Halting State

by Charles Stross

book data

645 ratings, 3.76 average rating, 165 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		20%
4		45%
3		26%
2		5%
1		2%

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published

October 2nd 2007 by Ace Hardcover

binding

Hardcover, 351 pages

setting

The United Kingdom

literary awards

Hugo Best Novel nominee (2008)

isbn

0441014984 (isbn13: 9780441014989)

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

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06/04/08

Kristin rated it:

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

Read in September, 2008

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 a...more

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09/05/08

Sandi rated it:

(review of isbn 0441016073)

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

Read in October, 2008

"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...more

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3 comments

12/30/07

Jenne rated it:

Read in December, 2007

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....more

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8 comments

04/21/08

Tricia rated it:

(review of isbn 1841496944)

bookshelves: 08-05-may

Read in May, 2008

recommends it for: people with patience and definitely people in the gaming industry or just into games in general

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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10/04/07

Seth rated it:

bookshelves: science-fiction

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 espionage story and leaves the sociological theorizing out.

The plot revolves around a multi-million-dollar...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 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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12/31/07

Janet rated it:

Read in December, 2007

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 sma...more

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01/15/08

Jason Pettus rated it:

Read in January, 2008

(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 compet...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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09/12/07

Daniel rated it:

Read in March, 2008

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 ...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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12/10/08

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 1841496650)

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in December, 2008

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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01/28/09

Rob rated it:

Read in January, 2009

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 prim...more

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01/08/09

Bill rated it:

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 interest...more

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01/07/09

Brownbetty added it

bookshelves: abandoned-unfinished

Read in January, 2009

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.

T...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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04/05/09

CD rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in April, 2009

I didn't give this book 5 stars because it took me quite a while to get into it. I bought it 9 months ago and read a couple of chapters and put it down and didn't pick it up again until just this month when I didn't have anything to read in the house. So, I warn you, the beginning is slow, confusing and a bit all over the place. However, having just finished it in a weekend, I found that once you get past page 50, it picks up to a furious pace and is utterly fascinating.

The over...more

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02/03/09

Andrew rated it:

Read in February, 2009

This book is set up in a daunting manner. The narrative switches between three different points of view, and each of them is told in the second person, present tense. For example: "You check out your shoulder in the bathroom mirror. That's quite some bruise Mike landed on you at the club." Between the somewhat disorienting second-person approach and the constantly shifting viewpoints, "Halting State" can be a challenging book to engage with. This is leaving aside the rather t...more This book is set up in a daunting manner. The narrative switches between three different points of view, and each of them is told in the second person, present tense. For example: "You check out your shoulder in the bathroom mirror. That's quite some bruise Mike landed on you at the club." Between the somewhat disorienting second-person approach and the constantly shifting viewpoints, "Halting State" can be a challenging book to engage with. This is leaving aside the rather technical nature of much of its narrative; the book tells the story of a software company that's had a bank robbery occur inside one of its most popular video games, which threatens to disrupt its imminent IPO and lose it assloads of money. One of the characters is the local cop inexplicably summoned to the scene of this virtual robbery, while the other two are working for the parent company of the robbed software company. Or something like that. There's a lot of technical jargon, about stocks, international relations, banking, video games, and hypothetical technologies that Stross is creating as he relates the narrative. Did I mention that this book takes place a decade from now, in a future that is, technologically speaking, borderline unrecognizable to a citizen of our current time? Well, it does. Having only read Stross's "Merchant Princes" series before now, I was unprepared for what he gets up to when he really lets his science-fictional side run wild.

That said, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Sure, there are technical elements that were discussed at points in the narrative that I didn't understand as I read them, but they were never central enough to the plot to confuse my understanding of the story as a whole. I do wish Stross was a bit better at explaining points like this, as, for example, Neal Stephenson is, but that's a minor quibble. Really, if you strip away the technological bells and whistles, as well as the scientific grounding of the novel's central conceit, what you have here is a fast-moving espionage novel. You've probably got to have at least somewhat of a geeky, sci-fi oriented mindset to enjoy this, so I don't exactly recommend passing it along to your great uncle who loves John Le Carre, but it's really not that different from his Le Carre novels for all that. What's more, I think it would make a great movie. It's fast-moving, features a complicated and engaging plot, and throws around plenty of big ideas to engage the geek in all of us. It's well worth checking out, and it only further cements my impression that pretty much any book by Charles Stross is worth picking up... even the ones that are slightly confusing at points.(less)

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04/22/09

Vergast rated it:

(review of isbn 1841496650)

Read in April, 2009

this book.... well what can i say.
I was not impresed. The techno bable was bad even for a sci-fi-nerd-gamer type like me.
Course i bought this book because while looking at Lora Innes books i stumbled arcoss:
'Washington's Crossing (Pivotal Moments in American History) by David Hackett Fischer'
and imedetly wanted it...
And Zombie Hakci but for a different reason that has nothing to do with trying to make the book shop girl think im deep and mysterious and into poet...more

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04/14/09

Jennifer Tatroe rated it:

bookshelves: 2009, science-fiction

Read in April, 2009

recommends it for: game developers, near-future sci-fi fans, MMO players

An attempt to add some science fiction to my reading diet.

Halting State was, like most of the limited sci fi I've read, a book about Ideas. I got the feeling that Stross's plot was there mostly as a curtain rod on which to hang his Ideas about the role of virtual reality and the dangers of hyper-connectivity in the near future. I'll give him this much credit: he definitely didn't put a gun on the wall in Act I that he didn't intend to fire in Act III. Unfortunately, it took way too ...more

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03/27/09

Stefan rated it:

(review of isbn 0441016073)

bookshelves: science-fiction

Read in October, 2008

This is the second novel by Charles Stross I've read (the first one was "Accelerando") and despite the fact that they're very different in concept, I'm definitely seeing some similarities in style. Very heavy on the geek jargon, for one. Sort of a hip, fast-moving narrative, full of obvious and less-obvious cultural references, that doesn't really stop to explain much of the techno-babble and assumes you'll either get it or catch up at some point. It's strangely enjoyable --- strang...more

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12/30/08

Duncan rated it:

(review of isbn 0441016073)

bookshelves: science-fiction

Read in December, 2008

overall an enjoyable read. i was a bit disappointed to find the premise (a fantasy adventure taking place within the confines of a next generation MMORPG) was little more than a device and not explored as much as i hoped. character arcs were a bit predictable and i felt as with some of stross' previous work a lot of important information is handled "off screen" and/or introduced incredibly late and not particularly skillfully. the prose was at times annoyingly redundant, but first pers...more

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04/23/09

Noah M. rated it:

Read in April, 2009

Dear Halting State:

You were a really good book. You dealt with a lot of interesting near future issues--privacy, crime and economy in virtual worlds, etc. You had a strange POV, 2nd person, which is not often seen in literature. It took me about 20 pages to warm up to such an odd perspective, but once I was in the flow of things it was no problem. The POV makes sense, given that the story is about games and gaming. It's sort of like having a very intricate game narrated to you b...more

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03/20/08

Jeffrey rated it:

bookshelves: read-in-2008, science-fiction

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Jeffrey by: Locus Magazine
recommends it for: Gamers, science fiction readers

Interesting science fiction speculative story with game play, mystery, cops and robbers and espionage all taking place in Scotland and Europe. The book starts out with a bang but about midway through I thought the author labored a little for about 20 pages as the story went in too many directions at once. Finally, I thought the ending was just not convincing, but all in all a fun read.

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