Finishing HaltinG StatE

I finished reading Charles Stross's HaltinG StatE the other day. I have to rate it very high on ideas, which come rapid fire in this book. It is, I think, Mr. Stross's first near-future SF book, so it was interesting to read his predictions for the near future. These included an independent Scotland (under EU auspices), and gamespace and gamers used as surreptitious spooks in spook country. I enjoyed the idea that gamers were recruited as volunteer secret agents without understanding that they were really being co opted by the security services of different countries. Nice touch there.

Stross also paints a vivid picture of a what a future cyber attack on a nation might look like. That alone is probably worth the price of the book.

That said, I wasn't as impressed with the characters and the plot as I have been with other of Stross's works. I thought that the whole plot seemed fairly contrived, that character and relationship problems were introduced at convenient times and not as part of their "natural" development, and I question whether some of the characters really needed a point of view in the novel. I saw the mysterious villain coming from a long way off and wondered why he wasn't neutralized earlier.

As I've already noted, the book begins slowly and only my previous experiences with Stross's work kept me reading. The ending is confused and lacks inevitability. (It's always troubling when the final-but-one chapter has to do the job of explaining exactly what happened during the book.) Ditto for the second-person points of view and the dense software language that a non-expert reader like me, who enjoys cypberpunk in general, found too much.

That said, the book doesn't miss the mark by too much. Stross's compelling future vision goes a long way to making this book a good read, and I would like to see more work in this setting by Stross. Perhaps what he needs is a good glossary like the one originally published in Dune. I'd rate it a solid "B" as new SF books go. If you are into the language of software, you might rate it higher.