Review of Charles Stross’s Rule 34

One thing we can be sure of in the future is that it will provide more opportunities for people to get what they want – through the internet and its
future growth, primarily – and that a great deal of what people want may not be exactly good for them. In a not very distant future Scotland, the internet has become a kind of monstrous presence which can link people with anything they can imagine: hook your wireless connection to a simple 3D printer and the product of your imagination, however monstrous or indeed wonderful it might be, will be brought to life. Perhaps literally, if that is how your mind works.

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Review of Stross’s The Fuller Memorandum

 

Horrors from beyond space and time continue to stalk the universe, irrespective of whether anyone else really wants them to and with indeed blithe indifference to the desires of humans, cultists, civilians and Laundry operatives. Fortunately for the sanity of humanity, the way into our perception of the universe is long and tangled and requires such things as chanting, the stars being right, blood sacrifices and advanced algorithmic calculations in the field of combat epistemology. The bad news, of course, is that all of these once very onerous requirements are now easily available via a laptop computer or even a smart phone – the Necronom-Ipod, perhaps.

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Review of Stross’s Wireless

There is often something malevolent in Charles Stross’s work–sometimes it comes in the form of an external, objectified monster from beyond space and time (in the Laundry series of Lovecraftian mystery) and sometimes an abstract but no less vicious notion such as class antagonism or the cunning of history. Malevolence is well-represented in this collection of the prolific author’s work–most of which are appearing in such a convenient format for the first time.

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Review of The Revolution Business

Involuntarily impregnated, forced to wear uncomfortable clothes and deprived of proper tea, our heroine Miriam is feeling the strain in this fifth episode of the Merchant Princes saga–and there will be at least one more episode to come, with the possibility of many more after that. The plot in this book offers a variety of ways in which more and more action is required to satisfy all of the different strands that have been added by the author to the original conceit. Then again, the cliffhanger on which this book ends is of sufficient scope to bring the whole shebang to a conclusion fairly rapidly.

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Review of Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children

In addition to having the sixth planet of our solar system named after him, the god Saturn was renowned for his predilection for devouring all of his children, being aware of the prophecy that one day one of his children will cast him down from his throne and kill him just as he himself did to his own liege. He was aided and abetted in this, so the legends go, by his wife Rhea.

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Review of Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

When the Festival arrives at New Rochard, a planetary colony of the New Republic, it announces its arrival in the form of a rain of mobile phones. People pick up the phones, which are a novelty for them and find that they can ask for anything they like, so long as they entertain the being on the other end of the line. For a world kept under strict control by hereditary privileged classes which have restricted access to technology and promoted state-sponsored religion and other forms of social control in its place, the end of the world (or at least the end of the prevailing social order) appears to have arrived.

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Review of Halting State

It is a few years in the future, 2018, and the world is a little bit more connected, a little bit more attached to the life online. People can more fully immerse themselves in the increasingly rich and developed virtual worlds in which they can shape themselves, their shape and their personality in ways which continue to escape them in the real world. New forms of interactivity provide games in which the real world and the worlds of the imagination collide and overlap: many people sign up as spies, for example, taking part in unexpected assignments on an urgent basis but rarely able to discern the higher level patterns that govern the nature of such a game.

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Review of Glasshouse

When scientists approach individuals vulnerable from recent memory/identity-reassignment surgery who remain unsure whether anyone is still out to get them and provide an offer of safe haven for a period of several years, it appears to be an offer perhaps not too good to refuse but welcome for all that. The safe haven turns out to be an iterative prisoner’s dilemma with open record scoresheets–that is, individuals assume the roles of people from the somewhat distant past of 1950s earth, probably somewhere in the USA, and are rewarded for actions that are in character and punished for actions out of character.

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Review of The Jennifer Morgue

There are two main role models for spies in British literature: George Smiley and James Bond. The two occupy worlds which coincide only at the most basic points and the narratives in which they might find themselves diverge rapidly from possibly the first page. In this extraordinarily enjoyable romp, there is no place for the George Smiley’s of the British Intelligence Service–quite deliberately so, since the formidable super-hero has erected a Bond-like geas over the enormous yacht (previously a part of the Soviet surface fleet) that requires all unregistered entrants to adopt a superheroic attitude and mentality. This is for protective purposes since the Bond-like operatives are usually easier to keep track of and to nullify when required, while when they have been captured and put to work, the attitude works to the benefit of the evil villain.

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Review of The Merchants’ War

If the third episode in this series of The Merchant Princes could have been sub-titled “The Empire Strikes Back,” then this fourth episode might be called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Episode three seemed to herald the forthcoming victory of the forces of conservatism and, indeed, things still look pretty bleak at the end of episode four, yet the forces of revolution are not without some power of their own and, having been launched into action, press on at their own pace.

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