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351 pages, Hardcover
First published October 2, 2007
Mary’s been nagging you about your heart ever since that stupid DNA check you both took last year (‘so the wee wun kens his maws ur both gawn tae be aboot for a whiule’), and the way she goes on, you’d think refined sugar was laced with prussic acid.If that writing is like nails on a chalk board for you—both the second-person POV and the Scottish dialect—then you definitely want to stay away from this work. Myself, I stopped noticing it after 30 pages or so.
Marcus Hackman’s office is all done up in chrome and black like an eighties bachelor pad. Mary has a thing for design magazines, and you recognise the Eames chair and lounger, and you’ll swear you’ve seen that desk somewhere famous. One wall is cluttered with photographs and certificates and the sort of shit the terminally insecure use to reassure themselves that they really matter; or maybe it’s what aggressive office sociopaths use to browbeat the terminally insecure into thinking that they really matter. The shark bares his teeth at you in a not-too-cannibalistic manner. ‘I can spare you five minutes.’Let’s take the sentence ‘The shark bares his teeth at you in a not-too-cannibalistic manner’.
‘The share bares his teeth at me in a not-too-cannibalistic manner.’Is it all just in Sue’s imagination? The sentence becomes as much about Sue as it is about Marcus Hackman.
‘The shark bares his teeth at Sue in a manner that she found not-too-cannibalistic.’We also get a divorce between the objectivity of the impression of ‘shark’ given by the third-party POV and the subjectivity of describing Sue’s reaction.
CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory. Here’s the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath…There’s the green tree of signs sprouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat. Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticket, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social services case files, where applicable…This is the twenty-first century, and all the tetrabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world, sprayed across it in a Technicolour mass of officious labelling and crime notices.The connectedness and ubiquity of access to the internet was just about beginning in 2007 when Charles Stross wrote this. Internet glasses are currently being developed by Google. But the interesting, and just about too scarily plausible next step, is the labelling and retrieval of information on people based on face-recognition technology and cross-referencing a range of databases in real time for instant reference. It’s the whole soci0-economic and cultural effect of such steps in where we currently are to where we might well be in the next decade that makes the future of this novel so intriguingly compelling.