Rule 34

Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters.

The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little flat at times when used as a device to describe things that you would already know if this was really *you* we were talking about.

Still, the most impressive thing here is that Rule 34 is a character-driven story that hypothesis the implications of technological, political, and economic advances over the next decade or so on life, crime, and policing.

I just finished the book though, and I'm already thinking about going back to read it again -- because while the loose ends are tied up at the end, this book is rather dense with information, and knowing who was doing what and why would probably go a long way toward explaining their apparently inexplicable actions earlier on. Maybe...

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Rooftop garden tour (October, 2011)

The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn't try very hard.

That section of the garden has become something of a science experiment in the past few months as I let the greens go to seed to see what the seed pods would look like. Maybe I'll try growing leafy greens again in the spring, but the growing season on the rooftop is almost over for now.

Eventually when we build a deck on the roof I'd like to create a small cold frame that we can use to grow cold-weather vegetables such as spinach, but for now the garden is in a race against nature to see how many snow peas it can produce.

Overall snow peas have turned out to be my vegetable of the year. By sowing a fairly large number of seeds (given the small space) directly in the soil I've managed to get a pretty good crop this fall. The pea pods mature very quickly once the plants are full grown and I have to pick a few every day -- sometimes even twice a day.

It usually takes 2-3 days to pick enough for a meal, but so far I've been happier with my fall snow pea crop than with anything else I've tried growing on the roof.

The climate probably has a lot to do with that. This fall hasn't been too warm, too rainy, or too cloudy -- although we've had a bit of each condition.

The amount of work I put into trying to grow sweet peppers this summer, on the other hand, is barely paying off. I've picked about three peppers so far -- two with very thin skin and one nice and juicy red bell pepper which was a bit on the small side. I'm hopeful that two last peppers that are hanging on will fully ripen before it gets too cold for the plants to survive.

Halting State

I've been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I've tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past... set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they're writing about a distant world we're never likely to visit in our lifetimes... even when that world is earth after a major technological advancement.

The best stories often just take one simple idea and try to run with its implications. What if we lived in a world with robot servants? What if we discovered we could teleport across short distances?

But every now and then contemporary science fiction authors take a much more plausible idea and run with that instead.

When I first read Neuromancer I was blown away by the complete world William Gibson imagined where cyberspace was real. But he wasn't predicting a far-flung future. He was looking at the existing technology of networked computers in 1984 and imagining one way that technology might evolve -- and what some of the implications could be for society.

And so a million cyberpunk novels were born, and I went back to reading classic science fiction stories.

But this week I read Halting State, a 2007 novel by Charles Stross that does for augmented reality what Neuromancer did for the idea of cyberspace. And for the first time I was really impressed with the implications (both good and bad) of this technology which is available today, but which is still in its infancy.

As a technology blogger and reporter I've been covering augmented reality apps for computers and smartphones for a  few years. But I've never been particularly impressed.

Sure, apps such as Layar, which allow you to point your phone's camera down the street and see information about nearby restaurants or tourist attractions pop up over the top of the picture are fun to play with for a few minutes. But right now you have to hold your phone in front of your face and look at it instead of the road ahead of you to get the most out of these apps. Just make sure not to walk into that pole that would be in your peripheral vision if you weren't relying on your phone's narrow-angle lens.

With today's technology, there's almost always an easier way to sift through data than using augmented reality. There are hundreds of apps that will show me a map or list with those same restaurants or tourist attractions -- and those apps help me make decisions much more quickly and efficiently.

But Halting State imagines that by 2018 your smartphone will stay in your pocket and link up to a special pair of glasses that will give you a heads-up display with all the data you could ever need. Walk into a gaming convention and instead of enthusiasts wearing costumes, you can flip a button and orcs and dragons will enter you field of vision. Police officers can use a different augmented layer reality to pull up information they need while on patrol. And of course nobody with one of these setups need ever get lost, since you can see the directions floating right in front of your face.

Halting State isn't just about augmented reality. It also projects the future of video gaming and live action role playing games, distributed computing systems, and a few other trends that might or might not take off. But the world of Halting State feels very plausible based on today's technology and shows why people are so excited about making apps like Layar, even if they don't seem very useful today. In the future they might be.

Of course, as 2018 approaches, this book could end up looking a lot like a 1950s story that imagines human beings colonizing the moon and fighting Martians. Things don't always turn out the way you think they will in the future.

But I enjoyed Halting State and I'm looking forward to reading Rule 34, the second book in the series. It was published in 2011, and I'm wondering if Stross has made any changes to his world of the future to keep in line with the changes in technology over the past few years. You also have to love any author that apparently titles his book after an xkcd comic.