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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I'm a conflicted about this book, which is why it's taken me two months to get around to writing a review. Let's get the dollars and cents out of the way first. I paid one hundred twenty-eight dollars for this book. Sad to say, that's not even close to my personal record for expensive wood pulp and ink. But at least the other books in that range were textbooks.

That's not really a fair criticism though, because I bought HMJCtW in Hong Kong Dollars, so it really cost about eighteen bucks in American currency. Sloppy thinking like that suffuses this book.

Francis Wheen is a columnist at the The Guardian, Britain's most profitable left-wing newspaper, which should have been a clue about what I was getting into. For every reasonable screen about how UFO believers are idiots, there was another chapter about how only idiots could believe that a free market could efficiently distribute goods and services. He spends a chapter bewailing Margaret Thatcher and her distruction of the British coal miner's union. He also spends a chapter on post-modernism in literary criticism (see the Sokal Affair), but his half of his objections to the "po-mos" is that they supplanted Marxist literary criticism as the academic vogue; and Marxist criticism is just as irrational as the po-mos.

Lastly, the books was heavily cover-blurbed as being hilariously funny. Maybe this is one of those "English humor" things that this poor colonial doesn't follow, but this book is rather profoundly unfunny. Reading it was like getting stuck at a dinner party next to an aging hippy that made a bundle in the stock market and is now ethically confused but bitter and unwilling to shut up.

I didn't learn a damn thing from this book, except that writers all-fired up to expose idiocy may, in fact, be idiots themselves.

Posted by: Boviate at 12:53 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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