A second person narration is meant to be terribly evocative, but it rarely works. Even when masterfully handled as in Italo Calvino’s On A Winter’s Night A Traveler it’s pretty distracting.

Charles Stross is no Calvino, but seems to have decided he’s better than Calvino, because this book is very distractingly written in the second person — with three different point-of-view characters! Thus at some points the reader “is” Sue, a police detective, Jack, a hacker/gamer, and Elaine, a forensic accountant with a taste for medieval swordfighting. Supposedly this is meant as an homage to those old ADVENTURE computer games, which, ok. But as a noveling technique? Meh.

That aside, this is a GREAT read. Stross found a great angle on the old “bank robbery with global implications” bit — the bank is within an MMORPG and the robbery a tiny part of a fractally weird uberplot. Second person narrative aside, the characters are really well-drawn and cool, and their secrets are well kept until they detonate satisfyingly at the end (where they should).

All in all, a good little bit of info-age sci-fi. William Gibson recommended it, and Amazon has been recommending Stross to me for a while now.

I see why, yes I do!