Customer Reviews

Halting State

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

In 1973, I read George Orwell's "1984" in one sitting with my hair standing on end. I won't beleaguer this review with how prophetic some of Orwell's content is, you can probably come up with a few examples before you finish reading this review.

It's a strange and unnerving coincidence I just read "Halting State" 11 years from the time the story takes place in 2018 and yes--in one sitting with my hair standing on end. I definitely think the world Stross is proposing is possible, perhaps even probable.

The plot---Edinburgh detective Sue is called out on a robbery case only to discover the victim is a corporation and the robbery took place inside a computer game. She's about to dismiss the case when she realizes the theft could have serious market implications.

Enter Elaine Barnaby, a forensic accountant for the firm's underwriter who's there to prove that the firm was somehow negligent so her employer doesn't have to pay the inevitable claims. She quickly realizes that her live action role playing (LARP) experience does not qualify her to examine a bank in a game world. Jack Reed, recently unemployed game programmer, is hired to serve as her decoder and native guide.

The three quickly discover the theft is just the beginning. The thieves' motivation could be anything from stock market manipulation to taking down the grid. The novel moves at a brisk pace with very little time for a breather in between events.

Stross deliberately challenged many of the writing conventions in "Halting State." First, the novel's written in second person--referring to characters as 'you.' Initially, the tense seemed accusatory and offputting; however, once I got into the plot of the book, 'you' became irrelevant. I would actually recommend this book to anyone who was considering second person narrative.

Also, "Halting State" offers three point of view characters: Elaine, Sue, and Jack. This, combined with the second person, does prevent the characters from coming to life as readily as first or third-person.

Finally, Stross mixes geekspeak with a Scottish brogue thrown in. The mixed dialect he's created is sometimes cumbersome, but if you can hear the brogue in your head it's easily overcome and becomes almost lyrical.

I have two concerns related to this book. Foremost, "Halting State" should not just be pigeon-holed in science fiction--or even mystery. Literature might be a better classification to reach a wider audience.

Additionally, while I think Stross did very well breaking editorial convention in this novel, he may well also have severely limited its appeal. That is regrettable because the trends he touches on politically, technologically, and sociologically are well worth the read.

I generally don't read fiction. But I couldn't resist this. This exciting book takes us into a world that, while fiction, could just as easily be our world in a few years --- a spook world.

Most of the book can easily be comprehended by people who may not have a through knowledge of computers and networks, as is necessary for previous works by this author.

The story opens in the very near future in Edinburgh, where police sergeant Sue Smith is called in to investigate a bank robbery. But, guess what, no guns were pulled. No stick-up note. This was a robbery done in gamespace, online! Don't you love it?

This technothriller is a must-read for gamers. But it's also a wonderful romp for mystery lovers and people who like to read about computer crime and how we are losing our privacy to those who know and understand computers and networks and the cyberworld in general.

Reading this book may just make you a bit leary about those anonymous folks lurking in chat rooms and forums.

The story shows how multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) can be a tool used by governments and intelligence agencies to recruit useful idiots, unwary puppets to do the dirty work of infiltrating networks while they think they're just hacking around in a virtual gaming environment.

Highly recommended.

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.

Near the end of this book, one of the protagonists blurts, "They're tunelling TCP/IP over AD&D!" And that line is a very good test for potentials readers, because if you understand it (and why it's kind of funny), you might enjoy the book. If you're scratching your head, well, you might still enjoy the book, but you're certainly in for a whole lot more head scratching along the way.

When you strip everything away, this near-future thriller is a cautionary tale about network and database security, and what can happen as our lives become increasingly wired and digitized. The premise is that someone has hacked their way into a MMOG and pulled off an in-game heist, thus triggering the involvement of a police sergeant, an unemployed software engineer, and a forensic accountant. The three characters are called in to investigate this crime and the chapters alternate between their perspectives.

Note that they are not the narrators -- that's because the entire book is written in the second person, a choice which some readers will absolutely hate. I didn't find it as grating as many reviewers did, but it certainly doesn't help the rather weak characterization). Unfortunately, the plot is awfully heavy with techie jargon and those who aren't network engineers or software developers (as the author has been), may find it rocky going. Similarly, the plot revolves around MMOGs and ARGs, and if you're not familiar with this kind of computer and live action gaming, you might get a little lost. In both cases, there are lots of nuances and inside jokes which will fly right over your head (I think I got about half of them). Finally, if the second person voice, techie and gaming jargon don't put you off, there's also a bit of Scots dialect to decipher (I didn't have a problem with it, but other readers seemed to really struggle with it.).

Probably the best thing about the book is the setting (Scotland, circa 2018) and the author's projection of how technology might have evolved over the last decade in ways that affect us all. It's very plausible and convincing -- which makes the story that much more interesting when it all goes pear-shaped. And when it does start to go wrong, the scale shifts from contained crime to all-out infowar, complete with international hacker crews and EU black ops squads. While I could see the point being made by such a shift in scale (a country, even an superpower, totally destabilized via hacking/infowar), it also moved the book into conventional disaster/thriller turf, which I'm not a huge fan of.

I'm a very occasional reader of science fiction, and I prefer my sci-fi to be immersive and contained. The first half of this book does a good job of setting up near-future Scotland and how society might be slightly different, but as it went on and the techspeak got more and more complex, and the stakes went through the roof, I found myself less and less engaged. To be fair, I am neither an online gamer, nor a computer techie, but I have plenty of friends who are, and I think they might find it a little bit more fun of a read than I did.

The first few chapters, I loved. I liked the characters. I was even okay with the second person viewpoint, while they were actually themselves. The story got very difficult to follow once they entered the virtual world, because Stross made it almost impossible to follow who was who and where they were. The worlds changed at a moments notice. That might be interesting if you were actually in the game, but trying to explain, from two different characters, their multiple virtual worlds was beyond unwieldy. I spent far too much time rereading, flipping back to the beginning of chapters to see who was talking. It became so convoluted that it was no longer entertaining.

I don't think this book will ever be rewritten, as others have suggested, but maybe he has a similar book in him that he will be able to execute in a better style. The moral of this story is to always read the poor reviews as well as the good in great detail before purchasing!!

I am not usually the type to put a book down without plowing through the pages til the end before writing a review. Unfortunately I will never make it to the end with this book. The premise of the book is intriguing and the plot summary refreshing. However the tech lingo is so highly inbedded in long verbose sentences that require so much thought and re-reading that the enjoyment of the story is lost. Also, reading from the second person makes reading even more taxing.

There's a good novel in here, and it's a good novel that Stross could write, but sadly it gets buried under a heaping pile of avant-garde excess. This novel is only peripherally about theft in an MMORPG, but by the time it gets into the really weird infowar stuff, the 'so strange it has to be true' futurism that Stross excels at it, the book is beyond the point of recovery.

Stross's choice of second-person tense is daring, but doesn't pay off. The language is just too damaged to carry the story as it should. All the ideas that I expected were there, but finding the pearls in this novel was too much work. For once, Stross dodges the hard questions that he raised, like what augmented reality means about buying into someone else's world view and what economic warfare actually means in globalized world. The more terrifying implications of an intelligence agency that regards every citizen of the country as an agent are similarly glossed over. I was not satisfied by his explanation of immigration in a virtual world, and the exchange rates between games and the real world, another rich topic for the novel.

Finally, the depiction of the games didn't ring true for me. Games aren't about fun, they're about accomplishment. Vanqish the demon, conquer the world, prove your awesome shooter skills, it's all about an easily achievable goal so you can bump your motivation complex. There's some fairly deep psychology involved with why we play games, and Stross chooses to talk about that on a very shallow level.

In the end, this novel is too ambitious, not nearly fleshed out enough, and not up to Stross's usual standards. I'd only recommend this to the cyberpunk completist or fans of ergodic literature. Try Glasshouse or The Atrocity Archives instead.

I thought the book tried to bring up some good points and concepts. I liked the concept of the practical applications of live action role playing games. I liked the "robbery in a game" concept as well, even if it was weakly portrayed. I thought a female forensic accountant who is also a live action swordfighter was a great character concept.

I was very disappointed with the book on the whole, however. Personally, I found reading a book written in the second person distracting. The story jumps between 3 different characters, with the focus on a different character each chapter. Some of the minor characters were indistinguishable from each other because they were not very well characterized. There were a few times while I was reading that I wondered "who is this guy?"

There were some sentences over 100 words long that made me wonder what they were about by the time they reached their end. It was done in an artistic way, but I felt like I was being forced to let the words wash over me instead of trying to figure out what was being said. There was a huge amount of technical color talk thrown into the mix, which made parts indecipherable. It was almost like he wanted to sound cool by throwing in as many technical words as he could, and when those failed, he'd make up a few cool sounding acronyms and toss them out too. There were also a few "facts" laid out in the story that you find out are not true by the end of the book. I don't want to ruin the story, but you find out some of the crisis aren't really there at the end of the book. It was like a twisted version of Chekhov's gun: "The gun from the first act? Oh, yea, I lied about that. It never existed." That was my main reason not to recommend this book.

I really enjoyed Stross's book Accelerando, so I hope his future books are better than this one was.

Like so much of Stross' work, HALTING STATE alternates between excitingly imaginative and annoyingly ... well, just plain annoying.

As everyone else has noted, HALTING STATE is a sort of crime/suspense novel in which our three heroes must somehow solve a mystery that initially seems silly and trivial yet becomes deeper and more serious with every chapter ... or every fifth chapter, anyway.

The story unfolds through alternation between three protagonists -- Jack the hacker, Elaine the forensic accountant, and Sue the cop. This is done through chapters written in the second person (e.g., "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"), which, at least formally, places the reader in each of the characters' roles, as if the book itself were a type of role-playing game (RPG), like the RPG in which the focal crime takes place.

The most innovative and enjoyable aspect of the novel is the notion that, in the near future, life will become like a chaotic collision of multiple RPGs, each with its own version of reality. Elaine the accountant shuttles between virtual meetings with her co-workers and "facials" (face-to-face meetings) but she also dips into the SPIES RPG and other alternate realities, often moving from one to the other with little boundary between. It's not that "life is a but a game" is a new idea, but it's never been done before (to my knowledge) with MMORPGs in as a model.

What's annoying about the novel are the second person storytelling, which makes the storytelling awkward without adding anything, the relatively slow plot development that results from the frequent switches in point-of-view (it's all second-person, but the persons differ), the jokey hacker references (which include the "twisty little passages" bit above, referring to the original text "Adventure" game that many of us played in the 1970s and 1980s), Sue's thick Scottish dialect (which Ian MacLeod has handled much better in some of his novels), and the cutesy awkwardness with which he handles most of his female characters. The ridiculousness of the (don't ask) spy subplot (not the computer security issues, but the politics) isn't really annoying, even if it is disappointing.

I didn't get hooked until about halfway through the book. I DID get hooked, however, and I DO recommend finishing the book even if you have difficulty slogging through the first ten or so chapters. Stuff does happen, the mystery becomes more interesting, and while I can't say whether or not the nerd gets the (sort of) babe, the romantic byplay adds some spice to the mix.

You probably want something more consistently entertaining for a vacation read, but if you're a Stross fan or a SCI-FI-y MMORPG fan, HALTING STATE is worth kicking around the house for a week or so.

Way back when I was in seminary school, there was a person there who said you could never write a narrative in the second person. I wonder if someone rapped Charles Stross's knuckles then too. This novel is stubbornly written entirely in the second person--the first novel I have ever read written that way. Perhaps it was to imitate the vernacular of video games ("you have picked up a level 7 blunderbuss...") to give the reader a closer connection to the characters. At first it was extremely irritating, often requiring me as a reader to do some subliminal translating before proceeding. However, by the time I had reached the climax of the plot, I agreed that this story could not have been written any other way. It left me with an eagerness to pick up the book again and read it over on some later date.

There has been a few negative reviews of this book--mostly that it starts off at a strong pace, but fizzles at the end. I strongly disagree with that assessment. The denouement was more extended than most modern science fiction, but not nearly as winded as Stross's obvious role-model Gibson has been of late. This is a very well-paced story, with intriguing themes and endearing characters. It managed to do something to me that only David Brin has been capable of: make me wonder what the characters are up to when the book is closed.