What scary things are people really doing on the internet???

books:


	• Halting State Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

What scary things are people really doing on the internet???

Want to know what people spend all that time on the internet doing? Many are creating virtual worlds with characters named after themselves. Halting State is an absorbing novel about a bank robbery in that virtual world.

Near future crime - worth a read

I have to say I enjoyed this outing in near future Scotland. This is a mystery novel crossed with gaming and spy themes. It starts out a little slow, but not slow enough to make me want to stop reading.

When Jack Reed is made redundant from his job he goes on a bender in Amsterdam only to sent speedily back home by the local police. When he gets back he finds himself rehired rather more quickly than expected by accountants of all people.

This book has all the characters written from a first person point of view. Its not something I've seen used often in SciFi but in this case the author has managed to pull it off well.

If you like mysteries and thrillers this book is worth picking up for a read from an author who is proving both prolific and readable.

for more information click here

Gaming Thriller

A fun thriller that taxed my knowledge of games.

Well to be honest, I don't know a thing about reality gaming. I've only played with the Sims. Stross approached the fear of technology and its entanglement in our lives from the inside. The characters don't want to go backward. But they are forced to become super aware of what price they are paying as they go forward. The book races forward and you have to hang on! I read the book in two sittings.

It was interesting to read in relationship to his books "Singularity Sky" and "Accelerando". While those books begin in our time, they extend to the proposed 'Singularity' (read Vinge for context). This novel is set completely in the near future. The characters' devices are still mobile phones, PDAs, and laptop computers--that is, they are discrete devices. The devices have not quite yet become an essential part of everyone's memory. The characters are only just realizing how much of their memory is stored in an external device made of silicon chips. An older writer might have written this as a modern horror story. Instead, these characters accept the change in their electronic landscape.

OH, and I loved the political barbs in the story!

for more information click here

Halting State

Charles Stross is an excellent author who improves with each novel he writes. I'd recommend this book for anyone who likes detective novels or mysteries.

Pretty good, but too chewy -- fun ideas v. dense prose

You'll like this: if you're a fan of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a Live Action Role Player (LARPer), or other kind of geek gamer; if you are a Dilbert-with-an-edge software developer; if you are really, really into near-future Scottish police procedurals.

The novel follows three characters through twists and turns after a bank robbery is pulled of in a multi-player online game, a sort of World of Warcraft on steroids. But who are the bad guys? What do they want? Why rip off a virtual bank? And do we really care?

Stross does his usual good job of taking some interesting ideas(multiplayer game economics! reality overlays! cyber terrorist hi-jinks!) to their non-obvious conclusions. And this aspect is really fun, makes you think, gives you some "oho!" moments. But it's hard to get in gear with the story. First, the Scottish dialect and slang are nearly impenetrable. I bogged down several times, to the point where I wanted a heads-up display with instantaneous translation. "Two nations divided by a common language" is right -- if you're not a devoted Anglophile, be warned. And if you're not up on gaming concepts, or software development, you may be in for a similar problem. If you like Stross, you like dense text and new concepts that come thick and fast -- but this is at a whole new level.

I didn't have any problem with the second person POV. It's a great twist on Zork-style text adventure computer games ("You enter a web page with book reviews. You notice that readers either loved or hated this novel. You see links leading to other pages glowing an eerie blue."), and very readable in the context of this book.

The dense prose makes it hard to understand the nuances of what's going on, hard to get into the characters, and ultimately hard to care about the resolution.

I loved Accelerando, and other works that Stross has done. I think I'd like an annotated version of this one better.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10

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