Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters.
The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little flat at times when used as a device to describe things that you would already know if this was really *you* we were talking about.
Still, the most impressive thing here is that Rule 34 is a character-driven story that hypothesis the implications of technological, political, and economic advances over the next decade or so on life, crime, and policing.
I just finished the book though, and I’m already thinking about going back to read it again — because while the loose ends are tied up at the end, this book is rather dense with information, and knowing who was doing what and why would probably go a long way toward explaining their apparently inexplicable actions earlier on. Maybe…
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