Halting State

You are in a maze of twisty little plot turns...

Finally, a Hugo nominee that makes me unreservedly happy!  I had read the Charles Stross novel Halting State (Ace Books, 2007; editor: Ginjer Buchanan) last year and was pleased to have an excuse to reread it while pondering my Hugo votes.

Halting State is written, unusually, in the second person, and switches between three protagonists: gamer/programmer geek Jack Reed, Scottish police sergeant Sue Smith, and Elaine Barnaby, a forensic accountant with a hands-on interest in medieval combat forms. The setting is a mix of near-future Scotland and its alternate-reality overlays created by massively multiplayer online game companies.  The game world of interest, Avalon 4, is a D&D-like universe in which a group of orcs and a dragon has just succeeded in the supposedly impossible feat of robbing a bank via unauthorized access to admin-level privileges.  The in-game theft has potential real-world financial consequences for the company managing the game economics and its insurer.  While Sue investigates the managing company's eccentric and possibly crooked employees, Elaine and Jack trace the criminals through the linked worlds of different games back to their real-world origins.

While I'm not currently a gamer myself, I pay some attention to where the field is going.  The extrapolation from today's World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs to a future in which virtual-reality goggles allow people to stay in game mode wherever they are is deliciously plausible, and the use of gangs of professional gamers to manipulate events within an online game is literally ripped from recent headlines.

Stross manages to deliciously capture geek culture and its denizens:

Three adult males sit bolt upright in expensive wheelie chairs, facing the centre of the room, whistling a vaguely familiar melody while one of them - balding, thirtyish, red-faced - frowns furiously, concentrating as he juggles four or five small plush Cthulhu dolls. (After a moment you realize they're all trying to whistle the Twilight Zone theme, slightly out of key.)

[snip]

“Focus break,” says Russell. “We work till it gets too much, and then . . . juggling elder gods just seems to help with the stress, you know?”

Didn't I meet these guys at a con?  And unlike Robert Sawyer, Stross manages to casually name-drop cultural references (Xena, Ankh-Morpork, Greyhawk) without them seeming like product placements or being so critical to the plot that failure to catch them is a handicap.  No doubt some people miss the in-jokes for lack of explanations, but the tradeoff in verisimilitude is worth it and the light authorial touch a pleasant change.  Likewise, Stross does not hold his readers' hands with respect to language; the book is a dizzying but exciting mix of programming jargon, gaming jargon, and Scottish dialect that is initially confusing but rewards the reader who forges onward armed confidently with phonics and context.  Despite being neither programmer nor gamer nor Scottish, I had no trouble.

I am almost hesitant to mention this, since Stross does not make a point of it, but it's nice to see a major character whose lesbianism is both taken completely for granted and utterly irrelevant to the plot.

Being addressed in second person immediately creates a game-world mindset for anyone old enough to remember the original text-based Adventure game or Zork; I half-expected a grue to turn up.  Narrating the entire story in this fashion makes the real world seem as much a game setting as any other.  This feeling is enhanced when Stross introduces SPOOKS, a live-action, real-time role-playing spy-thriller game which puts the characters in very real danger as the boundaries between games and reality start to blur.  Remote-controlled taxis, an antique claymore, a virtual Iron Maiden, sexual offender laws, and Europol all have their places as Stross twists his plot into an elaborate knot of virtual and non-virtual reality and then carefully untangles it all for a satisfying resolution with one final tweak of the reader's assumptions about what is real.

Stross is on quite a roll with Hugo nominations lately.  Last year's Glasshouse was enjoyable enough, but Halting State is a home run.  It goes to the head of my ballot pending further reading.

Ballot thus far (voting deadline minus four days):
1. Halting State
2.
3.
4. Rollback
5. The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Get your own copy:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

That's the US cover. I got the UK cover from SFBC, which I like better. I haven't read it yet, since I'm not voting, but I know he's going to do a sequel.

(And Charlie and his wife Feorag are not only living in Edinburgh, but have friends with wide ranges of gender orientation and attraction.)

[Susan de Guardiola]

Yeah, I've heard about the sequel. It's following one of the minor characters who didn't interest me passionately, but I'm willing to trust Stross and pick it up on the strength of HS.

I'm a little more worried about his new one, Saturn's Children. Books about "femmebots" or "sexbots" are not generally at the top of my list; too much shades of Gord (link not safe for work!) and other hardcore porn. But I have trouble imagining him writing the sort of idiotic teenage-geek sex fantasy that the description and cover suggest, too. I'm waiting for a woman who's read the book to reassure me.

I really struggled with whether I should mention the one character's sexuality, since it isn't relevant to the story in any way, and that's exactly what I like about it. That's where we want to be; the female character's wife should be of no more interest than the male character's wife. But I also wanted to give him points for arriving at that lovely post-orientation mindset.

[Serge]

it's nice to see a major character whose lesbianism is both taken completely for granted and utterly irrelevant to the plot

I guess it's a sign that things are changing for the better when that happens. This reminds me of an episode of 1964's The Outer Limits that had a secondary character be a black astronaut. The show's creators had problems with the censors because, well, there was no reason for the character to be black.

As for Stross's book... I msut admit that 2nd-person narration might give me trouble. Well, I can always take a chance when the book is out in paperback.

[Susan de Guardiola]

No need to wait: it's out in paperback! If you shop at Amazon, the link at the end the post will take you right there to buy it.

[Marilee J. Layman]

I haven't read Saturn's Children yet, although I know a lot of people who have, but I know about it. It's a Heinlein pastiche and Freya, the sexbot on the cover (of the US edition), is actually looking for other work because the human "style" has changed. Nobody wants to have sex with her anymore. Okay, I looked at Gord books -- nothing like that. Let's see, here's Charlie's Diary post about it coming out (and you'll see lots of people you know posting comments about reading it) and here's the interview Freya gave.

[Serge]

No need to wait: it's out in paperback!

Perfect. I have just now added it to my list of books I must look for when I'm in San Francisco next week. There's Stacey's Bookstore near my employer's building on Market Street, and Berkeley has at least two F/SF bookstores that I know of.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Marilee:
Okay, now I get that it's a play on Friday I feel a little better about it. But since I hated Friday and haven't thought much about it since I first read it, I don't know if that'll help me with Saturn's Children. Maybe I'll find a library copy first before spending the money.

[Marilee J. Layman]

I didn't like Friday either, but Charlie is a much better writer. I ordered mine from SFBC and it should be here soon.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Please let me know what you think when you've read it.

[Serge]

I've never read Friday, but my wife did, and it irritated her greatly too. I can't remember the details, but I don't think it was about Friday being very sexy. She's sleeping right now so I can't ask. So, what is it that both of you didn't like about the book?

I'll make a confession about Heinlein. He's a Grand Master of SF, but, for reasons I don't understand, I never could get into his stuff much, except for the juvenile about the Venusian dragon who called himself Isaac Newton. I did read some of his adult stuff, but I never had the urge to seek it out.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge:
I can't speak for your wife, of course, and it's been awhile since I read the book, but I'll go out on a limb and say I'm probably not the only woman profoundly irritated by the female protagonist's "hey, stuff happens, and actually one of these guys isn't bad!" reaction to the gang rape early in the book. Not to mention the whole "I am a kick-ass chick, but in my heart I really just wanna stay home and make babies!" (with her one-time rapist, if I recall correctly) and general willingness to hop in bed with, well, anyone.

I was a teenager when I read it, but I was already alert enough to call "bullshit!" on this stuff. And I'm not exactly prim about sex.

After twenty-odd years the details have, happily, left my brain, and I'm not inclined to reread the book to restore them.

[Serge]

In other words, Friday was the fantasy woman of a male adolescent, even though that adolescent was an old man.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Which makes her different from most Heinlein heroines...not.

[Serge]

In other other words, a Heinlein heroine, no matter how capable she may be of ruling her own destiny, in the end still bows down to the superiority of the male's plumbing and to his desires.

(Darn. My sarcasm subroutine kicked into overdrive again.)

[Marilee J. Layman]

Yep, I agree with Susan. It was just so unlikely, he had to have pulled it from his wishlist. The only Heinlein I like is the early stuff. I think a lot of the rest is wish-fulfillment.

[Serge]

I think a lot of the rest is wish-fulfillment

Kind of funny that he never grew out of those. Now, is that the part where someone points out that boys never grow out of that, or grow up pure and simple? Heheheh.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I expect most people don't fully grow out of their adolescent desires, but most people acquire more complex desires to layer in, not to mention the social savoir-faire to not parade their teenage fantasies.

[Serge]

Would it be off-the-wall to say that a writer who doesn't think he needs to be edited is creatively in trouble?

[Marilee J. Layman]

No, Serge, I think you're right. Even the best writers need some editing.

[Serge]

Marilee... And if they can't see that, then they are in trouble.