Rule 34 — Charlie Stross

Cover of Rule 34


Rule 34
Charlie Stross
358 pages
published in 2011

It’s only thanks to Christopher Priest’s tirade about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that you remember that you haven’t reviewed Charlie Stross latest novel, Rule 34 yet. You know that, like Halting State, which it is a sequel to, it’s written in the second person and you briefly toy with the idea to write your review the same way. But then you come to your senses and decide to write the rest of the review in a less irritating way.

Not that I minded the second person point of view in Rule 34, as Charlie Stross made it work and it fit the central metaphor of these books, reality as a massive multiplayer immersive game. At the same time I can see where Christopher Priest is coming from when he writes:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

It’s funny because it’s true, if mean spirited. As a writer Charlie Stross does bring a kind of geeky enthusiasm to his novels that can be wearing if you don’t share his interests. Stross’ writing style is snarky rather than witty, more interested in conveying information than in a mellifluous turn of phrase and he can be prone to a bit of infodumping. As with using second person point of view, it is not to everybody’s tastes. And if that’s the case for you, as it seems to have been for Priest, it would be a slog to get through Rule 34.

Yet neither his writing style nor his choice of the second person viewpoint is a flaw in Rule 34; instead they’re deliberate choices made to enable Charlie Stross to tell the story he wanted to tell with this novel. Like its predecessor Halting State this novel is an attempt to create a plausible near future Scotland by looking at various contemporary trends and extrapolating them a couple of decades into the future. As fitting an “internet puppy”, most of these changes are technological, extensions of current computing trends a few years down the road, but Stross looks beyond what might technologically be possible and embeds these developments in a political and sociological context.

The central idea at the heart of Rule 34 is that of the panopticon singulary, the way in which technological developments, commercial pressures and the law come together to kill privacy. The second person viewpoint in which it is written drives this home, because it makes the reader complicit in the panopticon: the characters become the reader’s avatars, as if this is a videogame rather than a novel. At the same time, Stross’ writing style, detached & snarky distances you from the characters as well which again reinforces that sense of complicity, of voyeurism.

For the people caught in Rule 34‘s plot, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, banished to the Rule 34 Squad, the one dealing with all the pervy crimes, Anwar Hussein, a Scottish-Pakistani petty criminal turned honorary consul for a small, new Central-Asian state and “John Christie”, point man for The Organisation, having to negotiate their way through life with this sort of omnipresent surveillance is just part of their daily routines. So Liz spents her entire working life in CopSpace, through which she both has access to all data the Scottish police forces acquire and the system can keep taps on her. Hussein meanwhile is expected to keep his smartphone on and with him everyday so the polis can snitch on his location 24/7, while “Christie” has to take pains to avoid areas with too high a surveillance level, like airports.

Rule 34‘s story starts with Liz being called out to a crime scene, a suspicious death of an ex-criminal, who died while getting a colonic irrigation from an old Soviet machine that used to belong to Ceasescu… A true double wetsuit job, it at first just seems a regretable accident, but of course there’s more going on. Anwar Hussein meanwhile is beginning to wonder why exactly he has been made honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan for. “John Christie” finally knows exactly what he’s in Edinburgh for, to recreate the Scottish branch of The Organisation. Each of these three protagonists thinks they’re at least somewhat in control of their own lifes, even if they’re now clearly been caught up into something bigger, but this turns out not to be the case.

Instead through the course of the novel it becomes clear that they are each being nudged in some way or another to perform certain actions, by somebody who knows how to do this for each of them individually and without their knowledge. Nudge theory is quite popular with the current British government, who see this as a cheap and easy way to get the hoi polloi to behave themselves and the more data you got on people the easier it becomes to find the right nudge. Current implementations are still primitive, in Rule 34 Stross imagines what it would be like if the people doing the nudging had perfect methods and all the data needed to use them, thanks to the panopticon. None of the protagonists ever quite catch up with the fact that they were being nudged or the overarching plot these nudges served, but the reader does get to know who is behind everything that happened and why.

As said Rule 34 sets out to create a plausible near future world which we could concievably get through from where we are now. Charlie Stross has done the most difficult job any sf writer can undertake, try and predict not just what new technology could do, but how it will be used and how the law, government and societies as a whole will handle it. As such then it is a worthy novel to be on the Clarke Awards shortlist.

The Hidden Family – Charlie Stross

Cover of The Hidden Family


The Hidden Family
Charlie Stross
309 pages
published in 2005

The Merchant Princes series is Charlie’s attempt at writing a fat fantasy series. Unfortunately, the rules changed shortly after he had written the first book in the series, with bookstores no longer wanting fat fantasies. Hence what should’ve been the first book was split in two, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family each hastily rewritten to stand on their own. This wasn’t entirely succesful, especially in the first book; the best way to read these two novels is back to back and pretend it’s still one novel. As it is, you have The Family Trade setting up some plot threads which are only resolved in The Hidden Family; read them on their own and you only have half a novel. A pity, but nothing to be done about that.

In The Family Trade we met Miriam Bernstein, journalistic investigator for a IT/biotech trade journal, who stumbled on something far greater than the already impressive whitewashing operation she tought she had uncovered. She’s fired, her house is broken into and she’s almost kidnapped, but then she discovers she can transport herself to a parallel world. It turns out she’s a lost member of a family of worldwalkers, who were also behind that whitewashing operation that got her into trouble in the first place. Though she’s understandably reluctant to do so, Miriam slowly accepts her new family and her own role in keeping the family business –smuggling drugs absolutely undetectably into the United States by running it through their homeworld to make money to buy medcines and luxury goods not available there and selling those to the nobility– afloat. Once she does, she sees some opportunities for drastically modernising the family; The Hidden Family takes up the rest of the story.

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Halting State – Charlie Stross

Cover of Halting State


Halting State
Charlie Stross
351 pages
published in 2007

It’s ten years from now, Scotland is independent and uses a proper currency, the euro, there’s a new internet boom, phones have eaten the personal computer just like they’ve eaten digital cameras and mp3 players for most uses, security is everywhere, and various forms of massive online and alternate reality games are mass pastimes made possible by the ubiquitous overlay of offline reality by online reality in ways only hinted at by Google Earth today. Twenty years ago the internet was still a playtoy for academics and Cold Warriors, ten years ago everybody knew about it but still thought of it as an addon, today it’s an essential tool for most white collar jobs and in 2017 it’s literally everywhere to the point that getting lost in a strange city is no longer an option. In short, online and offline reality are intermixed to such an extent that a bank robbery in an mmorpg can have very real offline consequences.

Which is where Halting State starts, with sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police force being assigned a confused case which may or may not be a robbery, which after some further confusion turns out to have been a bank robbery in an online game, with which the local police force should never have become involved. It’s a hacking incident, with the nasty overtones of an insider trading financial scam, as Hayek, the company running the bank, has just had its IPO and its shares will tank once the news leaks out. For Sue, this means she’s up to her neck into something that’s not just above her, but which also has the potential to go political, quick. Not what you need to keep your scores up and your bosses happy.

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