"Rule 34" is a popular online meme, which, as Charles Stross puts it, holds that "if you can imagine it, there's pornography about it on the Internet," for any value of "it." Stross uses that line as the inspiration for the "Rule 34 Squad" or, as it's officially known, the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit--a division of tomorrow's Edinburgh police department that tracks down "[the] eldritch fads and niche cultures that have zero local history until they detonate suddenly," as people try to replicate the disturbing things they find online in their own homes and neighborhoods.
The ICIU is run by 38-year-old detective inspector Liz Kavanagh, but it's not her only responsibility in the department and, as Rule 34 begins she's assigned to a bizarre homicide case involving a former spammer and an enema machine once owned by Nicolae Ceausescu. Stross interweaves her story with that of Anwar Hussein, an ex-con who's been recruited to run the Scottish consulate for Issyk-Kulistan (a brand new nation splintering off from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan), and the Toymaker, a "neurodiverse" (i.e., sociopathic) foot soldier in an international criminal enterprise that's run like a venture capital fund.
Of course all these plot threads are going to come up against each other, but Stross does an excellent job of shifting among multiple second-person narrators as he maneuvers his characters unobtrusively into position--and if any of the proceedings strike you as a bit too coincidental, there's a good explanation, eventually. He also neatly sketches out a near-future world that's been transformed by "globalization and EU harmonization and Depression 2.0 and Policing 3.0," without a lot of finger pointing and hand wringing about How It All Went Wrong (as seen in Dan Simmons's recent science fiction thriller Flashback). When the true underlying premises start to unfurl in the second half, they're grounded in fascinating economic and technological speculations but remain accessible to readers who don't consider themselves science fiction fans.
One of the novel's best aspects, though, is its handling of the police force of the future. Although Liz's experience is overlaid by CopSpace--"the augmented-reality interface to all the accumulated policing and intelligence databases around which your job revolves"--the core story is about trying to fight crime while dealing with departmental bureaucracy and tense office politics. Even with the shiny techno-flourishes, it's an instantly recognizable work environment that, if Stross were to explore it over enough stories, could be on a par with classic police procedural settings like Ed McBain's 87th Precinct. --Ron Hogan
Shelf Talker: Rule 34 is set in the same future Edinburgh as Stross's 2007 novel Halting State, but you don't need to have read that book to enjoy this high-tech thriller on its own merits.