Halting State - Charles Stross

Juvenile derivative drivel

The 'jockinese' is probably the best of it.... the only saving grace of the plot is that the game characters' actions don't actually affect the real world people, a turn I was dreading at every page. As a novel attempting to catch the current fashions in both security and gaming this falls woefully short, and already feels out of date. Unfortunate really, because Stross can do soooo much better than this. It could well be an early novella fleshed out, but please don't do it again......

Sheer brilliance.

This is perhaps the best novel by Charles Stross yet - and considering the quality of his earlier works (Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are also on my five star list), this is quite some achievement.

Everything about the book is perfect: the characters are interesting and well-developed throughout, the plot is complex without being overly intimidating, the style of writing is engaging from the outset and the atmosphere utterly compelling.

Paying tribute to the core subject matter (online RPGs), and, I suspect, referencing his own gaming past, Stross writes each chapter using the form: 'you' - e.g. "You read the review and nod thoughtfully". I think this works really well, especially in context.

There's a lot of technobabble, as anyone familiar with the author's work will surely expect, but due to the setting (i.e. the not-too-distant future, such that the peculiarities of our time might be remembered), this only adds to the sense of prophecy. I expect all of this will one day come to pass.

Fears and paranoia aside... The humour is intelligent, if geeky (another plus), and the numerous stabs at our 'modern' life comforting, in a uniquely British (self-deprecating) fashion.

Also: I'd read this for the final scenes alone.

I could not put this book down - highly recommended!

An NO2ID/ ADHD/Asperger's future whodunit

Sorry about the acronyms, but if you buy this, you'll need to get used to it. Personally, I liked it. It's a good stab at the future of surveillance, gaming and cybercrime. The characterisation is a bit thin, but plausible. The mindboggling starts with the idea that distributed games run on mobile phones and virtual objects have real value. It continues with the all-pervasive surveillance of 2017, where everyone knows everything about everyone else (as long as they're cops or Cap Gemini). Everything is outsourced, most intelligence agents think they're playing a game, and criminals build their own mobile networks. It's certain that the near future will probably look like quite similar; William Gibson imagined the Internet before the engineers built it, and the Gernsback/McDonald era SF writers had most of their ideas borrowed by NASA.
If you didn't spend your teens and twenties avoiding sunlight and the opposite sex, you may find it heavy going, which is why it only gets 4 stars.

Entertaining futuristic Computer Mystery

For those in the know of the MMORG this is probably a book that will make you not only laugh your socks off but scare the hell out of you at the same time. Not only have you spent hours/days/weeks building up your character and managed to grab those indispensable items but all of a sudden you find your character robbed blind and the items that you've so long horded stolen and sold on the open market? Only in fiction you say, well not really, its happened and on most auction sites you can find these little beauties available. You could even pay someone in China to build your character up for you.

What Charles does here is not only play on the paranoia but brings a great mystery up to date in a futuristic world where the worst can happen with everyday games taking over peoples lives in a counter intelligence operation built in cyberspace. Highly inventive, confusing and above all probably a scarily accurate possible future. An interesting take on the world from a man who perhaps not only understands it but could be one of the guys pushing us towards it in this highly addictive sci-fi novel where every character has a role to play in the bigger picture. You are no longer a person but a pixelization of the cyberworld trying to keep their space free. With espionage, counter terrorism, plotting, criminal activity and above all a tale that will keep you guessing from the first page to the last, this will be a book to recommend to all those computer addicted friends. How will you know if they've read it? Just look at the paranoid way in which they watch the computer out of the corner of their eyes as well as the haunted way that they just can't resist building their characters to even higher proportions.

Annoying

sorry, but it was.

As the previous reviewer mentions, the author uses "you" instead of "I" when his characters are doing things. I kept on having to check the chapter heading to find out who he was talking about. The Scots policewoman talked in a faux 'jockenese' accent, that will throw any non-British reader (and a few British readers who have never been north of the Watford gap).

The cover was reminiscent of the book J-Pod, but this book is no where near as good.

There were some interesting technical bits in it, but you'd need to be a bit of a network geek to fully appreciate them.

A better book, by far, on this kind of thing is Ken MacCleod's Execution Channel.

Would I recommend this book - well, it's better than some of the rubbish I've trawled through recently, but not Stross's best.