Rule 34 by Charles StrossI looked at the cover of this book a long time, once I'd picked it up off the "new fiction" shelf at the Puyallup Library. I was having cover deja vu—couldn't remember the story when I read the jacket material, but it looked so familiar. I ended up taking it home based mostly on the blurb where the author was praised as a "master of the near-future." Near future sci-fi is very hit-or-miss for me, so I was curious about what mastery in the niche genre read like.
I'm recommending this book mostly because I want someone else to read it and tell me what the hell...? I'm a pretty astute reader; I've had lots of practice. This one, however, left my brain spinning, and I can't decide if that was on purpose or not. I enjoyed it. Glad I read it. Still not sure if the author mismanaged his (admittedly) complex plot or if I just couldn't keep up. Someone let me know.
Meantime, let me tell you something about this novel that is, in my experience, almost completely unique: this novel is written in the second person.
[Technical note, since even my really smart friends are asking: 1st person is the "I" perspective, 3rd person is the "he/she" perspective. Both common in novels. 2nd person is the "you" perspective, as in "You walk into the room and smell blood, which is how most of your Mondays begin, now that you think about it." The only other books I can think of that do this are the Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a kid. Can you think of another?]
Of course I noticed the 2nd person perspective right away, and was aware of it throughout. This isn't a great sign, novelistically speaking; you'd rather people notice your story and not your writing. And yet, is it even possible to write in the 2nd person and not have it be constantly noticed? It's just way too rare.
My second concern was that the author had done this just to stand out. I can understand the impulse, having studied the publishing context the past couple years. The more I read though, the more I thought it worked. I'm pretty tolerant of oddity in novels, so your experience may differ, but I liked it, if only for the variety.
The author doesn't pull a single punch either. He's already made you uncomfortable by choosing this unusual perspective, but then he piles on by writing multiple points of view. Not only are you being forced to experience the novel as one of the main characters, your are being forced to adopt the perspective of different main characters each chapter as the author rotates through his approximately three POV characters.
How can there be approximately three main characters? Damn good question, because he's not done messing with you yet. First you're forced into the odd 2nd person perspective, then you're forced into a multiple POV situation, THEN he makes the characters people you probably can't identify with. First chapter I'm a lesbian cop with career issues, second chapter I'm a bisexual muslim man with a family, third chapter I'm a predatory psychopath on meds. And there is no shortage of graphic scenes to illustrate these different life-choices. Let me tell you, as a Standard White Male, all of this required some serious mind-bending.
The approximate part comes in when you realize over the course of the early chapters that there is some kind of maybe-artificial-maybe-guided computer intelligence at work, and occasionally there's a chapter from that perspective that isn't clearly identified. Three main characters? Four? You have to finish the book to find out.
There's a lot going on here. It may be that you'll find the novel a failure as a work of literary entertainment, but you've got to appreciate the madness involved in even attempting such a thing. I may buy a copy just so I can have this conversation every time someone stands in front of my bookshelves.
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