him up with certain representatives of Issyk-Kulistan, "a shiny new Eastern European Republic" who offer him a handsome salary and all the trimmings if he'll only be their Scottish Consul. Anwar is just desperate enough to agree, yet not so stupid as to miss the implication that this new avenue of employment is a front for something decidedly dodgy. Just what's off about it, though, he hasn't a clue -- except that it involves bread mix.

Meanwhile, "a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder" (p.248) who Stross christens The Toymaker has come to town to corner the market on living dolls made to order for child molesters. However, he finds his carefully arranged business plan thwarted at every turn; where he expects to meet business associates, there are only bodies, all flesh and blood and broken bone. Probably the lizards did it, reasons the creep.

Far and away the most distinctive thing about this short novel is that it's told entirely in the second-person perspective. And not just from one such perspective: three - and three more if you count the interludes in addition to Liz, Anwar and The Toymaker. Needless to say, the second-person is a rare choice in fiction, and I imagine it will prove a touch too much for some Rule 34 readers - counter-intuitively it can on occasion work to distance one from the subject rather than draw one in - but with ten solid novels behind him, and better versed than most in this unusual voice thanks to Halting State, which Rule 34 very much recalls, it would be wise of you, I think, to trust in the antipope Charles Stross.

I did -- and it was an ask for the first while, I'll admit. But within an hour of starting in on Rule 34 I'd adjusted easily enough, and thereafter, thrumming through the white noise of botnets and lifelogging and augmented reality which at the outset threatens to overburden the surface of Stross' latest, I could just about pick out this book's pulse. And when I'd heard it, I couldn't - wouldn't - unhear it.

Rule 34 is at its core a novel about who we are, with a tremendously provocative concept at its core. Its narrative is primarily concerned with questions of identity sprung from the science of cognitive psychology and the fiction of future tech (or wherever the twain might meet), which Stross posits will quite paralyse the human animal, leaving us unable to cope with the myriad demands of morality and reality. When for instance the police need bleeding-edge AR overlays to keep track of the 300,000-odd actionable offences they might arrest an individual over, how can we mere mortals be expected to live by the book?

Rule 34 suggests that where in this sense man must end, having finally met his match, the machine might very well begin; instituting what Stross calls choice architecture, which is to say "the science of designing situations to nudge people towards a desired preference." (p. 285) In short, if we are our choices, and our choices are no longer our own, then who are we, exactly? And what in the great Goog's name are we good for?

I keep saying we, but Rule 34 isn't a book about us, so to speak. It's about you - yes, you - and therein lies its greatest strength, as well as its foremost weakness. Stross implicates each and every reader in this nightmare vision of the near future, and in the ghastly crimes which may or may not herald the arrival of the end times. We are only the hunter in these pages insofar as we are also his prey, and if Rule 34 is sometimes difficult to parse when it casts us in such opposing roles... well. I dare say that might just be the point.

Gripping, prescient and deeply relevant, fast and sharp and smart as they come, Rule 34 is a powerful showcase for one of the utmost masters of predictive SF: a document of an author approaching career-best form. If you can get to grips with Stross' use of the second-person - and some may not - you'll remember Rule 34 for a long time to come. That is until the machines volunteer to remember it for you... wholesale.