Halting State
Halting State is one extremely smart species of fun – or so says William Gibson and I agree with him. Set in near future Edinburgh, Halting State takes us on a journey into massively multiplayer online gaming, virtual economies, black nets, spies and information politics. Our unwitting tour guides are likeable and sympathetic and each of them turns out to be admirably heroic in an understated way. There’s Elaine, the legal arse kicker who’s job is a little bit like swimming in a tank full of sharks (keep moving, but not too fast), Sue the underwhelmed police woman who wishes criminals would stick to simple break and enters and not freak her out with computers and Jack the games programmer who carries a fold-up keyboard in his cargo pants and gets embarrassed when he sees someone in the real world.
These three characters (and a few other memorable jocks) are thrown together when an unprecedented bank robbery takes place: unprecedented because it occurs inside a game and the stolen goods are all game items. Seemingly just an annoyance for the game company and players: until the dead bodies start showing up.
I really enjoyed this book and it hit critical mass for me about two thirds through, after which I had to finish it in a mammoth session that saw me finishing up at 2:30am (a bit past my bedtime).
The near future aspect of the book means it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The characters can remember stuff that has happened in our recent past from their childhoods yet the amount of computing power and bandwidth available to them makes their society slightly alien.
One of the well realised aspects is how much the characters rely on the Internet for information every minute. At one point Jack remarks on how nobody remembers street names anymore and how people back in the day had to remember how to get to places. For Jack, you just search for it and follow the directions or more commonly let the car take you there.
The way that the games overlay everything through use of virtual reality is also well done. Similar to William Gibson’s Virtual Light where glasses can be worn that project labels and data onto the real world view, the glasses in Halting State transform ordinary streets into game environments where virtual objects can be found and other players can be located.
Stross has a lot of fun with these ideas as he leads us through the mystery of the virtual robbery and also spends a little time on exposition of how game economies work, a little bit of cryptography and how governments can use information warfare in more subtle ways than just hacking the crap out of each other.
The end is satisfying enough even if the ultimate premise is a little bit thin or convoluted, we’ve had so much fun getting there, we don’t mind if the bad guys, or good guys who turned bad or whatever have overstretched the imagination a bit. On the other hand, as Sue remarks, if people are willing to kill each other over a few thousand dollars, what lengths would they go to for a few million?
Currently reading: The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod.
