Halting State

This was the first Stross novel I've read, and for the first two chapters, I was uncomfortable with his present tense, second person narrative, and with his extensive use of Scottish dialect and colloquialisms. I was so put off initially that I nearly stopped reading, but I'm glad I didn't. I ended up thoroughly enjoying Stross' writing style. It's one of the few books where I laughed out loud at times while reading, despite it not being a comedy.

However, I didn't care for the story. Ironically, while I grew to like his writing style the more I read, my interest in the story itself declined as I read, and by the end, I was reading only because I was enjoying his writing style.

I enjoyed it enough that I am now reading his Accelerando, but I'm having mixed feelings about it, and hoping that my enjoyment of it picks up as I get further into the book, like it did with HaltinG StatE, but so far it isn't happening.

Stross tackles three distinct 2nd person narratives with gusto! This is difficult to maintain (the only other book I can remember being 2nd person and that I also enjoyed being 'Half asleep in Frog Pajamas' by Tom Robbins) The cyberpunk near future of this book is tantalizingly just out of reach, making me wonder about the leaps that will be made in gaming and technology in general in the next few years (barring, of course, the greater depression). The Augmented LARP/ Tradecrafty ARG aspects were especially fascinating to me. Many people found the brogue 'inpenetrable,' which I didn't - it only popped up every now and again. Maybe if you read a couple of Irvine Welsh books you become desensitized to it. The ending was a little bit of a downer for me, insomuch as it was a plot dump in the last few chapters that explained everything. An altogether well put together book, which impels me to seek out more Stross.

This book has many similarities to cheddar cheese: uniformly dense, sharp at first then dissolves into a certain creamy pleasure, yet uncomfortable with large doses. Maybe it even has similarities to three different types of cheese as this story is from the viewpoints of three individuals: Elaine, Sue, and Jack. Each has a interesting tinge to it but they all have a similar flatness which doesn't rank one above the other. I may have grown bored with the cyberpunk theme I was reading another cyberpunk novel at the time (Dream of Glass by Jean Mark Gawron). Halting State is an oddball in the cyberpunk world as it takes place in such a near future... and is completely believable! It's so believable that I actually kind of wish RPGs would be more like this so that I could get into the scene. I don't play RPGs now nor did I when I was younger, but this novel puts ideas in my head about the future realm of RPGs and it intrigues me very much!

This is my first Stross novel and I wasn't taken back by his writing styles like I am by other current Scottish SF authors. Stross offers a working-man's style of writing, while not bad, is often distracting. He tends to mix points-of-view in narration, using first person POV but having the characters call themselves 'you.' I found this distracting and led me to read another book... but in the end I liked the novel for its originality.

I enjoyed the first 90% of this novel immensly. The vision of pervasive computing and especially gaming in just a few years from now, some of the changes this will inflict on society and the potential for abusing people's augmented reality games is close enough to realistic to give the plot an uncomfortable feel.
Besides that, Charles Stross is maybe the first author that manages to talk the geek talk without making me cringe. For not-so-tech-savvy readers this may be more of a problem than a boon, but for someone who knows at least most of the tech talk he brings up, it's incredibly refreshing to see it used in a way that has actual meaning, not just as techno-babble to make characters appear geeky. (Special kudos for using the Keystone Kops, that honestly made my day)

But then came the last 10% of it that leave a sour taste after reading. A lot of the book is just escalating the scope of the plot, from virtual bank robbery up to insider trading, up to international virtual warfare, and then it's just over. A climax is sadly missing. The whole intricate setting just collapses within the last 50 pages or so and leaves me feeling rather unsatisfied.

With this warning given, i would still recommend the book to everyone interested in a very-near-future, almost-not-science-fiction spy novel.

My mate John mailed me a while ago, telling me I should read some Stross. So when I saw the cover of Halting State I knew this was a book I wanted to read.

Set a couple years from now, in an indepedent Republic of Scotland he book follows the three main characters in a way reminiscent of Gibson's Neuromancer. The cast is wonderful and somewhat weird, an Edinburgh cop, a sword wielding insurance agent and an almost normal programmer work their way through the mysteries thrown up when a software company is robbed, or rather a bank in one of their online games is robbed.

Wicked and for a game playing, software developer very, very recognisable fun. I loved the way the book links into our own time and how Stross paints a very believable 2017.

Highly recommended

I enjoyed it alright, but I could never really get into it as well as I would have liked. The character of Sue was largely uninteresting, and the plot was far too complicated for me to suss out. I'm still a little confused about some of it. The shifting POV thing was well-done, but it made for confusing reading at times. Still, it's a nice story and the love story between Elaine and Jack is really well done, and there are individual moments that totally work. Worth a read. I might check out more by Stross, but I'm not raving about it so far.

Good solid sci-fi from Stross. Downside: Predictable romance + forced scottish brogue from a lesbian cop. Upside: dense descriptions of on-line gaming culture. Great imagining of the future where we view the world through goggles that overlay the meat space with several layers of information tags. Worth reading, but some of the gaming bits were too far-fetched and I just get sick of the predictable romance story-line in most science fic.

Stross has been one of my favorite authors for a few years now. This latest book by him may be his best yet. It's a near-future techothriller, with lots of interesting observations about where our immediate future may take us.

A major theme is how the increasing fidelity -- and ubiquity -- of virtual worlds is changing the boundaries between entertainment and reality. The book starts out with a hapless Scottish policewoman called in to investigate a robbery -- in an MMO. Seems like a gang of Orcs broke into the bank of a major game and made off with tons of phat lewt. To quote Douglas Adams, "This is, of course, impossible." But it has manifestly happened, and is clearly a crime of some sort, so has to be investigated. Soon, shadowy government operatives start showing up, and it quickly becomes clear that the non-virtual world is in a great deal of danger. Real corpses are showing up, and war is waiting in the wings.

While it starts out examining a crime in a classic high fantasy WoW-like MMO, the book ends up touching on many other kinds of virtual worlds and their effects on society. To say more would perhaps be a spoiler, but there is a marvelous Sixth Sense style twist near the end. (No, it is *not* that the entire book so far is inside an MMO, Matrix-style; Stross is far more clever and original than that.)

Halting State is not as much of a show-off tour de force as Accelerando was, but it still packs in more ideas than most authors fit in a trilogy. It also manages to be *accessible*, in a way that many of his earlier works weren't. The protagonists are all likeable, and intelligent. While none of them are stupid, some of them are sufficiently under-informed that the others can explain the complex ideas to them in plain language. This book has the potential to get an audience outside of the SF ghetto, and make Charlie a lot of money. I think he deserves it for this one. Highly recommended.

When you start reading its a little hard to get into the fact that the entire thing revolves around three main characters each one done in the second person. But after a while you get engrossed in the plotline and also the writing style.
I would recommend picking this up :)

it's a mighty fine ride in a near future world of pervasive internet and almost runaway software agents clashing with the flesh and blood kind. Anything that starts with a robbery from an MMORPG's banking system and builds to international intrigue is mighty fine by me.