Any new Charles Stross is a Good Thing(tm)

books:


	• Halting State Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 40 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Any new Charles Stross is a Good Thing(tm)

I've been telling friends of this "new" SF writer since I stumbled across THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES in a local BORDERS. It was the tentacles coming out of a cubicle and the bemused sysadmin's face that hooked me. Since then, I've really enjoyed several of his SF "threads" ("In her majesty's occult service", "Singularity and the Eschaton", "Posthumans").

This story is totally independent of his other stuff, although I hope we see more of the game developer and his forensic accountant girlfriend. Looking just 10 years into the future and envisioning that mobile phones would be a great platform for a distributed multi-user role playing games is genius. Told from multiple points of view which he deftly juggles, each character is still fully fleshed out giving you just enough of a glimpse of their inner landscape and background. A quick read which grabbed me once I stepped into the universe, I didn't want to put down until it was finished. And he must either be a gamer or have coded because those aspects ring true to me. _I_ want to code with VR goggles and virtual keyboard.

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Near Future Perfect

It takes serious guts to try and speculate on what the near future might look like. Not many authors try, but Stross does it with care. It is not easy to depart from the comfortable realm of the space opera and I congratulate Stross for doing so in this interesting story.

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Stross makes it look easy--

So, if you ever were in a creative writing class, you could take down the things that you were told weren't recommended--writing in the second person, changes of perspective that might confuse a reader, use of dialect that might be obscure (or too much jargon--there's another one they'll tell you, in classes like that.) If there's such a thing as classes on sf novel-writing, they might say--well, keep your future prognosticating non-specific, and don't set your scene in the too-near future--

But see, they'd be absolutely wrong. The difference is whether you have the chops to pull it off or not, and if you happen to be Charles Stross, well, you can. The chops being, using the second person voice to advantage, by placing the reader momentarily in the place of the characters, while hiding certain of their motivations, using the shift in perspective to color a scene in the "voice" appropriate to it, using dialect to differentiate voices and set atmosphere (oh, and ditto for jargon-I like when an author gives his readers a little credit for not being dim), an ability to make the nouveaux plausible, because it's a offshoot of existing tech, and has the near-future setting make perfect sense because it's so recognizable, making the points about the increasing "on-line" lives of people more immediate.

I really did enjoy it, just as a story, and because it made me think a little about how much we already invest in our "virtual" selves. The three protagonist's voices are well-developed, and the story has some interesting twists.

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Unusually Powerful

Stross has a VERY unique style of developing a believable near-future using nothing more than than the words his characters speak. This story is alive, intelligent, real, and very different from anything I ever read before. I could not put it down once I started.

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I won't review the plot line - you can see that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that this is an outstanding book by Stross.

As mentioned by others, he uses the second person to tell the story through the eyes of three main characters - it is a bit disorienting at first, but comes together quickly. I liked the Scottish accent that Sue uses myself.

In this book Stross explores the implicit trust we increasingly place in our electronic devices, and how control of a country's communications network really means control of the country. As in Glass House, much is not as it seems at first. It is also a nice look at how a "mediated reality" future might look, and how MMORPGs could be manipulated in subtle ways for ends only peripherally related to the game.

So as the title states - get this book!!!

NOW

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

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