Halting State

published	2007 by Ace Hardcover
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0441014984 (isbn13: 9780441014989)
pages	352
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 Asso...more [close] 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...
date added	03-02-07 edit book

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Seth rated it:

10/16/07

bookshelves: sf-f-h

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: the cyber/phreak/hacker crowd, action/thriller sf fans

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 espio...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 </i>how<i> 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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