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!