Halting State
You realize while reading Halting State by Charles Stross, you don’t understand spoken English anymore. You understand geek talk, most of the cryptography, TCP/IP routers, even the MMORPG scenarios. But not most of the book conversation between Beings with English as Native Language.
You convince yourself that is only a minor distraction because you are young enough to be out of touch with the future in which the virtual reality theme story is set. But before long this minor distraction threatens to blow up once you are lost also in the second person narrative covering cyclically three protagonists in successive chapters.
You agree the ploy is creative story telling nevertheless annoyed every time you loose track of which protagonist the you is midway in a chapter. You need to flip to the helpful chapter title (with the protagonist name) to get your bearings.
Before long you end up wondering how you managed to pick this book. You realize you have not read SF for a while. So after consulting Cosma, Jennifer and Wikipedia (in that order), you decide to choose from the Hugo losers because of your underdog stature. And you spot Halting State, the 2008 Hugo nominee, at your book store. So you better justify your money spent. The book is getting insteresting anyway. Finish it, you tell yourself.
And you did it by the next day, bleary eyed.
You want to give a plot summary of the story but was warned by Google that someone had gone steps ahead in the Wikipedia. So you link to the page before being warned. But you know not many of the few who read this review would click that link. You proceed to summarize.
In the near future, a bank is robbed of unknown assets (a cybercrime) inside a multiplayer video game. The bank is supposed to maintain a stable economy inside the game to maximize fun. In real life, an employee of the company that manages the bank panic and call the real cops. Then a geek who is on the pay roll of the company goes missing. Before long it is revealed that the company is just a front for other cryptographic activities. Three protagonists, a cop, an insurance agent, a geek, try to comprehend and take turns to reveal and explain whats going on. They start separately and their wordlines meet and mingle. Stumbling through a few MMORPG scenarios with frantic search for and reclamation of the loot, two real life murders, a few revelations later the mole is ferreted out and captured.
In between you encounter various ways of how virtual reality and extreme dependency on it in the future can go wrong. How a nation state can be captured without physical war, but simply by capturing and controlling its communication networks. The title Halting State, you gather, is a pun on such a stand still. Just as in any computer program the final equilibrium state beyond which transition is not possible is its halting state.
And along the way you enjoyed the authors take on techno-babble and techno-clutter. And enough snazzy observations strewn around to make you smile. Like the one where
You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the pixels all of the time…
And of course, the book is full of video games. You have played some for many long hours. You have grown-up cousins who twitch their thumbs in sleep, blowing virtual worlds to smithereens in their dreams. You have long stopped playing role playing games. You have long realized the difference between habit and addiction. Your idea of fun has changed. So you shudder when you read the geek in the book, while playing a video game, observes:
Someday we are all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their life out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow…
You are reminded of The Matrix (and how the sequels gloriously deconstructed the idea).
Nevertheless you are thankful that the future depicted in this book, a future where virtual and real merge consciously and judiciously, a future where cops operate in a higher tech. level to protect us, a future where humans make love normally, cry, eat eggs and are allowed to walk on roads, is much more sensible and pleasant than those in other futuristic SF. You think it is because the author is intrigued and secure with his current reality, he doesn’t require to create a future one different in every other way from his living one. But you know there you are just guessing.
You suddenly think two of the three protagonists are not required to tell this story. But by then you have finished reading the book.
And you realize your second person did enjoy it.
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