Halting State is the new novel by Charles ("Charlie") Stross, one of the leading lights on the 21st century British Invasion of SF authors. He writes personal SF- no giant space fleets thundering across the immense vast inky blackness of space and whatnot; or rather, when he does write about that, it's from the perspective of a minor diplomat and and hard-working engineer. He's not interested in the people that make Grand Policy Decisions, he's interested in the people that work for a living and are just trying to not get crushed by the wheel of change.

He also loves to switch between characters, and Halting State carries along with that. It's told from three perspectives: a Scottish beat cop, a forensic accountant, and a game programmer. The three of them are brought together by a bank robbery. What gives the cop headaches is that the bank isn't real, and neither is anything that was stolen- the crime took place in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, when a squad or orcs backed up by a dragon broke into a game's main bank and proceeded to loot the place down to the furniture.

The heist gets interesting as soon as everyone realizes that committing the theft required breaking a number of ciphers that should be unbreakable- so why is someone robbing an online game's bank, when they could be taking real money from real banks?

The writing itself is interesting, and I'm embarrassed to admit it took me about ten chapters to realize why it seemed strange. The whole thing is written in the second person, a very unusual choice for a novel.

Now, this book was written for me. Specifically. The primary target to understand all of the jokes and allusions would have knowledge of:

• Tabletop Role-Playing Games
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games
• Macroeconomics
• Fencing
• Scotland and England
• The DnD monsters that the author created in the 1970s
• Distributed Network Computing
• Cryptography

So really, if I was English or a Scot, it's be perfect.

In summary: highly recommended to anyone with knowledge of any two items in the above list.

Posted by: Boviate at 06:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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