Accomplished tour of writing technique and the future

books:


	• Halting State Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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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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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Quite Good

I'd almost given up on Charles Stross, but HALTING STATE(2007), a very-near future SciFi Tech-Adventure, turned out to be quite good. GLASSHOUSE(2007) had an excessively violent theme, and was too "far out" tech-wise - but HALTING STATE takes the bold step of dabbling in very near future tech trends, and the computer and software-related tech is definitely interesting.

The book is set 10 years in the future, mostly in Scotland, and revolves around on-line gaming that has become so close to real that it blurs the lines with reality - with crimes taking place within games having to be investigated by the police... and the crimes turn out to be intertwined with international terrorism and all the intrigue that entails.

There is also the typical America-Bashing and Catastrophic Global Warming hype that has come to be expected from most modern SciFi writers. But these themes get tossed in almost as an afterthought, as if the writer doesn't really believe in the "agenda" any longer, and is just going thru the motions... it offers little distraction in this otherwise excellent book.

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Accomplished tour of writing technique and the future

Stross is a tremendous creative talent. I was impressed - nay, tickled - with his nod to the original 2nd-person, text-based games that laid the foundation for today's GUI MMOPRGs. (I played the former, not the latter.) My only fault with this book (no spoilers) is the fundamental conceit of one of the online games, though I concede it's the author's dramatic license to create the plot that will drive the story. Otherwise, I think Stross proved adept at meeting the challenge of engaging readers with multiple characters in 2nd person. Importantly, the technological underpinnings of the story ring true: a reminder to consider carefully the tradeoffs we easily and invisibly make in exchange for greater/faster connectivity and improved personal/professional productivity. Consider this slight reflection a resounding recommendation of Halting State.

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

In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that's just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both...

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