That's one thing you can always rely on a Booker winner for: a nice tasteful cover you can show off on the train.īut then that's exactly what Rule 34 is about really, isn't it? We're all hiding behind nice tasteful covers, nice tasteful clothes and nice tasteful behaviour. On second thoughts, the makers can't bankrupt capitalist society soon enough as far as you're concerned. But you can feel the spreadsheet sapping your will to live with every passing second. You just manage to get the spreadsheet back up as she storms past you to abuse some other poor soul. The boss just came stomping out of her office like a yeti on crack. Kavanagh and her squad are neck-deep in hardcore porn, copycat murders and cutting-edge cybercrime, and the story Stross weaves from all these big ideas makes for a top-quality crime thriller. Kavanagh has been relegated to running the Rule 34 squad, a not-so-crack unit of nerds and geeks assigned to monitoring weird internet trends in the hope of spotting various criminal activities. What if we all had to make everything we used? It would be like the stone age all over again! What happened to the porn? You're sure the title said something about porn.Īha! Stross's chief protagonist is one Liz Kavanagh, a washed-up detective inspector in the Edinburgh police force. But these trendy internet people are making stuff for themselves – all kinds of stuff, from electronics and robots to 3D printing rigs. Apparently people don't make things anymore, we just consume, like the passive foolish consumers we are, worshipping at our altars of mass consumerism. This is a trendy internet term for people making things for themselves. But the image of a Fender Stratocaster, dripping with foamy suds, covering the private parts of a nude model is stuck in your head now and your lizard brain isn't letting go of it any time soon.īy the time you haul your eyes back to the screen Walter has started yakking on about "maker culture".
Walter's going on about how this isn't just about porn but is really a clever way of talking about the proliferation of ideas and resources in the internet era blah blah blah. In fact you are rather tempted to Google "Wet Riffs" and see what you find there, but think it's also rather likely to be NSFW. You follow the link and decide that yes, it is indeed rather amusing. It states simply that "pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject", and was featured as a rather amusing cartoon on the famous XKCD web comic. Rule 34 is one of those internet memes people keep talking about. it's all beginning to sound a bit avant garde to you. What's more, this is the second book in which Stross has pulled this stunt, the cheeky bugger! To write one novel in the second person may be considered misfortune, two is starting to look like carelessness. It's written entirely in the second person, like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books from when you were a kid, only better. Apparently some bloke called Charles Stross has written a science fiction novel called Rule 34.
0 kommentar(er)
