Best book on what the future is going to be like IMO

books:


	• Halting State Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best book on what the future is going to be like IMO

One of the best books I have read on what the future will probably be like. A little slow to get started, but after a few chapters you get used to the lingo and it just explodes from there. Great book and great vision!

Hard to get into; hard to put down

This is a near-future novel. It definitely qualifies as SCIENCE fiction. There was nothing fantasy about it. It seems a natural extension of our rapid expansion in a number of areas of IT hardware and software. If you are reasonably familiar with the current state of the art of IT, you'll end up loving Halting State. If you've ever stayed awake until the wee hours pounding out code or playing some computer game, you'll wonder why you didn't write this book.

You'll probably find the book more accessible if you have a bit of computer gaming background. I don't. You also have to get used to some Scottish dialect, some imaginative extensions of today's IT terminology, and some strange applications and hardware. The concept of alternate `spaces' takes a while to get used to so you may get lost at some point. Stay the course. It will be worth it!

You also need to get past a novel written completely in second-person singular. The reasons for that flow from early Dungeons & Dragons scenarios but it took some getting used to, especially since `you' are three characters. Again, stay the course. It all comes clear in the end. I rated it four stars because there's no ramp-up. The author just dumps you into 2018 and turns you loose.

Initially, I found the Halting State difficult to follow and almost put it down on my pile of `mistakes' after reading the prologue and three chapters. That would have been a mistake. It's a learning experience. By the fifth chapter, I was hooked, hated putting it down, and wanted more when I finished the last page. You need to read this book!

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Another Tour de Force

Although I doubt he will ever write anything equal to the almost cultish appeal of "Accelerando" this is another winner. In fact, I liked it better than his previous work ("Glass House") because it seemed so much more plausible.

It is 2018 and more and more, people are "living" in virtual reality worlds. But this is ony a portent of things to come. Scotland has broken away from the UK and that is the setting for the story. My biggest complain was the overuse of the Scottish language and dialect. It would be if my review was in "hick Southern" (how I sound) and I made readers decipher not only what I was saying but what I was trying to say. It sound simple: The Police are called when a "bank" containing objects used in a game similar to WOW is "robbed".

Since they did not reside on a data base - operations are distributed - the question is how it was done. To this end, Jack, a programmer and a game player, is hired (@ 1,000 Euros/hour) for expertise. It sounds almost innocent until one discovers that nothing is as it seems. We are in the world of undercover spying in the 21st century. What stands out the most is the tie-in between a virtual world and a real world and the fact that the spies think they are playing a game (SPOOK) when they are actually being trained as foreign agents.

Along the way, Stross gives us a glimpse of the near future - driverless taxis, indentity cards, globalization gone wild and the power of human emotions and relationships. It's hard to describe the plot without giving it away so read the book.

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Accessible speculative fiction that rocks it.

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.

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.

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

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