Halting State - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
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...

Customer Reviews: Read 50 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Eerily prophetic and hard to put down October 10, 2007
47 out of 49 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

A great romp in a world of cybercrime and the gaming world October 3, 2007
25 out of 28 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

Goes too far, and not far enough October 8, 2007
14 out of 20 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

Game over October 9, 2007
14 out of 19 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

Don't use second person point of view October 11, 2007
14 out of 26 found this review helpful

I wanted to like this book, I really did, but neither my wife nor myself could get more than a few pages into it. The constant use of the second person point of view: "You enter the room"..."you laugh evilly"...etc..is jarring and reminds me of cheap SF comics of the 50s and badly written online adventure games.

We're book junkies but this one is being returned. My wife got maybe 25 pages into it, warned me and I flipped through it and chucked the idea of trying to fight through the POV.

The premise is great, the ideas look cool, the future civilization might be enthralling to discover and we both really long to read it if it ever gets re-written.

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