|
|
Title: Halting State
Purchase
Item
Manufacturer: Ace Hardcover
List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $5.45
|
|
| Customer Reviews: |
| Halting State by Ace Hardcover A Great Read! | | This is the first Stross novel I've read, and I really enjoyed it. Set in the near future, the plot concerns an in-game theft from an online game and rapidly spirals into something far more complex. Stross lays on the geek-speak pretty thick at times, and his references to gamer-culture (WoW, Dungeons & Dragons, d20, Cthulhu, etc) had my inner-nerd snapping his suspenders in joy. But if you're not clued into this stuff, you might find the book hard going and a lot of stuff will go straight over your head (the scene with the computer techs juggling Cthulhu dolls and whistling the Twilight Zone theme is hilarious). It's also written entirely in the second person, which I thought a little odd at first, but then realised Stross is just hitting another gamer reference (Fighting Fantasy/Choose Your Own Adventure books and computer RPGs). Geek-culture married to a complex plot of corporate theft and espionage - great stuff. | | Halting State by Ace Hardcover Not Free SF Reader | Taggart 2030.
Or, it seems a bit like that at times, especially with Sergeant Smith and company.
The second person thing didn't really worry me at all, I had read the first two or three chapters on the web, so once you get used to it after a few pages I found I wasn't really noticing it at all, and just reading it the same as any other novel.
An in-game raid on a bank in a MMORPG leads to an investigation, that has intelligence, financial and communications implications.
A near future setting where people are even more wired, and physical reality has a virtual overlay where things can be tagged, or have information added to them like a wiki, and people use this via mobile phones and glasses. The police, for example, use CopSpace.
Gaming is more prevalent, with people also taking part in large scale LARP and what they call ARG - co-ordinated by computer and phone - one of which, amusinglyg enough, is called 'SPOOKS'. No mention of games of Hustle or Life On Mars though, maybe firing up the Quatro would be frowned upon by law-enforcement. :)
For some of the flavour :
"..They're guarding some loot I need to get my hands on. About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fiercely large Shoggoth; if you want to keep your data secure, there's nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that's guarded by Lovecraftian horrors."
or
"The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever's sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won't get you a handle on what's going on because they're not using the game a sa ludic universe to chat in, they're using it as a transport layer! They're tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!"
There are three main characters, a game developer, a forensic accountant, and a police Sergeant, with stories told in three different threads, as their investigation leads into something rather nastier going on in real-life.
| | Halting State by Ace Hardcover Best book on what the future is going to be like IMO | | One of the best books I have read on what the future will probably be like. A little slow to get started, but after a few chapters you get used to the lingo and it just explodes from there. Great book and great vision! | | Halting State by Ace Hardcover Accessible speculative fiction that rocks it. | | I've always tried reading sci-fiction without much success. I picked up Halting State on recommendations from BoingBoing just to give it a look-see and I'm fantastically surprised. I'm not a hacker or gamer but the speculative nature of the book isn't so far fetched as to make it impossible to believe or pin down. Stross also writes a great character-driven story with believable sketches that bring the story to life so you're not tripping over the geekiness of the science that is believable and hopefully, not too far away. | | Halting State by Ace Hardcover Quite Good | I'd almost given up on Charles Stross, but HALTING STATE(2007), a very-near future SciFi Tech-Adventure, turned out to be quite good. GLASSHOUSE(2007) had an excessively violent theme, and was too "far out" tech-wise - but HALTING STATE takes the bold step of dabbling in very near future tech trends, and the computer and software-related tech is definitely interesting.
The book is set 10 years in the future, mostly in Scotland, and revolves around on-line gaming that has become so close to real that it blurs the lines with reality - with crimes taking place within games having to be investigated by the police... and the crimes turn out to be intertwined with international terrorism and all the intrigue that entails.
There is also the typical America-Bashing and Catastrophic Global Warming hype that has come to be expected from most modern SciFi writers. But these themes get tossed in almost as an afterthought, as if the writer doesn't really believe in the "agenda" any longer, and is just going thru the motions... it offers little distraction in this otherwise excellent book. | | Halting State by Ace Hardcover Product Description | | In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that's just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both... |
NetNewsWire Style: ReadLight
cleverdevil: “For a while now I have been itching to create a custom stylesheet for NetNewsWire, and I finally found the time to do it. So, I am proud to introduce ReadLight—a NetNewsWire style that attempts to feel like reading from a gorgeous hardcover book.”
Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:54:45 GMT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
