Halting State (A Halting State Novel)

I encountered to this book in the course of an hour-long hunt through cross-references ("people who bought this book also bought..."), best-seller lists, etc. looking for something new and good in the vein of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc. - a work by an author who really gets how the present works and the near future is likely to work, and can be truly, literarily creative with it. I ordered it expecting something decent, and found that I had received a real gem. Not only is the tech background super-solid (it helps if you're a sysadmin, but if not, no worries), but the writing is great - the dialog and internal monologues are as sardonic and humorous as, say, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaason, or John Sandford. Finally, dear God, it's set in Scotland and reads like Ian Rankin tartan noir. What's not to like?

You don't have to be a science fiction fan to enjoy HALTING STATE by Charles Stross. It's a mixed-reality, virtual-real world, techno-spy-terrorist, love story thriller that mentions Second Life several times. Four characters drive the story: Sue, Elaine, Jack, and Nigel. Sue's a cop working out of Edinburgh Scotland, which by the year 2018 has gained its independence from Britain and is a standalone member of the European Union and a major economic player in its own right. Elaine's a high-powered "forensic accountant" spreadsheet jockey type who does real-world martial arts and sword fighting role-playing as a hobby in her spare time. Jack's a geek-nerd-game-programmer who lives full time behind a coding keyboard or in game space (python programmer and more). Nigel's .. well, let's just say Nigel's a key character everyone's looking for during the plot. ANYway.. the story opens with Sue receiving a hot directive to report to the offices of Hayek Associates Plc. where a robbery has just taken place. NOW it gets interesting. It was a virtual world robbery by a gang of 20 Orcs backed up by a fire-breathing Dragon and what was stolen was 26 million Euros worth of Player Assets. Hayek Associates are fit to be tied because their purpose in life is, as their marketing director explains it to Sue: "We run virtual central banks for massively multiplayer online role-playing games. We stabilize the economies of seventeen imaginary realms with a combined VM2 - that's, uh, a measure of the total virtual money supply - about the same size as Japan's. We're responsible for ensuring that 20 million players who spend roughly 5 billion Euros a year to participate in our client's games don't see their virtual stake holdings vanish into mid-air." (Which, of course, is what has just happened with the Orc-Dragon raid on Hayek Associates' virtual vaults!). From here it moves forward faster and faster with lots of fun mixed-reality real-virtual world references including people's experiences and hardware/software. HALTING STATE is especially fun for SL residents because the book casually mentions Second Life several times in conversations by characters. In 2018, you see, Second Life and virtual worlds are a given! For example, policewoman Sue regularly uses a virtual overlay which puts little text boxes over (real world) people in her eyeglasses showing if they have criminal records. When the marketing director asks her if she's experienced with games he dismisses her response saying, "Do you play any games...? ... CopSpace? That's not a game, that's a metaverse like Real World or Second Life." In another conversation, when Sue, Elaine, and Jack realize they are now working for the Government (read UK Intelligence), their contact instructs them saying, "Do you remember the flap some years ago over terrorists holding training camps in Second Life? ... they weren't training camps, it was just a convenient place to go and swap intelligence or give orders, once the we

I've always tried reading sci-fiction without much success. I picked up Halting State on recommendations from BoingBoing just to give it a look-see and I'm fantastically surprised. I'm not a hacker or gamer but the speculative nature of the book isn't so far fetched as to make it impossible to believe or pin down. Stross also writes a great character-driven story with believable sketches that bring the story to life so you're not tripping over the geekiness of the science that is believable and hopefully, not too far away.

Charles Stross has come through again with a very eerily real vision of the future. Like Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End," this is set in a very near future that is so plausible that you expect the plot lines to come out in tomorrow's headlines. The ubiquitous game reality overlays of our everyday world are being explored in places like Second Life right now and he extrapolates what it might be for the next generation. The idea of a virtual crime environment for police is so real that you can imagine seeing it on the next version of CSI from Jerry Bruckheimer. That being said, there is a lot of jargon and many, many inside jokes from the worlds of gaming and programming. This may be off-putting to some and others may be lost. Still, for those of us with a little tech savvy, that just ads to the spice. Some of the reviewers thought that the shifting points of view and second person voice were annoying and that is too bad. I was not bothered, but loved the way the view point shifted and you kept seeing the previous event from another perspective. Bottom line - buy this book and read it first before you see it on CNN tomorrow.

I generally don't read fiction. But I couldn't resist this. This exciting book takes us into a world that, while fiction, could just as easily be our world in a few years --- a spook world. Most of the book can easily be comprehended by people who may not have a through knowledge of computers and networks, as is necessary for previous works by this author. The story opens in the very near future in Edinburgh, where police sergeant Sue Smith is called in to investigate a bank robbery. But, guess what, no guns were pulled. No stick-up note. This was a robbery done in gamespace, online! Don't you love it? This technothriller is a must-read for gamers. But it's also a wonderful romp for mystery lovers and people who like to read about computer crime and how we are losing our privacy to those who know and understand computers and networks and the cyberworld in general. Reading this book may just make you a bit leary about those anonymous folks lurking in chat rooms and forums. The story shows how multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) can be a tool used by governments and intelligence agencies to recruit useful idiots, unwary puppets to do the dirty work of infiltrating networks while they think they're just hacking around in a virtual gaming environment. Highly recommended.