All's Fair in (Virtual) Love and War

books:


	• Halting State Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Gibson meets Dick

Stross's writing tends to throw a massive amount of information at you. Unlike both Dick and Gibson he understands that wild and unbalancing ideas are more palatable when you have characters you actually like. There are a few extraneous plot points but Stross is a talented writer and he makes you root for his characters.

Getting it right

Charles Stross manages to make a book about a not so different world enjoyable. He was a little optimistic about when the virtual world would be here - it has already arrived. Internet warfare, electronic realities, and the crossover of behaviors bringing laws and lawyers to cyberspace. From the 'Atlantic Monthly' cartoon of a dog at the computer saying' "On-line no one knows you are a dog!" to present day reality of people selling clothes and accessories to avatars in 'Second Life'. Turns out that reality in not a crutch, it is what you make of it.

for more information click here

Not Free SF Reader

Taggart 2030.

Or, it seems a bit like that at times, especially with Sergeant Smith and company.

The second person thing didn't really worry me at all, I had read the first two or three chapters on the web, so once you get used to it after a few pages I found I wasn't really noticing it at all, and just reading it the same as any other novel.

An in-game raid on a bank in a MMORPG leads to an investigation, that has intelligence, financial and communications implications.

A near future setting where people are even more wired, and physical reality has a virtual overlay where things can be tagged, or have information added to them like a wiki, and people use this via mobile phones and glasses. The police, for example, use CopSpace.

Gaming is more prevalent, with people also taking part in large scale LARP and what they call ARG - co-ordinated by computer and phone - one of which, amusinglyg enough, is called 'SPOOKS'. No mention of games of Hustle or Life On Mars though, maybe firing up the Quatro would be frowned upon by law-enforcement. :)

For some of the flavour :

"..They're guarding some loot I need to get my hands on. About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fiercely large Shoggoth; if you want to keep your data secure, there's nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that's guarded by Lovecraftian horrors."

or

"The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever's sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won't get you a handle on what's going on because they're not using the game a sa ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer! They're tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!"

There are three main characters, a game developer, a forensic accountant, and a police Sergeant, with stories told in three different threads, as their investigation leads into something rather nastier going on in real-life.

for more information click here

A Great Read!

This is the first Stross novel I've read, and I really enjoyed it. Set in the near future, the plot concerns an in-game theft from an online game and rapidly spirals into something far more complex. Stross lays on the geek-speak pretty thick at times, and his references to gamer-culture (WoW, Dungeons & Dragons, d20, Cthulhu, etc) had my inner-nerd snapping his suspenders in joy. But if you're not clued into this stuff, you might find the book hard going and a lot of stuff will go straight over your head (the scene with the computer techs juggling Cthulhu dolls and whistling the Twilight Zone theme is hilarious). It's also written entirely in the second person, which I thought a little odd at first, but then realised Stross is just hitting another gamer reference (Fighting Fantasy/Choose Your Own Adventure books and computer RPGs). Geek-culture married to a complex plot of corporate theft and espionage - great stuff.

for more information click here

All's Fair in (Virtual) Love and War

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 web and email and telephone networks were all being tapped."

What's so fun about this story is that it's well-written, intelligent, and contemporary; it moves fast, and has a lot of humor and a bit of satire blended into the narrative. Sue, Elaine and Jack take turns by chapters telling what's happening in the story as it scoots along. In the end the good guys win, love between the nerd and the librarian has blossomed, and virtual worlds in real life have had their fun, futurist projection.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

hot

not?

What's your opinion?

Write a review and share your thoughts!

recommendations

Don't Read these Spine Chilling Horror Books Alone
Crack Open a Good Horror Book Tonight
You Can't Judge a Book By it's Cover
Give These Horror Stories a Read
Read, Read, Read, End of Story

search for books
halting state, halting, state

Impressum / about us