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.

Reading HaltinG StatE

It's spring break, time to relax and enjoy a bit of non-school reading. I've had Charles Stross's book HaltinG StatE (that title's no typo) on my table for a long time and decided to start reading it. Stross is a Scotsman and a writer of good hard SF (and some fantasy that I haven't read)

This book is a bit different from his earlier works like Singularity Sky and Accelerando, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed. It's set in an independent Scotland in the near future. The book was hard for me to get into at first. It's multiple points-of-view, second-person, were confusing. The early chapters were full of Scottishisms and Britishisms, foreign acronyms, local history in-jokes, and computer science tech words that were over my head and slowed my comprehension to a crawl. There wasn't much action in these early character-establishing chapters either.

If not for my earlier experiences with Stross, I probably would have put the book down. But I hung in, and things started to get interesting as an investigation into a cybercrime (the robbery of a virtual gaming bank) started waves rippling in the wider world. Now that I'm more than half-way into the book, I'm hooked on it, and learning a lot about the computer and gaming world that Stross is so expert in.

If you are a technophile, a mystery buff, or interested in near future predictions, you'll probably be as interested in the book as I am. It's a strong Idea novel, with good characterization, though I still don't understand the reason for the second-person p.o.v.--it's an unnecessary affectation, IMHO. I'll let you know when I finish it if its worth putting on your summer reading list.