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    Rule 34
    Rule 34
    Rule 34
    Audiobook13 hours

    Rule 34

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Robert Ian Mackenzie

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross takes listeners into the near future for this breathtaking thriller. As head of the Rule 34 Squad, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh keeps a close eye on Internet activity, monitoring whether people are participating in harmless fantasies or engaging in illegal activities. When three criminal spammers are murdered, it's up to Liz to determine how the victims were connected. If she can't figure it out, more people will surely die. "Stross sizzles with ideas."-Denver Post
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 14, 2011
    ISBN9781461849728
    Rule 34
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for Rule 34

    3.5/5

    424 ratings35 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Any story that follows at least seven different characters and is told entirely in the 2nd person would drive me mad. Stross is also guilty of pages worth of infodumps about made-up AIs. His characters' internal monologues are nearly indistinguishable and utilize strained, over-long metaphors that aren't nearly as clever as Stross thinks they are. The characters themselves are each a unique blend of characteristics, but in the end the only one I was even slightly interested in was the psychopath criminal, which I doubt was intended. And the AI's pov is the stupidest one I've heard yet.

      So no, I didn't like this. It gets 2 stars from me on the basis that Stross is clearly trying to use new character types and I liked the economics subplot. But overall I found this to be turgid, boring, and a serious slog to get through.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I just couldn't get into this, perhaps because of Stross's style in this book. I like other things he's written much better.
    • 3/5
      Charles Stross is one of my favorite science fiction authors. This is a police procedural set in Edinburgh Scotland, of all places, some 50 years from now. DI Liz Kavanaugh is a member of the Rule 34 squad which monitors the internet looking for crime. She is investigating the rather gruesome murders of three ex-spammers which turn out to have international implications.As near as I can tell, the excellent cover illustration has nothing to do with anything that happens in the book.
    • 4/5
      I just finished re-reading Ready Player One, and the dark future it paints is a cake walk in comparison with the snap shot we get of Scotland in the not very distant future at all. I loved RPO it was a wild ride of 80's games, music, and movies and while it was a lot more fun to read then this, Rule 34 is clearly the better book. With lots of flawed and interesting characters and a frighteningly familiar world and great writing like "you don't need to mix the metaphor to drink the cocktail" and "they squawk and cackle like nuns at a wife swapping party". With writing like that you don't need a hero to cheer for, with Stross's real human characters the story comes alive and the killer is a surprise. Do the police always get their man?
    • 4/5
      The problem with most sci-fi books is the future they depict: too alien, too unfamiliar. Even though Rule 34 is set in the future, it's actually very near-future, resulting in a world that feels like you and I might be living in... now or maybe a couple of years from now.

      I like the implications here. It's familiar territory, the nerd-speak is accessible, no mumbo jumbo that authors go crazy over, and a future that we are quite possibly headed at.

      Other than that, the characters were okay, the plot cool, and the execution snappy. There's a problem though: the voices sort of meld together, which can cause problems as you go deeper into the book.

      I highly recommend the book, but be prepared for a seriously carbon-friendly, net-savvy, augmented reality-wielding, bitter and cynical future. Have fun.
    • 4/5
      I took way, way too long to finish this. It would have had more of an impact at a quicker pace.
    • 3/5
      To call it a dead end job would be an understatement, policing the weird and sordid life of internet porn was like being in the U bend of her career as all the unpleasantness of life flowed past. This was DI Liz Kavanaugh's life now, but when a fetish nut dies on her watch, the Rule 34 squad goes from an irrelevance to high profile. This first death is just the tip of the fatberg as more start dying in the most bizarre ways possible and the more Kavanaugh finds out about the case and the links to organised crime, the less she wants to know…

      This is loosely a sequel to Halting State with Kavanaugh being the only character who has made it from that book. There are all sorts going on in this future police thriller; in it, he crams all sorts about the possibilities of pervasive state monitoring, a psychopath loose and the way that the criminals work across states. The writing point of view doesn't always make it the easiest book to read, however, it is highly entertaining with some typical surreal moments and the pace varies from sluggish to fairly brisk. I liked it but didn't love it.
    • 4/5
      Liz Kavanaugh is now heading up the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit (commonly referred to as the Rule 34 squad) that looks into offences that fall under the weird banner and often involve some sort of sexual deviancy. Punishment duty for the events related in Halting State. There’s been a suspicious death and the attending officer wants a 2nd opinion from a detective inspector so Liz gets the call. Turns out to be a little more than just suspicious though and pretty soon she’s handing the case over to CID as a homicide. When a couple of cases from other parts of the world get reported with similar circumstances though Liz is back on the investigation but she’ll be reporting to the jerk who got the job that was meant for her before her career hit the skids and neither of them are pleased with this outcome.Told from multiple viewpoints using second person narrative but switches begin with a new chapter with heading for whose segment it is. There are three main characters but a few more do pop up as needed in order to follow the necessary storyline. While this is a self-contained story I’d not recommend reading without first picking up Halting State as there’s not a lot of explanation for the background tools being used by the police especially so you might not pick up on the technological aspects in play. Also this one isn’t quite as good as its predecessor and it’s hard to work out why. The setting is the same (near-future Edinburgh) and the plot is intriguing even if it does take a while to set up so I think it must be that the characters are a little lacking this time around. Still a decent enough read and I’m looking forward to sampling more from the author.
    • 3/5
      This is the first Stross novel I've read, so I can't compare it to anything else in his oeuvre. He has talent – his description of a futuristic world running on fumes is snarkily wise, his meanderings through the clogged bureaucracies of said world will resonate with anyone who's dealt with immovable organizations, and he delves into the dark side of human nature with the jaded poise of a seen-it-all underworld guide.

      So the talent is there – the execution isn't.

      The first half of the novel is setup, exposition, flashbacks, digressions into bureaucratic procedure and geopolitical history – and then more setup, exposition, etc. Stross could've moved all of his pieces onto the board and explained their capabilities in half the time. Why didn't he? Guess he had to fill up some pages to make the novel look satisfyingly thick.

      The chapters were sometimes short, with nothing much happening. A character will ponder something, then the chapter ends and we jump to another character...who may also be pondering something. Again, a lot of this stuff could've been cut.

      The second half of the novel picks up the pace. The devious and convoluted plot begins to make sense, both to the reader and to the determined law enforcement officials trying to clean up the mess – well, it makes sense to a degree. Odds are you'll still have to closely review all the novel's events – or perhaps reread the book – to understand everything.

      On a basic level, the characters aren't exactly revolutionary (there's the female officer living in professional purgatory, the short-fused superior officer, the psychopathic fixer/hitman and so on) but Stross throws enough new stuff into the (bread) mix to make them memorable. John Christie in particular is one character who worms his way into your mind; any author who wants to have a true, dyed-in-blood-and-madness bad guy in their tale should study how Stross crafts him.

      I can't decide if I'll try another Stross novel. If he contained his excesses, his writing would be insanely good. I'll have to read some reviews to see if his other books have promise.
    • 5/5
      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 2nd person narrative, even though the viewpoint changed between chapters, the characters seemed distinct enough for this not to matter.
    • 4/5
      The book is written in second person, which at times makes it a bit harder to read than necessary, but once you've gotten used to the style the book very quickly becomes an excellent "what if.." based on today's online malarkey.

      The book is at times written for insiders (local slang, local placenames, lots of internet memes) which will both date the book and make it more inaccessible for people outside the cultural referance frame.

      Still, the plot and the "what if..." makes up for a lot of that. I relly enjoyed this book.
    • 4/5
      Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.I nominated this book to be read by my on-line book club, and from people's initial comments, it seemed not to be a very popular choice. Most people found the second person annoying at least to start with, or found that having so many viewpoint characters meant that they couldn't relate to any of them. People though there was too much technical detail and found the Kyrgyzstan and Issyk-Kulistan politics confusing, and a couple said that it would be better as a short story. On the other hand, this book did lead to a lot more discussion than most of the other books we have read, with people asking and answering questions about ATHENA and MacDonald's role in the story, and a couple of people commented that although they found it a chore to read, they found themselves thinking about it and talking to other people about it a lot after they finished. So it was a good choice for our book club after all. I enjoyed this book a lot, and the main thing that I found confusing was about the Issyk-Kulistan bonds, which I had to go back and re-read again after I finished. After re-reading that section it did make sense, so I was probably rushing too much the first time. The second person viewpoint ceased to bother me about half way through and my early thoughts about second person being like a game master talking about what your game character is doing weren't far off the mark as it turns out. By the mid-point I was wondering how the author could possibly expect his readers to accept so many unlikely coincidences happening, and it was surprisingly satisfying to find out that there probably wasn't a single coincidence in the whole book. And now I will have to re-read Halting State to find out if that is the case that caused Liz's career to derail so spectacularly, as I can't remember much about the plot of the earlier book.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      I really liked Halting State, but I found this very disappointing. It felt like the author was trying to write a book with all of the same elements as Halting State - a police force that uses a lot of surveillance, an investigation of crimes instigated on the internet, an exploration of near-future (or current cutting-edge) technology, some gory dark humor, and fast-paced action. It has the same elements, but they just don't cohere, and the book was confusing in places and just didn't keep me interested.
    • 4/5
      Slow start but quite a different plot.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      Most cyberpunk thing I've read in ages, but entirely modern too.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      I'm still somewhat confused about this one, though I enjoyed the ride.
      pProper review after a think, maybe.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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 information overload feel of a Stross story, crossed with the weird immediacy of second person.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      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 relevant.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      Bit fragmented and thin on ground-breaking ideas (compared to older Stross material) but basically entertaining read
    • 3/5
      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 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.