An averageish cyberpunk book with some interesting concepts regarding future crime. ( )

A few odds and ends beyond what other reviewers wrote:

* annoyance at rushed ending was compounded by the realization that some of the interesting stuff that had been dangled before the reader in this book was just sequel set-up, like Stross did to The Family Trade
* but at least the romance was more believable in this book
* corporate and tech aspects were convincingly portrayed
* contrary to one reviewer’s confused account, the zombie flash mob was NOT the same as the zombie horde. They were on/used by different sides, in different places, in different ways. That was part of the *fun* of this book.

Full review at http://configures.sarahelkins.org/200... ( )

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 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. ( )

Great book that is done a disservice by its geeky plot blurb of "virtual robbery with orcs". I put a lot of faith in his Hugo nominations and am glad now that I did. Stross has an almost fanatical attention to detail when using technology in his stories that you can see just as easily being replaced by "tech" filler as with Star Trek (something Ron Moore talked about in a speech, and that Stross wrote a lengthy blog post about). This aids credibility and readability to his story, and makes his work feel a lot like a higher-tech William Gibson, a writer I really enjoy. I specifically liked the idea of LARP spy networks in the story. I don't know if he invented the idea, or just made it his own, but it worked great as a plot device.

I thought the author's use of multiple viewpoints made the story jumpy, but generally worked well with the exception of the policewoman, who I felt was too far away from his other characters. ( )

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. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2009/09... ( )

The latest in my light summer reading series is a cyberpunk novel. You will note the cool, trendy, inappropriate capitalization in the title. It has a blurb from William Gibson on the cover. William Gibson is the Pete Seeger of cyberpunk. All the cyberpunks go to him for his blessing, just like the folkies get their records blessed by Pete.

Halting State is a near-future novel. One in which, not surprisingly, the internet has penetrated every facet of people's lives. It starts with a virtual reality bank robbery committed by a bunch of orcs and a dragon. The poor non-gaming cop, in Edinburgh, Scotland of all places, who takes the call, is nonplussed, even though she wears he interfacing glasses and operates in "cop space" all the time. Everyone wears these glasses that give them access to GPS, their address book, email, virual reality games, etc. through their web 3.whatever mobile phones. Cops have their own channel which gives personal information, including rap sheets, of everyone everywhere.



There is a bit of fantasy roll playing, some techophiliac nerdlings, a bit of international intrigue, some cyber crime, quite a lot of action and violence, a touch of love, a bit of implied sex, tastefully handled in a 1940 Hollywood sort of way, something for everyone. I particularly liked the way people were slightly disoriented when the net went down and they didn't have their GPS stream telling them were they were. Just think 20 years ago people could find the bus stop on their own.

I'll Never Forget The Day I Read A Book!

The novel follows three characters Sue, of the Edinburgh constabulary, Jack, who knits and programmes and, Elaine, forensic accountant and - in her spare time - a medieval swords person. The viewpoint is switched to tell the story from the three perspectives. I tried to race through Sue's because her story was much less interwoven with the other two.

What was really clever though is that it is written in third person. It gives a great effect of throwing you in the story and getting you emotionally involved without giving the game away. After all you assume you knows all about it while I may want to give subtle hints or tell you outright. This way the surprises stay surprises.

The plot moves on from robbery in an online game through industrial sabotage and international espionage the plot becomes a little hard to follow in the last twenty pages or so. The race for 'The End' is fast paced and in that it looses something.

Halting State is, however, a fantastic, realistic near future bit of SF. It gets extra bonus points for having characters instead of caricatures and someone who knits.

Edited from a ramble on my blog; http://solongas.blogspot.com/2009/09/... ( )

I did not like this series. I did not like the pacing ( )

A fun read, mad as usual for Stross. I'm amazed how natural it was to read a whole novel written in second person: I thought of it as a bit of gimmick when I heard about it, but actually it reads entirely smoothly. ( )

Whether you read Halting State as a hightech bagatelle or a nightmare near-future scenario this is a gripping and well-paced read, granted you can get around the gaming lingo and the acronyms showered over you at a steady rate of (at least) one per page.

We follow the proceedings from three different but inevitably interlaced points of view, each of which gets it's own self told 2nd person voice. This works very well, or so I think - it makes for a tone simultaneously detached AND personally involved - idea driven, but making me interested in the characters, all of which are believable.

Highly recommendable to anyone working within the IT industry enjoying spy thrillers. ( )

ZB7

Very slow start, picked up half-way through. The 2nd-person story-telling took some getting used to, but in the end it was really clever. Be sure to pay attention to the chapter titles and realize that the name shown in the chapter title is who the story is being told for. ( )

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 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.

..................................................................................................................... ( )

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 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.

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/518915.html

"This book is excellent and I would readily endorse it over the other [2008] Hugo nominee I read, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. There's a quote on the front from the New York Times about Stross' ability to conceive of a future that could exist in "six, sixty, or six hundred years," and it's pretty much true. I am reminded of when I read Exit Strategy by Rushkoff, which I faulted for feeling too shortsighted. But the future Stross gives us feels entirely plausible, since it seems to almost fit into the world we live in now, just a little enhanced. The book takes place ten years from now, in 2018, and I'm curious how it will hold up then. The book is very tech-heavy, and given what I know personally it works pretty well. I'm not an expert, but Stross has a degree in CS and used to be a software engineer at one point." ( )

I found this an unusually difficult book to read. A few of the contributing factors:

- Stross writes in the 2nd person, present tense. The second person, in particular, is so unusual that I was distracted by it for about the first 100 pages.
- The second-person voice points at three different characters. So it takes longer than usual to get to know any particular one.
- All three characters speak and think in jargon. Programming jargon, gaming jargon, and police jargon is everywhere.
- The plot is complicated, with many secondary characters in addition to the three primaries. None of them understands what is going on.

The end result of all this is that I spent most of the book feeling hopelessly confused and frustrated. It was hard to tell when my confusion was due to unfamiliarity with some bit of jargon, or if I was supposed to be sharing a character's confusion.

After finishing the book and thinking about it for a day, I believe that there is lots of good stuff in here that I missed on a first read. Halting State is a realistic extrapolation of trends in communication technology, not some flight of fancy. And it teases out fascinating implications concerning the relationship between individuals and the state, and between individuals within a state. There's a lot to think about here, but I'd be better equipped to do that thinking if I understood more of what happened. ( )

I'm a a bit of a sucker for near future sci-fi and this novel, set in 2017, does not disappoint.

It follows the lives of three people as they get tangled up in a white collar crime that quickly descends into the depths of a darker world of international espionage.

The human element of the story carries through really well, the best I have read from Stross; I particularly like the story as told by Sue, a Glaswegian copper.

The novel explores some very important issues to do with cryptography and introduces many other technological marvels. His understand of how the electronic web can be brought out into the real world via smart phones is very insightful. In other ways I thought that the technology he describes would not be quite as widespread as he does, but it is small failing. ( )

Starts off well and promises much but a bit of a let down in the end. ( )

In 2018, a bank robbery takes place in a bank in an online gaming world. The breach in security threatens the financial standing of the company running the game, so the police and the company's insurer come to investigate. The entire book is written in second person from the viewpoints of Sue Smith, the detective; Elaine Barnaby, the insurance investigator, and Jack Reed, a game developer hired as a consultant by Elaine's company. They soon discover that the robbery has bigger implications than just the gaming world.

Initially, the most noticeable thing about the book is the second person viewpoint which is a little strange but makes sense given the gaming emphasis of the story, and I did not find it a distraction from reading the book. The story moved at a brisk pace, with enough suspense and action to keep me interested the whole time I was reading it. There is a lot of technical jargon in the book, which I did not mind, but which could be offputting to people without a computer background. The only thing I didn't find all that convincing or interesting was Jack's continuous angst about his personal life, which lead to an underwhelming revelation at the end. Still, this is a very good near future thriller. ( )

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 - 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. ( )

This story about the unraveling of an online heist held my interest but just barely. It is nowhere near as innovative as his award-winning novel Accelerando. Halting State, in contrast, is formulaic and feels like it could be written by any competent SF writer. ( )

wow. never before have i read a book written in 2nd person. perhaps the book has redeeming qualities. i wouldn't know, however, because i couldn't make it past the second chapter. ( )

Taggart 2030.

Or, it seems a bit like that at times, especially with Sergeant Smith and company.

The second person thing didn't really worry me at all, I had read the first two or three chapters on the web, so once you get used to it after a few pages I found I wasn't really noticing it at all, and just reading it the same as any other novel.

An in-game raid on a bank in a MMORPG leads to an investigation, that has intelligence, financial and communications implications.

A near future setting where people are even more wired, and physical reality has a virtual overlay where things can be tagged, or have information added to them like a wiki, and people use this via mobile phones and glasses. The police, for example, use CopSpace.

Gaming is more prevalent, with people also taking part in large scale LARP and what they call ARG - co-ordinated by computer and phone - one of which, amusinglyg enough, is called 'SPOOKS'. No mention of games of Hustle or Life On Mars though, maybe firing up the Quatro would be frowned upon by law-enforcement. :)

For some of the flavour :

"..They're guarding some loot I need to get my hands on. About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fiercely large Shoggoth; if you want to keep your data secure, there's nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that's guarded by Lovecraftian horrors."

or

"The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever's sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won't get you a handle on what's going on because they're not using the game a sa ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer! They're tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!"

There are three main characters, a game developer, a forensic accountant, and a police Sergeant, with stories told in three different threads, as their investigation leads into something rather nastier going on in real-life.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/04... ( )