Rule 34

I didn't care much for Singularity Sky and had sort of dismissed Stross as someone who dealt in a nerd-friendly thriller-mode SF that was of little interest to me. Still, when one of my favourite booksellers showed me this shiny new trade paperback with its title ripped straight from yesterday's int......more

You open Rule 34 expecting a police procedural, and indeed, that's how it starts out. It's a police procedural twenty-one minutes into the future: one minute, plus five years, more from the settings of its predecessor Halting State, although the police only solve a few minor crimes, never the major......more

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......more

The Internet isn’t for porn, silly human. The Internet is for spam! It’s an interesting spin on a truism of our times. We are seeing the first reported smartphone botnet. We are seeing the future. Policing of the future isn’t going to be about Robocop busting drug dealers and car thieves on the stree......more

Rule 34 is interesting in many ways: it deals with a subject matter that is deeply interesting to me (artificial intelligence and what that means for society), is ripe with memes that any internet savvy reader would find amusing, and uses a unique second-person narrative style that takes some gettin......more