Paul Graham Raven

Rule 34 by Charles Stross

Publication type:

Publication date:

March 2012

Original venue:

Vector #269 (BSFA)

See original version

You’ve been reading Rule 34 by Charles Stross, and as a result your internal monologue has shifted into the second person present tense. On balance, this is a good indicator of how well Stross has got to grips with this difficult narrative mode because—as disconcerting as the experience is once you stop reading and try to go about your normal routine—the time you spent subsumed by the book’s pantheon of viewpoint characters flew by remarkably fast.

You remember Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh from Rule 34’s predecessor, Halting State; a decade after helping mop up a very messy breaching of the borders between meatspace and the synthetic worlds of the intertubes, she’s found her career sidelined by the office politics of the (post)modern police force, which remind you of your own experiences in hierarchical organisations, as well as those of your friends. DI Kavanaugh’s prime responsibility is the overseeing of the eponymous “Rule 34 Squad”: a retrofitted outbuilding containing a clade of geekish deskmonkeys who keep an eye on the bizarre horrors that bubble up from the roiling fleshpots of the digital domain. It’s not all LOLcats, Polish pr0n bootlegs and dubstep mashups of celebrity chef non sequiturs though; in a world where 3D printing has become a garage industry, the troll hordes of tomorrow have ways of making their imaginings take dangerously solid form. However, it isn’t a rogue meme-made-concrete that initially shakes Liz out of her career-slump ennui, but the bizarrely-staged murder of a former spam-king.

Anwar Hussein, meanwhile, is a bundle of contradictions spilling messily over the edges of the boxes that society wants to file him in: a Muslim man with a taste for Deuchars IPA and a propensity for graft and grey-hat employment that saw him spend a stretch in prison, courtesy of a certain DI Kavanaugh; a happily married father-of-two who also seeks the forbidden consolations of Edinburgh’s “pink triangle” gay scene; an earnest (if not too bright) guy trying to do the right thing in a world where the wrong things are far more lucrative, not to mention more easily accessed. He’s trying to keep his nose clean while he works out his probation in a precarious job market, so the offer of a part-time gig as honorary consul to the embassy of a newly hived-off independent republic of Somethingistan is tempting enough for him to avoid asking too many questions. Your own sense of the too-good-to-be-true is apparently more finely tuned than Anwar’s but, even so, you’re impressed at just how deeply into the shit he manages to get without Stross once resorting to egregious moments of Idiot Plot.

The Toymaker is a dangerous character (both within the context of the story and without); a schizoid freelance CEO trained by a black-hat venture capitalism fund and deployed to downsize and reboot the Scotland branch of “The Operation”, which consists of browbeating local small-time crims into illegally fabbing and distributing black-market nasties of every stripe, from bootleg household gimcracks to the sort of sexual lifestyle accessory that would make contemporary tabloid scares about internet smut look endearingly naive and puritanical by comparison. (You’re reminded of the theories of Joel Bakan who, in his book The Corporation, suggested that the behaviour of large corporations would be considered psychopathic if exhibited by individual human beings; The Toymaker and The Operation personify and concretise that metaphor, respectively.)

Rule 34 spends a lot less time inhabiting virtual spaces than Halting State. Abandoning the immersive MMORPG as dominant technological paradigm, Stross goes to town instead with augmented reality, a sort of hybrid of virtual reality and the canonical everyday of meatspace: reality overlaid with data, delivered by way of eyewear loaded with locative technologies and wireless bandwidth up the wazoo. AR is not the only blogospheric buzzthing in Rule 34, however; along the way you’ve also encountered post-national financial entities, “choice architecture”, morality prosthetics and the (seemingly oxymoronic) concept of libertarian paternalism, not to mention the more familiar and tangible next-big-things like drone sousveillence, 3D printing, ubicomp, everyware and hell knows what else. These cutting-edge postulations sit alongside the sort of grab-bag WTF oddities that anyone who reads BoingBoing (or who drinks from any of the other online firehoses of geek culture) will recognise as readily as you did. You recall Stross’s intent, publicly stated back in the mid-Noughties, to “pitch for the SlashDot generation” and—despite SlashDot’s diminishing voice among the expanded geek bloc—you can’t help but feel he’s pretty much nailed it. Rule 34 is fast, darkly funny and has the smell of Zeitgeist on its breath; you also suspect that if there’s any writer in UK sf right now whose work could find a home in the bag (or ereader) of the hypothetically average mainstream thrillers’n’mysteries reader who “doesn’t really like sci-fi”, then Stross is probably it.

And that’s taking the unusual style into account. You’ve read many jeremiads against the second person as a high-friction narrative mode and wonder whether Stross’s success with the form is due only to his dogged persistence and characteristic desire to fly in the face of conventional wisdom or to some additional fundamental change in the modern sense of identity. (The answer, you assume, rests somewhere in the phase space between those two possibilities.) The second person mode reflects the dissociated sense of self provided by networked virtual worlds and there’s an argument to be made that anyone who spends a considerable time in (or is it on?) the metamilieu of the internet—right in Stross’s crosshairs, in other words—might be more attuned to the experience of projecting their identity into the immediate experience of another, while still retaining sufficient sense of self to understand and appreciate said experience as narrative and puzzle-quest at once.

You know that this is an untestable and navel-gazey kind of theory, but that’s never stopped you before. Indeed, as time goes by you feel that “unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an uncertain resolution,” which is as neat a description as you could write of the vibe toward the end of Rule 34, as numerous threads entangle their way to the denouement. Its wiry hybrid vigour belies the care lavished on its construction, while its deadpan gallows humour leavens the socioeconomic meathooks of its imagined future. You suspect it’s the best novel Stross has written so far.

Commentary notes

Now, this was a turning-point piece for me, without a doubt. I know I’ve said that of a number of these reviews, but can a life not have more than one turning point? Furthermore, the pivots implicit with the others are mostly observable in hindsight, whereas with this one I felt the turn as I was writing it.

That feeling was the result of having, committing to, and paying off upon the wild idea of reviewing a novel written in the second person present tense using that same narrative modality. Now, I wouldn’t say I did a particularly spectacular job of it, here: the conceit comes through rather lumpily, in stark contrast to Stross’s work in the novel under review. But I do recall it as my first stab at what I suppose we might call “high concept” criticism, which in turn pegs this as a moment where I found a confidence that I had lacked before. It is also, perhaps, a first entry in the ledger of a practice whose acquisition I mostly credit to the criticism of Adam Roberts: the style and form of the review should, to whatever extent is plausible, practical and potentially entertaining, echo the style and form of the work under review. This is not always easy to do; indeed, it has resulted in some spectacular abandonments, when the challenge was beyond me, and I was obliged to return to something more straightforward. But this novel was a gift in that sense (as well as in many others), and this piece was a proud moment.