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Halting State (Halting State #1)

by Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)

3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 · rating details · 4,927 ratings · 534 reviews

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 lan...more

Hardcover, 351 pages

Published October 2nd 2007 by Ace Hardcover

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Apr 29, 2012 Simeon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

+1 to the list of notable books written in second person, which is only slightly longer than the list of notable books written solely to criticize them.

Halting State has a cool premise. I mean, aside from the fact that it was dated by the time it came out (goggles, really? That's your immersion technology. I mean, we've gotten to the point where we can read your mind. But hey, if you wanna strap a small TV to your face instead, whatever.)

Let's ignore specifics about Halting State for a minute,...more

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May 01, 2012 Whitaker rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-scifi, 2012-read

My Review in 50 Words or Less

Written in 2007, what you’ll get if you read this is a smart, savvy novel unsettlingly prescient about where we may be going. Plus there’s a decently plotted story to boot. Just get over that second-person narrative hump.

The More than 50-Words Version

The Second Person Narrative—Is There Something to It?

Mary’s been nagging you about your heart ever since that stupid DNA check you both took last year (‘so the wee wun kens his maws ur both gawn tae be aboot for a whiul

...more

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Feb 16, 2011 Joel rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, audiobooks, sci-fi-fantasy

Charles Stross decided it would be a good idea to write Halting State entirely in second person. I briefly toyed with doing the same for my review, but then I remembered that I already did that, and it wasn't that amusing.

Then I thought maybe I would do the whole thing in code like a l33t haXor, which would have been appropriate since this book finds it the height of amusement to throw around with-it language like "n00b" and "pwned."

Then I realized that it is obnoxious to force readers to suffer...more

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Aug 02, 2008 Kristin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: hugo-nominee, science-fiction, scifi-bkgrp-selection

This was a delight to read. The story is set in independent Scotland in 2018. Everyone has direct and constant access to the web through their glasses and walk around in a constant twitch as they hammer away on virtual keyboards. Hayek Associates, a small start-up gaming company, has discovered their software has been infiltrated and the virtual bank they oversee has been robbed by a band of orcs and a dragon. Sergeant Sue Smith is first on this bewildering crime “scene”. Next to come along is E...more

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Aug 17, 2009 Guy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy, have-read-more-than-once

Just when you think you've read everything worth reading and that there's nothing new under the sun, just when you are feeling really jaded, that's when books like this one (and Michael Flynn's "January Dancer", and Peter Watts' "Blindsight") come along and remind you why you love science fiction and fantasy.

Set in the near future, using technology that either exists already or is on the drawing board now, Stross creates a world that is at the same time almost alien and yet recognizably our tomo...more

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Oct 22, 2008 Sandi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: hugo-nominees-2008, 2008, sci-fi

"Halting State" by Charles Stross was the last book on my 2008 Hugo Nominees List. While I still think "Brasyl" by Ian McDonald should have won instead of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon, I do think this comes in a very, very close second.

I was pleasantly surprised by "Halting State". I read "Accelerando" by the same author last year and absolutely loathed it. "Halting State" really grabbed me and I read huge chunks at a time. I was amazed at how Stoss managed to maintain a sec...more

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Oct 16, 2007 Seth rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the cyber/phreak/hacker crowd, action/thriller sf fans

Shelves: science-fiction, sf-f-h

This book has several interesting (and unusual) attributes. Overall it's a fun read in the vein of Pat Cadigan's Synners, about hackers and suits working together to handle a threat to technology society has evolved to assume. Like Synners it throws you into the world head-first without explaining names, acronyms, slang, or the numerous in-jokes; unlike Synners it focuses on the espionage story and leaves the sociological theorizing out.

The plot revolves around a multi-million-dollar bank heist....more This book has several interesting (and unusual) attributes. Overall it's a fun read in the vein of Pat Cadigan's Synners, about hackers and suits working together to handle a threat to technology society has evolved to assume. Like Synners it throws you into the world head-first without explaining names, acronyms, slang, or the numerous in-jokes; unlike Synners it focuses on the espionage story and leaves the sociological theorizing out.

The plot revolves around a multi-million-dollar bank heist. We follow an insurance investigator, her hired computer consultant, and a local cop assigned to the case. The catch: the bank was inside an online game. Items in online games have real-world value, but how to track, charge, prosecute, and assess the insurance liability is entirely unclear.

Stross' 2018 society is a just-over-the-horizon extrapolation of our own. Familiar names (Google, Microsoft Office, AD&D) and parodies of familiar names (Web 3.14) abound. As usual, Cringeley's law applies: people tend to overestimate change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term. Stross has accelerated social acceptance of, reliance on, and affordable access to database mashups, smart cars, flexible work/life balance, telecommuting, pervasive computing, online gaming as intentional community, and other causes popular with the so-called-"Web 2.0" crowd. The book, set in a Scotland gone hyper-technical but still balanced between Presbeterian and Socialist heritage, also makes some interesting (and, again, too-quick) extrapolations about American-versus-EU infrastructure and pan-European cooperation. It's no wonder the first review I saw of this was Corey Doctorow's adoring recommendation on Boing Boing.

Stross makes the interesting the choice to write the book in the rare--and rarely successful--second person present. This is usually used by amateur hack writers doing action or porn to give a sense of being "in the action" (which it doesn't). In this case it works well: because the viewpoint character changes with each chapter it gives a sense of the reader becoming a different character, mirroring the character- and role-hopping going on in the game-playing and the identity-hopping that unfolds as the investigation proceeds.

The story starts as a detective story, and I was all settled in and looking forward to it. However, the scale keeps escalating, from the criminal stage to the corporate, the national, the international, and finally to global socioeconomic ramifications, turning the back half of the book into a spy story more than a detective one, with all of the feints, sudden murder attempts, suddenly-revealed secret backstories, and take-it-on-faith explanations as to why things matter that spy stories entail. I don't mind spy stories, but it is a bit of a bait-and-switch.

Possibly because it was a spy story and not a whodunnit, the end felt a little off to me. We catch the bad guy from the espionage but the actual robbery in the beginning is left mostly aside. None of the type of actual investigation we prepared for turns out necessary and the skills the characters thought they were bringing to the table weren't those they used. I felt a little let down, but enjoyed it enough anyway. In particular we build up a lot of expectation around a secret one character is hiding and keeps almost-confessing; when it comes out it's a complete waste of tension.

I want Stross to remove the word "sniffs" from his spell-checker. Almost every page someone "sniffs" in response to something; it's a meaningless tag used to indicate "reacted" without telling us how and it was used so often it became intrusive.

Other than those peeves, it's a fun book. It's a great one to play spot-the-reference ("give me a cookie," "a maze of twisty mirrors, all alike," warchalk" a reference to the game Assassin and the lore surrounding it, etc... there are hundreds throughout the book).(less)

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Dec 30, 2007 Jenne rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'd really like to give this three and a half stars. It was pretty cute, and the idea of the real-life spy game was neat.

As many others have noted, Stross has a fondness for enormous chunks of exposition, but I guess it doesn't bother me as much. I like learning about stuff, as long as it's interesting stuff.

I'm taking off points for:
--intermittent use of annoying Scottish dialect
--constantly referring to an accountant as a "librarian" because she's...nerdy? dunno.
--rather perfunctory characte...more

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Dec 05, 2012 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime, science-fiction, ebook, i-own-a-copy, read-in-2012, read-in-teenties, 4-stars, reviewed

The first, and eponymous, novel in the Halting State series – Charles Stross's stories set in a slightly futuristic Edinburgh. Scotland is now an independent European state; the Police wear augmented reality glasses connected up to CopSpace; and a gang of Orcs have robbed a bank. A bank in a computer game. Think World of Warcraft (I assume, although I have seen the adverts), and a bunch of Orcs stealing game items from the safety deposit boxes in the game. Obviously, like now, these in-game item...more The first, and eponymous, novel in the Halting State series – Charles Stross's stories set in a slightly futuristic Edinburgh. Scotland is now an independent European state; the Police wear augmented reality glasses connected up to CopSpace; and a gang of Orcs have robbed a bank. A bank in a computer game. Think World of Warcraft (I assume, although I have seen the adverts), and a bunch of Orcs stealing game items from the safety deposit boxes in the game. Obviously, like now, these in-game items have actual value in the real world – the news is always keen to tell us tales of people buying and selling in-game stuff, on eBay, out here in the real world. Unfortunately (for the company that runs the bank) somebody decides to call in the police rather than keeping it quiet and our story begins.

We follow the story through three point-of-view characters – Sue, a sergeant in the Edinburgh police; Elaine, an auditor at the company that insure the company that run the bank, she is brought into the case due to her gaming hobby and then the rest of the team promptly dump the case on her; and Jack, a recently sacked genius game developer, just back from a somewhat bleary trip to Amsterdam to try and forget his firing, who is brought in as a consultant to the auditor Elaine as he just happens to have exactly the right skills. Initially, we're introduced to them apart; with Sue in Edinburgh, Elaine in London and Jack in Amsterdam but it's pretty obvious that they are all going to meet up before too long. And this is where it gets messy.

Each of the characters take turns to tell the story – first Sue, then Elaine, then Jack; and back to Sue again. However, each of the three points-of-view are shared with us in a second-person narrative. Instead of the much simpler "Sue did this, Elaine did this, Jack did this, someone else did something else" we're treated to repeated shocking leaps from inside one character on to the next. Each one, in turn, described to us as if it were us – "You do this, then You do that, then you do the other". Which would be less confusing if it were just one character for the book, but with three characters, you have to mentally keep track of which character you're supposed to be. There are fewer clues in the prose than with other narrative styles.

I can see why Stross thought it would be cool. With the major theme of the novel being immersive gaming it took me back to those choose-your-own-adventure books as a child – "You are standing in the nave of a seventeenth-century church, its intricately carved stone surfaces dimly illuminated by candles." etc. And to be fair to him, it kinda is a little bit cool. I think Stross is the only author I've ever read to use the technique (choose-your-own-adventure books aside), but it does get a little frustrating at times. And I'm not convinced it was every cool enough to justify the second book, Rule 34 , being written in the same style.

I read the two out of order, but that certainly didn't matter. While Rule 34 is set in the same universe and uses one of the non-PoV cops from this story, there is no dependency or spoiler potential. Of the two I preferred this one. The second-person narrative seemed less awkward here. The use of geeky terminology seemed less forced. I think Halting State is just a better story. I think I may have overrated Charles Stross's Rule 34. I liked it too, but I'm not sure I really liked it as much as this one.(less)

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Jan 07, 2009 Brownbetty marked it as abandoned-unfinished

Every once in a while I get the idea I'm not reading brainy enough SF, and that all the other SF readers will sneer at me for not reading enough Hugo winners. Halting State hasn't won a Hugo, but it says "Hugo Award-winning author of" on the front, so it probably count for half points.

Sue Smith is a tough, no-nonsense cop who takes occasional flack for being the only out lesbian in her department. And that was the last time the book gave me something I liked.

The entire book (well, let me be hone...more Every once in a while I get the idea I'm not reading brainy enough SF, and that all the other SF readers will sneer at me for not reading enough Hugo winners. Halting State hasn't won a Hugo, but it says "Hugo Award-winning author of" on the front, so it probably count for half points.

Sue Smith is a tough, no-nonsense cop who takes occasional flack for being the only out lesbian in her department. And that was the last time the book gave me something I liked.

The entire book (well, let me be honest: right up until I stopped reading it, which was not far in at all) is written in the second person. This is the sort of show-off-y trick you had damn well better prove you're good enough to use. Sue (you) speak(s) with a brogue, and occasionally the narration from her (your) POV borrows it. The future we are in is signalled by heavy use of acronyms, abbreviations, and neologisms:

You shake your head and get out of the car, tapping your ear-piece to tell your phone to listen up: "Arriving on SOC, time-stamp now. Start evidence log." It's logging anyway--everything you do on duty goes into the black box--but the voice marker is searchable. It saves the event from getting lost in your lifelog.

Gives you the general gist. We are in the future! Surveillance is pervasive and inescapable! We have fun new acronyms! And then the crazy, are you ready for it, no really, make sure you are sitting down because this will Blow. Your. Mind. crime? Someone has knocked over a bank in ~~Second Life~~ Avalon Four.

I couldn't keep reading, it was like listening to my parents try to use teenage slang. In Stross's defense, this was written in 2007, which is probably a decade in internet-years, but he has somehow posited a future were people have just discovered virtual economies, which ought to be just as much speculative fiction as stories where Hannibal crosses the Alps in zeppelins, and yet really isn't.

So, anyway. Presumably lots of fun stuff happens after page twelve, but you'll have to ask someone else about that.(less)

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May 26, 2008 Tricia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people with patience and definitely people in the gaming industry or just into games in general

Shelves: 2008

Another from my list of books in second person. I found it extremely hard to get into this at first. The second person present perspective plus the head jumping into different characters felt very awkward, and I really wasn't at all sure where the story was going, so I was reluctant to dive in. About a third of the way through, I finally grokked where it was trying to go and I leapt in, reading the rest of the book at a faster pace and really enjoying the characters. It's rare in a book with mul...more

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Dec 31, 2007 Janet rated it 2 of 5 stars

Okay plot, although Stross thinks he's being more innovative than he really is. The idea of people thinking they're playing war games, only to find out it's real, has been done many times. (Ender's Game for one, and lots of movies from the 1980's). The main characters appealing, but undeveloped. Also, I know I'm fighting a losing battle here, but the word "librarian" describes a profession. It does not mean nerdy, intellectual, sexually repressed, insecure, spinsters! I hate to smash your daydre...more

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Mar 21, 2013 P. Aaron Potter rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi, geek

I am a late-comer to Stross' "Halting State," and he has moved on to bigger (better?) things. Therefore I feel perfectly comfortable in noting the book's weaknesses as well as its strengths.

This is one of the most annoyingly written good books I've ever read.

The plot is a futurist geek's dream: gamers and hackers and cops and robbers and ninjas all fighting for control of a distributed Augmented Reality RPG which turns out to be the key to, well, pretty much all of civilization. Plus a bucketloa...more I am a late-comer to Stross' "Halting State," and he has moved on to bigger (better?) things. Therefore I feel perfectly comfortable in noting the book's weaknesses as well as its strengths.

This is one of the most annoyingly written good books I've ever read.

The plot is a futurist geek's dream: gamers and hackers and cops and robbers and ninjas all fighting for control of a distributed Augmented Reality RPG which turns out to be the key to, well, pretty much all of civilization. Plus a bucketload of cash.

Stross' love for, and knowledge of, his subjects is on sharp display here...perhaps a bit too sharply, since he has a nasty habit of dropping piles of loosely associated computer terminology and gamer-slang into conversations. For the most part, he does so accurately, though at times his urge to name-drop a SQL trick or an OD&D reference trips him up, in ways which would ever really only matter to other uber-nerds, like myself, who can make fine sport out of spotting niggling little errors like those. That's not a problem.

A problem is Stross' bizarre decision to write the entire novel from the second-person POV. Yes, I get what he was aiming at here: the choose-your-own-adventure feel of early Infocom text adventures, or classic RPG supplements. The constant "you feel this" and "you suspect such and such" and "So you do that thing..." is quirky at first, and a little hard to navigate simply because it's such an unfamiliar narrative mode. About three chapters in, the reader gets the rhythm down, and the flow smooths out. But then, about three chapters later, the persistant "you, You, YOU" becomes like a finger jabbing out of the text, painfully poking the reader in the eye at every turn. There's a reason that the 2nd-person is not frequently used for narrative: it actually accomplishes the opposite of its intention. Rather than making me feel more like I was part of the story, it was as if a character on screen kept breaking the fourth wall and reminding me I was in a theater; it completely threw me out of the tale. This problem was exacerbated because the jargon-laden sci-fi setting necessitates a fair amount of exposition, which had to be rather ham-handedly stuffed into appositive constructions. "You suddenly remember about CMOS, the layer of programming underlying the OS, or Operating System, which yuo might use to..." See? Ugly.

So, an ambitious move. Daring. Bold. Totally flops. Which is a pity, because the book and characters themselves are quite likeable, much in the vein of Ernie Cline's Ready Player One. The rating above reflects my mixed feelings. (less)

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Jan 15, 2008 Jason Pettus rated it 3 of 5 stars

(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of science-fiction (or SF), and that one of the writers of the newest generation that I keep up with is master mind-screwer-upper Charles Stross, a multiple Hugo-nominated "writer's writer" who is greatly admired by the precise fellow writers who are his Hugo competition each year. In fa...more (My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of science-fiction (or SF), and that one of the writers of the newest generation that I keep up with is master mind-screwer-upper Charles Stross, a multiple Hugo-nominated "writer's writer" who is greatly admired by the precise fellow writers who are his Hugo competition each year. In fact, just a couple of months ago I read and reviewed my first book of his, 2006's greatly admired Glasshouse, set 700 years in the future and dealing with all kinds of interesting topics like teleportation, replication, genetic engineering, the Singularity and more. It's easy in Glasshouse, I explained in my original essay, to see why Stross is such a favorite not only among the youngest generation of SF fans but also the very people who spend the largest amount of time thinking about that speculative genre; because he's what can be called a "hard SF" author, a meticulous researcher whose outrageous fictional concepts are always based on real events from our current times, endlessly inventive extrapolations of our current reality that only the most brilliant of our society can envision. Now add that Stross himself is personally interested in a lot of the hot-button topics of our Web 2.0 times -- copyleft, fascism, steampunk, DRM and more -- and you can easily see why he's a personal favorite of such much-more-known personalities as Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net.

And that's why I was so excited to spy his latest novel, autumn-2007's Halting State, on the "new book" shelf of my library recently; oh, it's always so exciting, isn't it, to spy a book at a library you know is going to be very popular and impossible to get ahold of soon, randomly one day before anyone else has spied it on the shelf. Ah, but then I read it, and realized the danger of Stross being the type of writer that he is, which to be fair is the same danger facing any hard-SF author; that even as their far-future tales tend to sparkle and ignite the imagination, their insistence on basing all story details on real technology tends to make their "world of tomorrow" tales a hacky mess, full of terms and concepts that are about two years out of date even when originally published, then aging with all the grace of Bill Clinton talking about setting up CyberZones on the Information Superhighway. And Halting State is a "world of tomorrow" novel, make no mistake, one rooted in the trendy technology of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments, not only such videogames as World of Warcraft but such "virtual realities" as Second Life; and as thrilling as an actioner based on this technology might be to the absolute nerdiest of us at this particular moment in history, I'm telling you right now that snotty hipsters in fifteen years will be reading this book for its ironic enjoyment, for the amount of times it makes them roll their eyes in awful/wonderful "Web 2.0 Fiction" delight.

But wait, what's that, you say? You don't quite understand what an MMO is? Well, you're going to need to in order to understand Halting State, which assumes from page 1 that...(less)

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Jul 24, 2008 Daniel rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: nerds, Charles Stross fans, players of MMOGs

The first buzzwords I heard about this book were along the lines of "bank heist", "MMOs", and "marauding band of orcs." Aha, I thought, here's an interesting premise: "Programmers of a World of Warcraft-like MMO soup-up the AI on a bunch of NPC orcs to make them more of a challenge for their players. But they make the orcs too smart: Using unwitting agents in real-life (aka 'meatspace'), the orcs perpetrate a bank heist in our world, planning to use their loot to buy up in-game currency, items a...more The first buzzwords I heard about this book were along the lines of "bank heist", "MMOs", and "marauding band of orcs." Aha, I thought, here's an interesting premise: "Programmers of a World of Warcraft-like MMO soup-up the AI on a bunch of NPC orcs to make them more of a challenge for their players. But they make the orcs too smart: Using unwitting agents in real-life (aka 'meatspace'), the orcs perpetrate a bank heist in our world, planning to use their loot to buy up in-game currency, items and power." Alas, this is not the plot of Halting State. The marauding orcs are in fact avatars of real-life people, the bank heist occurs in the MMO's virtualspace, and the AI on the NPC beasties is still crap.

But Halting State reads like what I've come to expect from Stross. First, the technology--from 5-10 years down the line, rather than the techno-magic of Glasshouse and the last two-thirds of Accelerando—is smoothly integrated into the characters' lives. Second, the plot moves along nicely, but without much crescendo, until it seems to end more or less because Stross ran out of things to say. And finally, there's some sort of experimental literary technique: In this case, the use of 2nd-person narrative.

I have to admit I was quite put off for about 20 pages by the gimmicky use of "you". I felt like I was reading a Choose-Your-Own Adventure. (You pick up Halting State and begin to read. If you decide that you can get used to it, turn to page 67. If you choose to play World of Warcraft instead, turn to page 14.) But after a while it didn't bother me. I even began to appreciate the heavy-handed prediction he's making via the use of "you": that in the future much of our entertainment will be characterized by buzzwords like "user-driven", "interactive", "massively multiplayer", etc. (The still-new career path, "reality tv scenario builder", will come into its own, and the poor screen and television writers will weep and wail.)

To sum up: If you like to keep up with the latest trends in gadgets, or if you've liked Stross' past books, or if you think there's something sociologically significant about MMOs, then it might be worth your while to pick up this book.

(less)

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Dec 13, 2010 Robert rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 10, 2008 Mark Cheverton rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

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 unfortunately will probably date quite quickly.

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Jan 28, 2009 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars

A terrific science fiction novel, this is a crime story in which virtual reality overflows into reality. This should be especially entertaining for players of role-playing games, as the references are numerous and frequently funny. Not that you need to play much to get a lot of the jokes; I am the non-gamer in my family, but exposure to the basics was enough.

The blurb from the back cover that convinced me to buy this:

"A daring bank robbery has taken place... The prime suspects are a band of mara...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Bill rated it 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this book in the middle of reading 2666, mostly to have something lighter to read on my holiday cross-country plane rides. It fulfilled those expectations very well.

Halting State is a fun near-future detective novel that focuses on a large robbery. The twist is that the robbery happens online, to a virtual bank. What starts out as a straightforward detective story has some very satisfying second act twists that bring the narrative out a bit to include a lot of interesting ideas. I fo...more

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Apr 28, 2013 Matthew rated it 2 of 5 stars

Halting State is the second book by Charles Stross that I've read. The first, Accelerando, is (to steal a cliche) a flawed masterpiece -- a word which I don't use lightly -- and on its strength I was eager to dive into this novel.

Stross is a (apparently I'm stuck in reviewer-cliche land tonight) furiously imaginative writer, and half the fun of his novels is just keeping up with the barrage of new ideas about technology, culture, and the intersection thereof. That's certainly the case with Halt...more Halting State is the second book by Charles Stross that I've read. The first, Accelerando, is (to steal a cliche) a flawed masterpiece -- a word which I don't use lightly -- and on its strength I was eager to dive into this novel.

Stross is a (apparently I'm stuck in reviewer-cliche land tonight) furiously imaginative writer, and half the fun of his novels is just keeping up with the barrage of new ideas about technology, culture, and the intersection thereof. That's certainly the case with Halting State, a whodunnit set in the newly independent EU-member state of Scotland in 2018, when gaming is a pervasive aspect of many people's lives, and the distinction between "virtual" and "real" seems ridiculous.

Halting State is brilliant in places (among my favorite geek-out quotes was "they're not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer. They're tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!"), and Stross, who has a degree in CS and worked as programmer, does a convincing portrayal of the similarly obsessive worlds of the startup hacker and hardcore gamer.

The most notable aspect of the book, though, is its narrative stance. Halting State is all written in the second person -- a revolving second person, with three mostly-reliable narrators (a programmer, a forensic accountant, and a cop). I don't think I've seen multiple second persons attempted before in a novel, and hats off to Stross for giving it a try. For me though, it didn't work: the second person is a tough sell, even with enormous finesse, and needing to remember which character's POV you're currently sitting in makes the whole thing feel forced. The somewhat untidy and vague plot, featuring a corporate-espionage double-cross, unnamed intelligence agencies, and Chinese hackers, doesn't make things easier.

I admire Stross's ambition to do something different, and the fact that he makes it work at all is a testament to his ability: still despite its originality, this book isn't his best.(less)

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Feb 24, 2013 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Jason Plein

Shelves: cthulhu, fanfiction, government, hero-s-journey, metatexts, monsters, science-fiction, zombies, scotland

In the world-to-come, scary governments and scary nongovernments have figured out how to use live action role play and massively multiplayer online games to continue diplomacy by other means. Everything is monitored; everything monitoring system is infiltrated; every need in Maslow's hierarchy is a reward pellet to get the rats to run the maze and solve someone else’s problem. Our enemies are pale ghosts in the machine; no need to rewire our soldiers’ moral machinery before they are willing to s...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

The near future, I think, is one of the hardest scifi times to write in. This book does a great job in exploring some of the consequences for people and society of the rapidly expanding area of augmented reality. The usefulness of being permanently connected to the net through a terminal in your pocket and the changes to your lifestyle, actions and even mindset it causes are hard to deny once you've used a smartphone for a year or so. Augmented reality is already occurring through the use of fea...more

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Dec 31, 2012 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

I found this book a very enjoyable read. The second-person narrative worked for me; it made it seem like an old text adventure game, which seemed appropriate enough. I liked the three main characters, though they could have been fleshed out in more credible ways. With the rest of the characters, I sometimes got confused about who was who.

It is set in a future where Scotland is independent and the USA is no longer one of the big players, and where the internet and virtual overlays on reality hav...more

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Jul 27, 2012 Sean rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the reviews I read mentioned wanting an annotated version. I believe that would be rather simple to append, as well as rather necessary. Maybe I should have given up and googled 'scottish slang ned' the first time I came across it, but I am pretty tolerant of coming across a word or phrase I don't quite understand, and just continuing with the hope that all will be revealed later. In that case I wasn't disappointed, because a few chapters later a ned is equated to a chav, which I do recog...more

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Jun 24, 2012 Unwisely rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, science-fiction

This is more properly classed "cyberpunk", but I don't have a tag for that.

As everyone has noted, it's written in the second person, which is weird. There's a variety of narrators, and at first I had a little trouble with getting the connections, but I got there. It's also set in Edinburgh, and at least one person speaks in thick dialect. As that's a dialect I can parse, I kinda liked it, but I can see how it would get old.

Particularly after having finished reading a bunch of computer gaming stu...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Elf M. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Halting State is a fascinating swerve: it's a Scottish Police Procedural set twenty minutes into the future, it has three character POV's, and it's entirely written in the second person.

But it's a superveniary second person: Stross successfully captures the mindstate of someone playing a first person shooter, combined with an esoteric puzzler, all told with his characteristic pyrotechnically precise voice. The plot is fairly straightforward: Officer Smith is called in on a bank robbery, only she...more Halting State is a fascinating swerve: it's a Scottish Police Procedural set twenty minutes into the future, it has three character POV's, and it's entirely written in the second person.

But it's a superveniary second person: Stross successfully captures the mindstate of someone playing a first person shooter, combined with an esoteric puzzler, all told with his characteristic pyrotechnically precise voice. The plot is fairly straightforward: Officer Smith is called in on a bank robbery, only she learns that the bank was in a World-of-Warcraft-like massively multiplayer online role-playing game that exists only on the shared cloud-processing platforms of game subscribers, the theives were an army of Orcs backed by a dragon for heavy firepower, and they escaped through an illegal immigration tunnel from one MMO to another.

Which is silly until the nerds reveal that the total worth of what was in the bank amounts to almost many millions of euros. When that much value disappears out of anyone's bank, heads roll. Oh, and the top programmer at the job has gone missing.

What follows is a three-part song and dance between our cop, a forensic accountant from a company that insures the bank, and the forensic accountant's recently acquired pet nerd and gaming expert. There are twists and turns and Stross does a marvelous job of adding up a great many columns of facts and figures to tell it.

If the book has a problem, it's that in order to make it seem more interesting than it is, Stross has to pretend that code management tools for MMOs exist more or less in the same strata as the game itself: in order to debug a code problem, our heroes must fight their way through demons and Lovecraftian horrors. At the same time, the ending fight scene is so pedestrian and absurd, and oh, you saw that coming a mile away, didn't you?

But it's a great ride. And you get to sit in the head and look out the eyeballs of the heros, and Stross does a pretty good job of giving you an appreciable feel for each one of them.(less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Zedsdead rated it 4 of 5 stars

Halting State purports to be a gamer novel (a la Ready Player One) but it's actually more of a near-future tech thriller with a side of politics.

It opens with the Scottish police being called in to solve a sort-of bank robbery in which a horde of orcs (with dragon support) have looted a virtual bank in a World of Warcraft style VR game. Before long it morphs into spy-vs-spy suspense with the financial security of the world at stake.

I had a tough time plowing through some of the Scottish. I'm gen...more

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Jan 15, 2012 Jay Kristoff rated it 1 of 5 stars

You wonder why the author chose to write this book in second person PoV, when that writing mode is traditionally reserved for Choose Your own Adventure books and that odd shade of pornography where the camera is strapped to the pilot's head, all grunting into the camera-mounted mic and whatnot.

Then you the wonder why the author chose to write this book in second person PoV and include MULTIPLE CHARACTER POINTS OF VIEW.

You flail around for a few chapters, trying to wrap your brainmeats around th...more

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Oct 20, 2011 Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction

An entire novel written in the second person might put off a lot of potential readers, and in this case just to make it more difficult to follow there are three main protagonists all of whom are referred to as ‘you’. However by writing in this way the author has very cleverly written in a style that both mimics the subject of his plot (on-line gaming) and might appeal to his target readership (gamers).

Back when most on-line games were text-driven they were nearly all second-person, and their imm...more An entire novel written in the second person might put off a lot of potential readers, and in this case just to make it more difficult to follow there are three main protagonists all of whom are referred to as ‘you’. However by writing in this way the author has very cleverly written in a style that both mimics the subject of his plot (on-line gaming) and might appeal to his target readership (gamers).

Back when most on-line games were text-driven they were nearly all second-person, and their immediate off-line 1980s predecessors of text adventure games and choose-your-own-adventure books all followed this style. So with the explosion of popularity of gaming maybe this book could be seen as the harbinger of a comeback for an all-but-extinct literary style. Or maybe gamers will just shrug their shoulders and wonder what all those funny squiggles called words are. Who knows.

The story follows Sue, Elaine and Jack, respectively a police sergeant, insurance investigator and software developer. It is set in the near future, in a society very recognisable and comparable to our own, with the exception that being on-line has become a lot more immersive and socially acceptable than at present. In each new chapter you put on a different metaphorical hat and become one of the characters, much like you might in some computer games, as they try to find out what is behind a bank-robbery in an on-line world. The robbery turns out just be the tip of the iceberg; what they uncover has severe consequences in the real world too, with the stability and security of a newly independent Scotland under threat. The investigation and action take place both in games and in the real-world, and the author deliberately blurs the distinction between the two.

The story is a real page-turner, once you get used to the style. It could have just been a fairly average espionage/crime story, but putting some of the action online gives it an extra filip where it’s needed. There is lots of action and Jack and Elaine especially are well drawn characters, and their relationship once it develops feels believable. It is also the first novel I’ve read that explores some of the current trends in computer technology in society to a believable outcome within the next 10 years or so. The main criticisms I would have is that there is not much of an ending (it just seems to stop), and some of the minor characters fade a little into the background, so I found it sometimes tricky to remember just who they were when they popped up again. However I recommend it for anyone who wants to read something just a little different, perhaps before this kind of story becomes two-a-penny.

Cyberpunk novels have always frustrated me in the past, being a software engineer myself, as they seem to ignore the fact that although technology is built by geeks the society that uses it is not. In this novel there is a certain element of geek-saves-the-day, but by and large it shows a normal functioning society using technology such as augmented reality to help them live their lives, rather than having geeks telling them how to live their lives. I for one have always felt that this is a more realistic view of technological progress, and I’m glad to have finally found a novel that expresses that!(less)

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Aug 16, 2011 Steven Cole rated it 5 of 5 stars

What a fascinating book this was!

As a quick summary, this is a near-future electronic crime mystery more than a scifi novel, but it's still a blast to read. There's distributed computing, cryptography, games that are effectively MMORPGs, and Alternate Reality Games thrown in the mix. I'm actually employed in the games industry, so I know a lot of the buzzwords used here, but even so I was looking up stuff on wikipedia to gain a little bit of background on the topics Stross brings up.

The book is...more

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About Charles Stross

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

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“They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.” — 2 people liked it

“She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.” — 2 people liked it

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