What is Rule 34, you ask. Let Charles Stross explain | Science fiction books

What is Rule 34, you ask. Let Charles Stross explain

It's 9:30am on a painfully dull Thursday morning in the office. The boss has retreated behind her wall of pot plants after hovering over your shoulder like a huge and bothersome horsefly, peering at your computer screen as you attempt to explain the annual sales speadsheet. You flick your mouse cursor over to the Firefox browser you're running from the same USB dongle that is providing your wireless internet access, all so spotty Gareth in IT services can't spy on what you're looking at.

There's no response from the nice-looking date on Soulmates and no little red notifications demanding your attention on Facebook, so you click over to the Guardian's books website. With luck the lovely Sam Jordison will have read your nomination for the Not the Booker prize. But no! It's that SF geek Walter with another one of his weird things. What's he going on about this time?

Apparently some bloke called Charles Stross has written a science fiction novel called Rule 34. 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. 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. Hmmm ... it's all beginning to sound a bit avant garde to you.

Rule 34 is one of those internet memes people keep talking about. 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. You follow the link and decide that yes, it is indeed rather amusing. 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. 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. 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.

By the time you haul your eyes back to the screen Walter has started yakking on about "maker culture". This is a trendy internet term for people making things for themselves. Apparently people don't make things anymore, we just consume, like the passive foolish consumers we are, worshipping at our altars of mass consumerism. But these trendy internet people are making stuff for themselves – all kinds of stuff, from electronics and robots to 3D printing rigs. Bloody hippies. 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.

Aha! Stross's chief protagonist is one Liz Kavanagh, a washed-up detective inspector in the Edinburgh police force. 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. 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.

The boss just came stomping out of her office like a yeti on crack. You just manage to get the spreadsheet back up as she storms past you to abuse some other poor soul. But you can feel the spreadsheet sapping your will to live with every passing second. On second thoughts, the makers can't bankrupt capitalist society soon enough as far as you're concerned. You might give that Stross book a go. If only its cover weren't so ... geeky. That's one thing you can always rely on a Booker winner for: a nice tasteful cover you can show off on the train.

But 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. But under the covers we're as much like a sleazy erotic paperback as we are Nobel prize-winning literature. Most of us much more so. It used to be you could hide behind your cover, but the internet is giving as all a good look at what's really going on in the small print of our collective unconscious. Hmmm ... that sounds right up your zeitgeist. Clever Charles Stross. And clever you!

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