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    Halting State
    Halting State
    Halting State
    Audiobook13 hours

    Halting State

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Robert Ian Mackenzie

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls Hugo winner Charles Stross' novel Halting State a "brilliantly conceived techno-crime thriller." The year is 2012, and China, India, and the United States are waging an infowar for economic domination. With innocent gamers mere pawns in the hands of electronic intelligence agencies, programmer Jack Reed is tasked with ferreting out the plot of those who would gladly trade global turmoil for personal gain. "The act of creation seems to come easily to Charles Stross . [He] is peerless at dreaming up devices that could conceivably exist in 6, 60, or 600 years."-New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 25, 2010
    ISBN9781449814403
    Halting State
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for Halting State

    4/5

    842 ratings66 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An entertaining romp through the intersection of online gaming, spycraft, and policework. The style was a mishmash of heavy Scottish accents and British slang, with multiple POV characters each told in second person, which I found baffling at first but then delightful. It was strange and hard to follow but, well, it's the author's choice isn't it? And turned out to be rather fun.
    • 4/5
      The Scottish dialect was slightly unsettling because of my unfamiliarity with it, but the novel as a whole is quick paced, inventive and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      "Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table."In the near future, the Scottish police are called to investigate a theft from an online game company. They're totally bemused to find that the theft is from the game itself. But it is, and it turns out to be shockingly significant. Insurance companies, secret agencies, hackers, spies, gamers, and businessmen get thrown into the mix. There are virtual monsters that are really dangerous, and real people that don't really exist. It's all great fun, and (as you'd expect from Stross) replete with extensive insights into the effects of technological change on people and society.I can't give it five stars because of some quirks of the writing that just don't work very well. The second-person perspective is awkward, and is an idea he probably should have abandoned. Also, the rendition of Scottish speech is patchy -- it feels as if he's just thrown in the odd dialect word now and again when he remembers to, and it jars most of the time. ("The transcribers can be pish, sometimes, I'll give ye that, it's what you get when you farm out half the office jobs to Lagos...")Still, it's more than worth reading. 21st-century excitement.
    • 4/5
      In 2018, A bank in an MMORPG is robbed, and an insurance fraud investigator and a game developer try to figure out how and why.There are some pure genius moments in here: including the description of what any romance novel would call a "look deep into each other's eyes" as "information transfer ... via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer." The technology is ours, just slightly better (enhanced reality glasses, remote-driver-operated cars), and the speed of information transfer is ours, just slightly faster. The audience is thrown into a lot of information, just like the characters, and you have to get up to speed quickly, and then go back and wikipedia a few things later, like Sue parsing through interview recordings, or Jack grepping the treasure logs. This might be the most realistic capture of the modern work environment that I've yet read: the bizarre job interview, the jargon, the office politics at Dietrich-Brunner Associates, walking into a contract that turns out to be a thousand-layer onion with a nuclear bomb in the middle of it.
    • 3/5
      cyberpunk, near future, Scotland, augmented reality
    • 4/5
      Confusing at times, but interesting, but the end wasn't that great, but I liked it anyway.
    • 3/5
      In a sort-of-independent Scotland, a bank robbery in a gameworld draws the police into something far stranger, with spies, people pretending to be spies in a game, and the occasional murder. Packed with Stross’s love of tech and bureaucracy, but not really him at his best.
    • 4/5
      I read the two Halting States novels out of order, I’d gotten Rule 34 first, after reading that I got a copy of Halting States and liked it every bit as much as Rule 34. Some reviewers didn’t like the book because as Rule 34 was it’s written in multiple second person point of view, just like interactive fiction, very appropriate for a thriller about Augmented Realty Games, spies and the collapse of the web in a society who use it for everything from self driving cars to policing to logistics.

      Oh and the writing is great too

      “You emerge from the politie station blinking robotically, like an animatronic ground-hog with a short circuit”

      “you’ll have a job in a bank lined up by next week, fixing broken spreadsheets while wearing a suit with one of those strangulation devices, what do they call them…?”

      “so-called because it was new when it was built in the 1760s: Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath”

      “Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”

      Those are just a few of my favorite lines in the book, Stross also manages to throw in references to Ankh-Morpork and the TARDIS. Right now he’s my favorite modern SF author.
    • 5/5
      I expected things to turn out much worse - but this is from a simpler, gentler time I guess...
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable look into the near future and potential problems that could result from gamification of everything and a truly ubiquitous internet.
    • 5/5

      I really, really liked Halting State, by Charles Stross. This near-future thriller moves at breakneck speed, from several different perspectives. I'd call it a page-turner, but I read it in electronic format :)

      The tech/geek references fly even faster than the story itself. Someone not familiar with computer gaming, LARPing, or general SF/F fandom may have a hard time keeping up. There were times where I felt I was missing things, and I like to think I'm reasonably well versed in such things. Mr. Stross suggests some amazing, yet believable technology. But the writing and the plotting is engaging enough to hold my interest, even when I felt lost.

      He doesn't predict jacking into computer systems, not does he have everyone getting technology surgically implanted. Most people wear glasses or goggles that overlay the internet on normal vision. No, really. Just go read it - it's very smooth and makes a whole lot of sense.

      Our first viewpoint character is Detective Seargent Sue Smith. She wants to do a good job, and take care of her wife and son. I really, really like that Mr. Stross doesn't make a big deal out of the same sex relationship - it's just part of who Sue is. She's the closest we get to an Every(wo)man. She's a competent user of the ubiquitous, immersive technology, but doesn't give any thought to how it works - just like most end users today. She works with a virtual environment, then puts it aside to live her personal life.

      Then there's Elaine. She's a VR LARPer by night, and an insurance fraud auditor by day. Like Sue, she use the technology, but doesn't question it. And I seriously want in on a couple of the games she's playing in! She works with computers, but plays in immersive VR on her own time.

      Next we meet Jack, a programmer, gamer, and some-times hacker. He does know how the technology works, so he's the first to get scared. He, basically, lives in immersive technology, gaming as part of his workday, and using VR overlays nearly constantly in his personal life. He's the over-connected gamer geek turned up to 11.

      Eventually, I'm going to have to re-read Halting State. The plot is complex; I'm looking forward to seeing nuances I missed the first time around. And I'm looking forward to spending time with our viewpoint characters again. All three have a wonderful depth. Between them, just about anyone can find a character to identify with. With that connection, you're in for a roller coaster of a story, as three initially separate storylines converge, then blossom into a near-epic denouement. Each one has a different perspective, and different pieces of the puzzle. Once you get there, you see how everything led up to it - but you probably didn't see it coming.

      Go, read it!
    • 5/5
      This book was written in 2007-08 and is set in 2018. Having come to it late, I was staggered from the very first page as to how close Charlie Stross has come to accurately depicting the IT industry of my present day. The introduction takes the form of a speculative approach from an IT recruitment agency. I spent six months of 2016 looking for work in IT, so I was hooked from the outset.I'm not a techie person (I test software for a living, and I approach the job from the user's p.o.v.), but all the techno-babble that Stross uses was actually fairly comprehensible to me - that is, it made about as much sense to me in the novel as it does when I hear almost exactly the same terms used in the office. In the interview appended to the Orbit UK pb edition, Stross comments that there was little in the novel that didn't already exist; and what doesn't is very close to our present tech horizon. He did, in truth, work in the industry, and it shows, both in terms of the techie-speak and in the characters, personalities and settings. He has corporate management and office conspiracies right down to the smallest detail.The politics is like ours, only slightly different. The novel takes place in an independent Scotland, still negotiating the terms of its divorce from a Remnant UK which is still in the EU; and even though our current political situation is (sort of) opposite, it still feels very relevant and understandable. The plot concerns a (real) robbery from a (virtual) bank in an online role-playing game. I'm not a gamer, but I know sufficient people who are for this to have relevance. Teams from the police and from a firm of forensic accountants try to find out what was stolen, from whom, why, and how. Things quickly move into a much more serious space. The cover blurbs mention William Gibson, and certainly a lot of this had the feel of Gibson's exploration of new angles to our online world that no-one's thought of yet (or at least not gone public with yet).Stross is a Scot by adoptive choice, so his affection for Edinburgh comes out strongly. As to the accents - well, if you watch a few episodes of the Eighties/Nineties/Noughties cop show 'Taggart', you'll get the gist of what's being said.I bought this book on the first day of the UK Science Fiction Easter convention and started reading it that evening. I felt compelled to finish it as soon as I could, so much did the story and setting grab me. Oh, and the cover of the Orbit UK paperback, with graphics showing in-game avatars, includes one of Charlie Stross himself.Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      My first Charles Stross, inventive, funny, plausible near future SF/crime. Re-read after Yahtzee's Mogworld which it does beat hands down.
    • 3/5
      Rated only 2 and 1/2 stars because this is much further into the thriller genre than I'm usually willing to go, and I *really* love the Laundry Files. Take Laundry FIles, subtract the eldritch, and add more programming. Just-over-the-horizon technology combines with international intrigue, but the narrators here are a bunch of everymen rather than your typical slighly psychopathic spy/agent/cop. Labyrinthine plot and counterplot seen through the eyes of people who still have to take the bus, with some of the same dry self-deprecating tone with a wink at the absurd. Readers completely unfamiliar with the concept of VR might be a bit adrift, but is there really anyone who is at this point?"
    • 4/5
      Classic cyberpunk. Except written only two years ago. Great fun.
    • 5/5
      I recently got to re-read this excellent work of near future Sci-Fi, and while it has become a more unlikely future (Scottish independence in a EU framework, Google glass not quite taking off and all), it is still extremely funny and a great idea to fuse MORPs into reality, and write it in the style of a good old text adventure with multiple characters. Still a treasure
    • 3/5
      A cute, light story, but the second person narration nearly killed me.
    • 5/5
      Intriguing near future science fiction. I loved the way he referred to face to face action as taking place in "monkey space".
    • 4/5
      Idiosyncratic, but very informative ( Can't wait for ' Rule 34 ' )
    • 3/5
      I really liked the beginning and end of this book, and I think Stross is smart about technology and geo-politics. In fact, I had trouble following the middle because I needed my hand held through some of the gaming-infrastructure discussion, not because it wasn't smart. The characters seem complex but are actually sort of TV style stereotypes (a quiet career woman who secretly kicks LARPing ass, a disheveled game designer who's secretly socially awkward, nasty suits, a dyke cop--shocking!). I guess I just wanted more showing of the near-future world he imagines and less exposition clunky characterization. But overall, decent. Oh, and I'm not a gamer (aside from my childhood adventures in D&D) so maybe this book is more exciting for gamers.
    • 3/5
      I'd really like to give this three and a half stars. It was pretty cute, and the idea of the real-life spy game was neat.

      As many others have noted, Stross has a fondness for enormous chunks of exposition, but I guess it doesn't bother me as much. I like learning about stuff, as long as it's interesting stuff.

      I'm taking off points for:
      --intermittent use of annoying Scottish dialect
      --constantly referring to an accountant as a "librarian" because she's...nerdy? dunno.
      --rather perfunctory character development in general, and specifically the romance part
    • 5/5
      I probably would have given it four stars, but I work in the MMO industry and damn, Stross has it nailed. This is a brilliant look at the industry in the comparatively near future, with some fascinating speculation on the way massively multiplayer online games could spread and evolve, and the sub-industries that don't quite exist yet but will soon. (I bet someone has an FDIC-type firm in EVE Online already.)

      Aside from gamer-wankery, this is a ripping good thriller, with some twists that completely blindsided me and the potential for some truly excellent sequels. It's also one of the only novels I've read that is written in the second person - and pulls it off. Definitely fits with the game background ("you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike") and after three pages I stopped noticing it at all.
    • 4/5
      In 2018, A bank in an MMORPG is robbed, and an insurance fraud investigator and a game developer try to figure out how and why.There are some pure genius moments in here: including the description of what any romance novel would call a "look deep into each other's eyes" as "information transfer ... via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer." The technology is ours, just slightly better (enhanced reality glasses, remote-driver-operated cars), and the speed of information transfer is ours, just slightly faster. The audience is thrown into a lot of information, just like the characters, and you have to get up to speed quickly, and then go back and wikipedia a few things later, like Sue parsing through interview recordings, or Jack grepping the treasure logs. This might be the most realistic capture of the modern work environment that I've yet read: the bizarre job interview, the jargon, the office politics at Dietrich-Brunner Associates, walking into a contract that turns out to be a thousand-layer onion with a nuclear bomb in the middle of it.
    • 5/5
      A fun and suspenseful romp through a near-future world of augmented reality glasses and video games. I like books that examine the consequences of technology we are developing now, and this one certainly does that - it examines the joys and hazards of augmented reality, and particularly the possibilities and vulnerabilities of a world that is connected online. The book focuses on three characters who, in various capacities, are called in to investigate a bank robbery in an online video game. They find themselves involved in something much, much bigger and much more dangerous. The plot gets pretty complex, and there are times when I felt like I didn't quite understand what was going on, but by the end, everything came together neatly. I respect Stross for not dumbing things down for his readers. For people who are unfamiliar with the online world, some of this might be confusing (I found him using slang that not even all computer geeks know - it was fun, because I'm the kind of computer geek who does know this slang so I really felt like the book was speaking to me, but other people might be confused). The book is exciting, hard to put down, at times creepy, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I thoroughly enjoyed it.The story is told from the point of view of three different characters, but the whole thing is written in the second person: "you." Stross did this to emphasize the role-playing and video game aspects of the story. I know some people find this really annoying. I wasn't annoyed by it, but I'm not really sure that it added anything to the book either.
    • 4/5
      In a nutshell it's a science fiction crime drama about a robbery in a virtual MMO world. Unexpectedly a bunch of Orcs storm the main bank in the game and make off with €26 million worth of items which is supposed to be impossible. Sorting out the mess is Scottish Police Sergeant Sue Smith, Forensic Accountant Elaine and Programmer and Gaming Expert Jack. It's their job to find out what happened, track down the items and generally save the day.It's set about 10 years in the future from now. Technology is similar to what we have now but just taken to the next level. People use their phones to order taxis, get around and many other useful tasks. They also wear glasses that enhance their vision and connect them to the technology grid. You can totally see a lot of the ideas coming true in a few more years. Anyway, back to the plot. It seems there is much to the robbery than the item theft. Could it be a cover up of a much larger conspiracy? How far does said conspiracy reach?It took me a little while to get into the novel as it's told completely in second person e.g. you enter the room and in front of you is a white desk with a computer monitor on it type stuff etc. It reads like either a choose-your-own-adventure or an episode of Knightmare (anyone else remember this awesome tv show?). Once I did though I actually enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. The characters (especially Elaine and Jack) were really well developed and I cared about what happened to them. The plot was quite complex but to be fair it wasn't solving the crime that kept me hooked. It was more getting caught up in the world and the techno speak. A lot of it went over my head, but some of the references to geek culture were awesome! It made me feel more intelligent just reading it.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this novel, so much so that I read it again a second time immediately after my first read. I found the science fiction to be first class, a really realistic technological, social and even political vision of the future, although perhaps a future slightly further away than 2017. Perhaps familiriaty played a role in my enjoyment of this book, having lived in Scotland for all of my life and Edinburgh for a long time. The setting was perfect and there was observational humour that is current both to the Scottish people and our cities. The characters were well developed, interesting and realistic and the situations that they found themselves in are believable given the technology. The blurring of technology and reality was something that I found particularly interesting given the rate at which technology and immersive gaming are developing. Well worth a read.
    • 4/5
      A very-near future SF thriller focusing on games and encryption. Picture, if you will, a geeky Tom Clancy. Definitely an enjoyable read, just not one I'm incredibly enthusiastic over.It has a few barriers to entry: The book is written in second person: as it shifts from one POV character to another, it maintains a style of "You glance at Elaine," or "You wonder how much of the truth he's telling." It's odd, but easy enough to get used to. One character's Scottish dialect is likewise a mild stumbling block, but you can read through it. Finally, I think he's slow to weave the threads together into a plot you can follow. The upshot of this is that, for me at least, it took until about 80 or 90 pages into a 350 page book to get comfortable.The future he paints is a plausible one, and he examines it a bit tongue-in-cheek, but no so much so that you can only enjoy it as humor.I suppose the problem I have with it is one inherent on the (techno thriller) genre. As the, viewpoint and therefore knowledge, shifts, it's difficult to put yourself firmly into the head of the character with the current focus. So doing a caper/spy/mystery plot with shifting focus is hard. My biggest issue is that, at least for me, Halting State doesn't quite beat that.
    • 4/5
      Good story, generally interesting characters. I might have given this 5 stars, but I had to knock it down both for the use of 2nd person present tense throughout, plus the ending was a bit too much of an extended exposition explaining why everything had happened the way it had. (I kind of get why he tried the 2nd person present tense thing, but it's just too distracting for me to be effective.)
    • 4/5
      So glad that someone at work leant me this - I'd been meaning to read some Charles Stross for years, but never got round to it. It was great fun, although did tend towards techno-babble and lots of exposition and explaining what on earth was going on. The latter was necessary, else I wouldn't have had a clue!
    • 1/5
      Could not get past the use of Present Perfect Tense and the use of Scottish Dialect, not just for people's speech, as it IS set in Edinburgh, but for general narrated descriptions. Might have been a fantastic book, but these two narrative traits are highly distracting.