Sign in with FacebookJayaprakash Satyamurthy's Reviews > Rule 34
Rule 34
by Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)
by Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)
I didn't care much for Singularity Sky and had sort of dismissed Stross as someone who dealt in a nerd-friendly thriller-mode SF that was of little interest to me. Still, when one of my favourite booksellers showed me this shiny new trade paperback with its title ripped straight from yesterday's internet memes, I was intrigued.
So what we have here is a near-future police procedural, broadly put. It revolves around a police detective from the internet porn tracking squad who gets involved in a murder investigation that turns out to be nothing less than an investigation into the simultaneous deaths of large numbers of people who are somehow connected with net-related illegal activities. Along the way, Stross skewers conventional notions of AI and the singularity while offering interesting ideas about how both natural and artificial intelligence and consciousness might work and be subverted.
This takes a long time to kick in though; for more than half this novel I saw it as something enjoyable but not deeply engaging. I have nothing against unlikable characters in fiction, but Stross has this knack for creating characters who are both unlikable and deeply uninteresting. Then there's his style - good at moving things along and making an impact, but with a marked tendency to get lost in too-cool details, sidebars and annoying metephors assembled from corporate jargon.
Somewhere on page 286 though, I finally caught sight of that larger-scale view that is one of the typical pay-offs one looks for in an SF novel. While I didn't eventually feel this was anything more than a good SF thriller with a sprinkling of up-to-the-second cool concepts and one or two really interesting ideas, I didn't hate it either.
But I'd still say that the surface of Stross' work is too concerned with doing things in a thriller or, in this case, police-procedural mode to add up to the kind of SF narrative I like the best. A number of ideas are waved about, but the real strangeness at the heart of this novel is submerged under all the infodumps and ultimately hollow characterisation. Good for some values of good then.
So what we have here is a near-future police procedural, broadly put. It revolves around a police detective from the internet porn tracking squad who gets involved in a murder investigation that turns out to be nothing less than an investigation into the simultaneous deaths of large numbers of people who are somehow connected with net-related illegal activities. Along the way, Stross skewers conventional notions of AI and the singularity while offering interesting ideas about how both natural and artificial intelligence and consciousness might work and be subverted.
This takes a long time to kick in though; for more than half this novel I saw it as something enjoyable but not deeply engaging. I have nothing against unlikable characters in fiction, but Stross has this knack for creating characters who are both unlikable and deeply uninteresting. Then there's his style - good at moving things along and making an impact, but with a marked tendency to get lost in too-cool details, sidebars and annoying metephors assembled from corporate jargon.
Somewhere on page 286 though, I finally caught sight of that larger-scale view that is one of the typical pay-offs one looks for in an SF novel. While I didn't eventually feel this was anything more than a good SF thriller with a sprinkling of up-to-the-second cool concepts and one or two really interesting ideas, I didn't hate it either.
But I'd still say that the surface of Stross' work is too concerned with doing things in a thriller or, in this case, police-procedural mode to add up to the kind of SF narrative I like the best. A number of ideas are waved about, but the real strangeness at the heart of this novel is submerged under all the infodumps and ultimately hollow characterisation. Good for some values of good then.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read Rule 34.
sign in »
