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Fiction. Science Fiction. Thriller. HTML:“Halting State [is] a near-future story that is at once over-the-top and compellingly believable.” – Vernor Vinge, author of Rainbows End 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 start-up company that’s just floated onto the London stock exchange. But this crime may be a bit beyond Smith’s expertise. The prime suspects are a band of marauding orcs with a dragon in tow for fire support. The bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four, and the robbery was supposed to be impossible. When word gets out, Hayek Associates and all its virtual “economies” are going to crash hard. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But the deeper she digs, the bigger the case gets. There are powerful players—both real and pixelated—who are watching her every move. Because there is far more at stake than just some game-head’s fantasy financial security….… (more)
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When you first heard about this
The language is very playful and the plot rockets along as you realise just how deeply game worlds and other virtual worlds are intertwined with the near future that Stross presents.
You thoroughly enjoyed reading "Halting State" and highly recommend it.
A much better job of non standard scifi than is usually done, though some of the character interactions seem forced, and
In the near future, the Scottish police are called to investigate a theft from an online game company. They're totally bemused to find that the theft is from the game itself. But it is, and it turns out to be shockingly significant.
I can't give it five stars because of some quirks of the writing that just don't work very well. The second-person perspective is awkward, and is an idea he probably should have abandoned. Also, the rendition of Scottish speech is patchy -- it feels as if he's just thrown in the odd dialect word now and again when he remembers to, and it jars most of the time. ("The transcribers can be pish, sometimes, I'll give ye that, it's what you get when you farm out half the office jobs to Lagos...")
Still, it's more than worth reading. 21st-century excitement.
In Edinburgh, Scotland of the year 2018, a high-tech company called Hayek Associates suffers a bank robbery. A senior officer of the firm panics, and calls the local police, instead of taking care of things internally.
Elaine Barnaby, a London-based forensic accountant, is sent to Edinburgh to audit the bank from the inside. The unspoken part is that, if anything goes wrong, her firm will plead ignorance, and her neck will be on the chopping block. She is provided with a guide through the world of online gaming named Jack Reed, who, coincidentally (or not so coincidentally) became unemployed the week before.
Very Important People in newly independent Scotland are interested in the case, including the Scottish equivalent of the FBI. Brussels (the home of the European Union) gets involved in the case. There are Chinese hackers involved, who may or may not be assisted by Chinese State Security. Copspace, a sort of private VR database system for the police, which is supposedly secure, gets hacked. It is a world where everyone has access to the Internet through their eyeglasses. There is even a zombie flash mob.
I understood very little of the technical parts, because I know nothing about online gaming, but I loved reading this book. It is very cool and cutting edge, and works quite well as a straight thriller. If I could, I would give this book three thumbs up.
Charles Stross takes us to a soon to be real world future where everything (and everyone) is linked in 24/7. His use of multiple first person accounts can be distracting at first, but the action moves swiftly with layers of meaning revealing themselves with each new revelation. There are a dozen interesting concepts in this novel, but the characters seemed a bit one dimensional and writing perfunctory rather then fluid. A fine romp, but not an award contender.
There are some pure genius moments in here: including the description of what any romance novel would call a "look deep into each other's eyes" as "information transfer ...
I really, really liked Halting State, by Charles Stross. This near-future thriller moves at breakneck speed, from several different perspectives. I'd call it a page-turner, but I read it in electronic format :)
The tech/geek references fly even faster than the story itself. Someone not familiar with
He doesn't predict jacking into computer systems, not does he have everyone getting technology surgically implanted. Most people wear glasses or goggles that overlay the internet on normal vision. No, really. Just go read it - it's very smooth and makes a whole lot of sense.
Our first viewpoint character is Detective Seargent Sue Smith. She wants to do a good job, and take care of her wife and son. I really, really like that Mr. Stross doesn't make a big deal out of the same sex relationship - it's just part of who Sue is. She's the closest we get to an Every(wo)man. She's a competent user of the ubiquitous, immersive technology, but doesn't give any thought to how it works - just like most end users today. She works with a virtual environment, then puts it aside to live her personal life.
Then there's Elaine. She's a VR LARPer by night, and an insurance fraud auditor by day. Like Sue, she use the technology, but doesn't question it. And I seriously want in on a couple of the games she's playing in! She works with computers, but plays in immersive VR on her own time.
Next we meet Jack, a programmer, gamer, and some-times hacker. He does know how the technology works, so he's the first to get scared. He, basically, lives in immersive technology, gaming as part of his workday, and using VR overlays nearly constantly in his personal life. He's the over-connected gamer geek turned up to 11.
Eventually, I'm going to have to re-read Halting State. The plot is complex; I'm looking forward to seeing nuances I missed the first time around. And I'm looking forward to spending time with our viewpoint characters again. All three have a wonderful depth. Between them, just about anyone can find a character to identify with. With that connection, you're in for a roller coaster of a story, as three initially separate storylines converge, then blossom into a near-epic denouement. Each one has a different perspective, and different pieces of the puzzle. Once you get there, you see how everything led up to it - but you probably didn't see it coming.
Go, read it!
It's set about 10 years in the future from now. Technology is similar to what we have now but just taken to the next level. People use their phones to order taxis, get around and many other useful tasks. They also wear glasses that enhance their vision and connect them to the technology grid. You can totally see a lot of the ideas coming true in a few more years. Anyway, back to the plot. It seems there is much to the robbery than the item theft. Could it be a cover up of a much larger conspiracy? How far does said conspiracy reach?
It took me a little while to get into the novel as it's told completely in second person e.g. you enter the room and in front of you is a white desk with a computer monitor on it type stuff etc. It reads like either a choose-your-own-adventure or an episode of Knightmare (anyone else remember this awesome tv show?). Once I did though I actually enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. The characters (especially Elaine and Jack) were really well developed and I cared about what happened to them. The plot was quite complex but to be fair it wasn't solving the crime that kept me hooked. It was more getting caught up in the world and the techno speak. A lot of it went over my head, but some of the references to geek culture were awesome! It made me feel more intelligent just reading it.
In this one he takes mostly extant (or at least being researched) technology, some real politics, some real social trends and mixes them together into a novel of the near future.
It is set in Scotland, a devolved Scotland, where everyone is online all the time
But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and it broadens out into spy-games and cyber-terrorism, with large doses of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing and some fun and games.
There are big, sweeping themes and ideas, and there are lovely little touches too - the fate of Elise is a particularly poignant touch as far as I'm concerned, and a completely unexpected twist.
And as someone who fits into the category of basically never lost any more - my phone has 3G and can pinpoint my position, I have found my way to my optician using this facility for example - it's a rather scary thought of what might be as well as exciting.
Stross brings us a very believable tale of crime and intrigue set in the year 2018. Augmented and virtual reality are commonly used for games, and the story opens with a bank heist in that
This book is the only one I know of written in the second person perspective. It's unusual, and it works: it tells you what each character is perceiving and understanding as the story unfolds, and allows him to juggle exposition and the complexities of technology quite well. I find his speculations of the utility of augmented reality and lifelogs in police work very plausible.
I'm not a techie person (I test software for a living, and I approach the job from the user's p.o.v.), but all the techno-babble that Stross uses was actually fairly comprehensible to me - that is, it made about as much sense to me in the novel as it does when I hear almost exactly the same terms used in the office. In the interview appended to the Orbit UK pb edition, Stross comments that there was little in the novel that didn't already exist; and what doesn't is very close to our present tech horizon. He did, in truth, work in the industry, and it shows, both in terms of the techie-speak and in the characters, personalities and settings. He has corporate management and office conspiracies right down to the smallest detail.
The politics is like ours, only slightly different. The novel takes place in an independent Scotland, still negotiating the terms of its divorce from a Remnant UK which is still in the EU; and even though our current political situation is (sort of) opposite, it still feels very relevant and understandable.
The plot concerns a (real) robbery from a (virtual) bank in an online role-playing game. I'm not a gamer, but I know sufficient people who are for this to have relevance. Teams from the police and from a firm of forensic accountants try to find out what was stolen, from whom, why, and how. Things quickly move into a much more serious space. The cover blurbs mention William Gibson, and certainly a lot of this had the feel of Gibson's exploration of new angles to our online world that no-one's thought of yet (or at least not gone public with yet).
Stross is a Scot by adoptive choice, so his affection for Edinburgh comes out strongly. As to the accents - well, if you watch a few episodes of the Eighties/Nineties/Noughties cop show 'Taggart', you'll get the gist of what's being said.
I bought this book on the first day of the UK Science Fiction Easter convention and started reading it that evening. I felt compelled to finish it as soon as I could, so much did the story and setting grab me. Oh, and the cover of the Orbit UK paperback, with graphics showing in-game avatars, includes one of Charlie Stross himself.
Highly recommended.
A bank is robbed, and the police are called to investigate. Even for 2017 the scene of crime as an ex-nuclear bunker seems a bit odd to the attending Seargent Sue Smith. It turns out
The 2nd person voice grates a bit , and although I wasn't concentrating on it fully, I'm fairly sure it wasn't totally consistently maintained. The intermittant attempts at a scottish accent are also pretty poor. And although Sue's dialect can be pretty thick, none of the english characters ever struggle to understand her, which would be the only point of emphasising the accent to begin with. The alternating character voice is also annoying, although it does allow multiple viewpoints on what is happening. The biggest downside for many readers is that there is a fairly high level of unexplained technology and computer / gaming terms. I had no problems with it, but I'm fairly sure there is a significant population of people who will be completely lost.
For a near future novel the predictions aren't too off beat - a devolved Scotland is in the offing, and much of the technology - VR glasses and the like is already available if not widely used or yet completely user friendly. In an interview at the back of the book Stross states that only 1 technology isn't already commerically available. I'm very sure this is the Quantum Computer, and I'm quite sure it won't be here in 5 years time either. Even if it was it won't be as useful as Stross makes out (and could easily decipher OTP encryption - a very slight plot hole).
the initial confusion in the plot (especially the middle section) resolves itself reasonably comprehensibly by the end. I did lose track a few times of who thought what about which, but it just about keeps together.
Halting State is a very clever concept pretty well executed, and enjoyble for cyberpunk and techno-geeks everywhere. It is much less dark than many cyberpunk novels.
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