Rule 34

For some reason it took me quite a while to finish this book while I devoured Accelerando. I've read a few of Stross' books and generally like his style. This time however his use of jargon put me off. I can pin it to a single word: "wave". When the book was written Google Wave was "the next thing" except half a year later it wasn't. This made the whole book feel dated to me. The final twist with the identity of ... somehow didn't get me, and I believe there is a previous book with the several of the same characters that I haven't read. All these factors made me enjoy the book a little less.

Despite these personal issues I think this is a good and fun read of a future where reality has become augmented and spam turns smarter every day. It's not too far into the future and I can easily imagine many of his visions coming to pass. I like the setting in Edinburgh as well. The 2nd person perspective is something you get used to after a couple of pages.

It's neither a quick nor an easy read with dense writing, a slow-starting, complicated plot with many twists, turns, and viewpoints. This book suffered from my not having enough time/concentration. This is more of a vacation read.

PS: as the title suggests: you better be an internet nerd, or you won't get half the jargon anyway. In that respect it seems even worse/better (depends on your pov) than Accelerando.

A loose follow up to the excellent Halting State, Rule 34 features some of the secondary characters from that book and the same setting. But don't let that put you off. It could easily be read before reading Halting State. The connections aren't even clearly stated until about halfway through the book.

It also has a lot of the elements that made Halting State so enjoyable for me to read. Not least of which naturally is the Edinburgh setting and the refusal to dumb it down for people who won't get the local references.

I went to Edinburgh University and not only had lectures in Appleton Tower, but also used the computer science lab in there too. It was the place I learned to hate Apple Macs and appreciate Unix workstations. So the brief section that occurs in the building stirred up some memories.

However, I have to say I found this story less engaging than the previous one. In part I think it's just down to the fact there were fewer sympathetic viewpoint characters. A significant amount of time was spent seeing the world from a rather odious position.

The other problem was the ending, which was... abrupt. There was no real effort made to tie up the plot elements. Technically there was resolution, it just wasn't very satisfactory and I certainly didn't feel that any of the characters had progressed during the story.

For all that, its a fascinating exploration of a pretty credible near future where technology is ubiquitous and society is rapidly adapting to it.

I decided that I would not finish Charles Stross' Rule 34. I bought that one on title only, because it made me laugh (Rule 34 of the Internet states: "if you can imagine it, there is porn of it", +/- local variants).
I was first taken aback by the use of the second person, leaving a feeling of Choose Your Own Adventure book; it gets better after a few pages.
Then, there is the fact that "you" change from chapter to chapter. Again, it needs some adaptation, but oh well.
Last blow was the over use of... I suppose scottish accent transcription, possibly "as it would be in 2023" (no opinion on this, I'm definitely not an expert on accents ;) ). My English level is not ridiculous, but if you make me subvocalize a word or more per paragraph, trying to understand what it means from the approximate pronunciation that I can guess, and maintaining a brain cache of what I've figured out, I'm going to be very annoyed very fast. As in, after 2 chapters fast. Well, after two annoying chapters and the first page of the 3rd one that was definitely getting worse in that regard.

Rule 34 isn't exactly a sequel to Halting State , it is in the same universe, there are familiar characters and the world is familiar, but it has a standalone plot. You do not have to read Halting State before Rule 34 to enjoy it.
I'm happy to report that Rule 34 doesn't suffer from stale sequel syndrome. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Halting State.

The third person style of writing takes a bit of getting used to, but I listened to Rule 34 as an audiobook and it didn't disturb me.
As an audiobook you also get the book read to you in a Scottish accent which adds to the humor. I know it's a bit racist but accents can add to humor.
Choosing accents for Rule 34 was a bit problematic as many characters aren't native Scots.
How do you do an accent for a Muslim born in Scotland to immigrant parents or even grandparents? I found that I didn't always agree with the choice of accent, but the different voices and accents made it easier to distinguish between different characters all written in third person.

I liked the Muslim hero/antihero character, it was nice to have a Muslim character that is first and foremost a person with regular (well perhaps in his case serious but regular human) weaknesses that also happens to be Muslim.