Halting State

by Charles Stross

Other authorsRita Frangie (Cover designer), Sophie Toulouse (Cover artist)
Hardcover, 2007

Status

Available

Call number

PR6119.T79 H36

Publication

Ace Books (New York, 2007). 1st edition, 1st printing. 368 pages. $24.95.

Description

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)

Media reviews

This is his tightest-plotted novel to date, a detective story with a million perfectly meshed moving parts, and a hundred magnificent surprises that had me gasping and shouting YES.

User reviews

LibraryThing member mdreid
Unlike "Accelerando" which left you bored and/or confused in places, "Halting State" was entertaining and lucid from start to finish. You find this surprising since it is written entirely in the second person and consists of four different characters' viewpoints.

When you first heard about this
Show More
book, you thought the second person narrative was a bit gimmicky but were surprised to find that it is a really great way of building the atmosphere of the novel. Anyone who has ever played those Infocom text adventures will agree that it is a clever conceit that fits perfectly with the subject matter of the book: the heist of a virtual bank by a gang of marauding orcs inside a game.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member SaintBrevity
Charlie Stross does what Charlie Stross does, this time in a semi dystopic Scotland wherein a bank robbery in a MMORPG sets on a chain of events leading to a Much Bigger Problem.

A much better job of non standard scifi than is usually done, though some of the character interactions seem forced, and
Show More
the second person point of view, while being an excellent tie in to gaming, takes some immersion before being natural.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
This book is everything that Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" should have been, but wasn't, in that Stross is giving you a thriller where some mostly competant average people have to cope with and overcome a technological threat verging on the catastrophic. This is not to mention that Stross has more
Show More
of an eye for absurdity than Vinge has ever displayed AND depicts much better female characters. If I have to mark this novel down for anything it's that I'm not thrilled with how the family situation of the character Jack Reed is handled, as I have a hard time finding it plausible.
Show Less
LibraryThing member flemmily
While I love the near-future setting and the overly monitored world, I'm a little put off by the second-person narrative. While it ties in neatly with the MMOPRG suject matter, it is kind of jarring and gimmicky to read.
LibraryThing member RoboSchro
"Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table."

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.
Show More
Insurance companies, secret agencies, hackers, spies, gamers, and businessmen get thrown into the mix. There are virtual monsters that are really dangerous, and real people that don't really exist. It's all great fun, and (as you'd expect from Stross) replete with extensive insights into the effects of technological change on people and society.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member plappen
This near-future story is about a bank robbery that exposes a whole lot more.

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.
Show More
Things get weird when Sergeant Sue Smith is told that the robbery took place inside a virtual reality games called Avalon Four. Forgetting for a moment that this is supposed to be impossible, Hayek Associates is about to have its Initial Public Offering of stock. If word gets out, the company (and its virtual economies) will crash hard. This may not be your average bank robbery, but the amount of money involved, over 26 million Euros, is very real.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kd9
Is a theft of treasures in an online role playing game a national security threat? It is if the game developers are being hacked by a foreign power. Sue, a regular Edinburgh police woman, is called into a game developer's headquarters when their marketing manager calls in a burglary. But she never
Show More
thought she would have to arrest a horde or orcs and a fire breathing dragon. But more than a threat to public safety, this is a threat to the investors in this about-to-go-public company. A forensic accountant, Elaine, is sent in to find out who to blame and where they hid the money. She is a sword wielding LARP player, but needs a real game developer, Jack, to help her.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member NogDog
Good story, generally interesting characters. I might have given this 5 stars, but I had to knock it down both for the use of 2nd person present tense throughout, plus the ending was a bit too much of an extended exposition explaining why everything had happened the way it had. (I kind of get why
Show More
he tried the 2nd person present tense thing, but it's just too distracting for me to be effective.)
Show Less
LibraryThing member hobreads
Could not get past the use of Present Perfect Tense and the use of Scottish Dialect, not just for people's speech, as it IS set in Edinburgh, but for general narrated descriptions. Might have been a fantastic book, but these two narrative traits are highly distracting.
LibraryThing member bexaplex
In 2018, A bank in an MMORPG is robbed, and an insurance fraud investigator and a game developer try to figure out how and why.

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 ...
Show More
via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer." The technology is ours, just slightly better (enhanced reality glasses, remote-driver-operated cars), and the speed of information transfer is ours, just slightly faster. The audience is thrown into a lot of information, just like the characters, and you have to get up to speed quickly, and then go back and wikipedia a few things later, like Sue parsing through interview recordings, or Jack grepping the treasure logs. This might be the most realistic capture of the modern work environment that I've yet read: the bizarre job interview, the jargon, the office politics at Dietrich-Brunner Associates, walking into a contract that turns out to be a thousand-layer onion with a nuclear bomb in the middle of it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member woodge
From the back cover: In the year 2018, a daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates. 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. But Sergeant Sue Smith discovers that this
Show More
virtual world robbery may be linked to some real world devastation.The story is told from the perspective of three characters (and in the second-person style of video game instructions). There's Sargeant Sue Smith of Edinburgh's finest; Elaine Barnaby, a forensic accountant; game-developer Jack Reed (who has a few well-hidden secrets). This techno-crime thriller has a number interesting ideas (some of which are waaaay esoteric). Along the way, there are various terms like LARP, griefing, and nerfing that it helps to be aware of. It's pretty cool and of course, as the characters start digging into the mystery, it gets bigger and more dangerous. Although I'm not a gamer, I enjoyed the story, but I imagine gamers would get even more out of it. Much of the author's ideas seem all too plausible.
Show Less
LibraryThing member blueslibrarian
Halting State takes a very interesting premise, a story of espionage and theft, and turns it on its head. In the near future, a robbery has taken place inside a massively multi-player online computer role playing game, and the police have been called to investigate the real world ramifications. The
Show More
point of view of the novel shifts between Sue, a grizzled cop, Elaine, a forensic accountant charged with tracking the money, and Jack, a programmer and games expert. As they investigate, the plot gets deeper and deeper, involving spies, shadowy governmental agencies and murder. Stross writes some of the most interesting science fiction of the day and this is a fascinating scenario. While the use of jargon and constantly shifting narration can be confusing at times, this is a very enjoyable techno-thriller.
Show Less
LibraryThing member hopeevey

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
Show More
computer gaming, LARPing, or general SF/F fandom may have a hard time keeping up. There were times where I felt I was missing things, and I like to think I'm reasonably well versed in such things. Mr. Stross suggests some amazing, yet believable technology. But the writing and the plotting is engaging enough to hold my interest, even when I felt lost.

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!
Show Less
LibraryThing member Rhinoa
In a nutshell it's a science fiction crime drama about a robbery in a virtual MMO world. Unexpectedly a bunch of Orcs storm the main bank in the game and make off with €26 million worth of items which is supposed to be impossible. Sorting out the mess is Scottish Police Sergeant Sue Smith,
Show More
Forensic Accountant Elaine and Programmer and Gaming Expert Jack. It's their job to find out what happened, track down the items and generally save the day.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ennui2342
Really nice near future novel from Stross. Explores how virtual worlds will develop and in particular blur with the real world to provide augmented reality.The layered plot is also well formed with convincing characterisation and a fast pace that keeps you reading. A good solid light read, that
Show More
unfortunately will probably date quite quickly.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Radaghast
This book just didn't work for me. It's in second person, and switches between multiple perspectives. It is experimental. It may have worked for some readers, but for me, the experiment failed.
LibraryThing member lewispike
Another excellent book from Mr. Stross.

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
Show More
- data goggles are worn by everyone, phones are all smart and so on. The police (complete with goggles and an Augmented Reality overlay called CopSpace) are called in to a crime scene... some orcs and a dragon raided and nerfed a bank in an online game, stealing a load of magic items.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member slothman
"It isn't virtual reality until you can mount a coup d'etat in it -- and make it stick in the real world."

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
Show More
era's equivalent of World of Warcraft which threatens to lead to serious economic repercussions. As police and insurance investigators dig deeper into the case, they uncover more machinations, and begin to draw lethal attention in return.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member RobertDay
This book was written in 2007-08 and is set in 2018. Having come to it late, I was staggered from the very first page as to how close Charlie Stross has come to accurately depicting the IT industry of my present day. The introduction takes the form of a speculative approach from an IT recruitment
Show More
agency. I spent six months of 2016 looking for work in IT, so I was hooked from the outset.

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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member TheoClarke
A hugely clever novel set in cyber-rich independent near future Scotland, this is rich with intertextual reference and picturesque circumlocution. Told in second person chapters by three protagonists the complex plot of geopolitical consipracy within online games is intriguing but I failed to
Show More
engage with the characters.
Show Less
LibraryThing member reading_fox
Weird fun. You should only read this if you've some previous experience with fantasy / role play / computer gaming.

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
Show More
to have been a virtual bank in one of the companies online game zones. Something that is technically impossible to hack. Enter Elaine - an auditor for one of the firms bankrolling the bank's host. Charged by her high flying management to find out who's responsible and whether her firm was mislead, or missed any information in their intial audit. She has to spend a week in Edinborough looking at the data in person. And for this she needs a consultant - guide - in the form of Jack, dedicated gamer and coder, who can interpret what the firm's geeks are talking about. Told strictly in sequence rotating through the three characters in a weird 2nd person voice - 'you wake up and need coffee'. It turns out that the 'simple' bank robbery by a team of orcs and a dragon, has got some unexpected and very far reaching consequences, because what they did should only have been possible with knowledge of some very secure encryption keys. Who has been leaking the insider information?

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.

.....................................................................................................................
Show Less
LibraryThing member SimonChamberlain
Seems like now Rankin has retired you-know-who, the science-fiction writers of Edinburgh have stepped in to replace him. This is the second book I've read this month which melds science-fiction and detective themes in a near-future Edinburgh. This one's pretty good; it starts with an in-game
Show More
robbery in a future version of World of Warcraft, and proceeds to get more serious, fast. It moves along at a decent pace with a few plot twists, lots of inside-jokes and references that you'll need to be a tech geek or at least a casual gamer to understand. Stross is a decent writer and he's created a believable and entertaining future world. I'm glad to see that he's writing a sequel.
Show Less
LibraryThing member m.a.harding
Stross consistently on form. Funny, exhilarating near-future thriller. Has at least three ideas that would make a good sf novel each. PS. Love the cool drawing of Stross as the bearded geek on the back cover.
LibraryThing member KevlarRelic
Near future, when all the young WoW players of today grow up and run the world. Cellphones are universal computing devices and online games are all connected allowing a character to walk between them. It's written in the second person ("You walked there, and you were shocked by this...") which must
Show More
have made it hard for me to relate to the characters, because I didn't care much for any of them. The plot is interesting and engaging; maybe they just mentioned the male character's "mummy lobe" one too many times.
Show Less
LibraryThing member infiniteletters
Like an updated Snow Crash. And that's one of the best recommendations I can give.

Awards

Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 2008)
Locus Award (Finalist — Science Fiction Novel — 2008)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2007-10-02

Physical description

368 p.; 6.38 inches

ISBN

0441014984 / 9780441014989
Page: 2.9827 seconds