Rule 34

I usually wait to finish the book before the review, but this one is good.  Rule 34, by Charles Stross, one of the writers I follow.  He writes SciFi, near present stuff.  And he is better than most, way better.  For people who liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, this one is for you.  For people who like intelligent depiction of lesbian lifestyles, this one is for you and so far there is no sex, perves and I don't expect any.  For those that have recently been traveling Scotland, this one is for you. If you want to get a glimpse of what the future work is going to look like in about twenty years, this book is for you.

Stross is my type of writer, he pulls stuff that is happening right now and extrapolates.  In his world the collapse of the US dollar is in the past, the collapse of the EU that is happening around our ears right now, is in the past; the EU survived by the way.  Technology is not campy and too complex to understand so it is not dealt with like vanilla SciFi; it is an extrapolation from what we have now.  Oh and it is quite clever.  As I write, California has just allowed the first auto driving car on its roads, Stross penned it into his story everywhere.  Internet connectivity is everywhere and it is part of everyone's life, seemlessly.

That is just setting, I LOVE settings.  

The thing about SciFi/Fantasy novels, the good ones anyways, is that the setting is the part that makes it that type of novel; the basic plot is something else.  This is a crime mystery novel, a Who Dunit.  I can't put it down.  I read at work yesterday.  Half way done ….  Hey I am a slow reader and some of the passages demand being re read.  Problems there is a lot of jargon, and there are a lot of acronyms, job specific jargon acronyms.  

Oh the cool thing is that this is the first book I have ever read, except choose your own adventure, written in Second Person.  You walked up stairs, you read a blog on e Internet, you surfed for lesbian porn evolving horses.  Oh last warning not for kids, there are too many glimpses into their own future, they might give up if they read this.  Oh yeah there are some adult kinky situations and some recent history lessons.  Some on former Romanian dictators kink.