If you spend any amount of time reading science fiction (and I do mean reading, film and television SF are different beasts altogether) it's pretty clear that the genre is as much about what the future will look like and what the author perceives now is all about. After all as the satirists have learned, it is much easier to poke away at the modern world by saying out front that isn't your world -- even though it is (in the fantasy genre, check out any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels).
So what does it say that I've read two novels in the last few months (the other is William Gibson's excellent Spook Country) -- both by major players in the field -- that say privacy as we've known it is dead; and it is the technology that has made so much in our lives convenient in recent years also carries our undoing?
Like any good novel, Halting State is as much about its characters and story as the issues Stross explores, though writing in the genre gives him a bit more leeway to go off on strange tangents. Set a bit more than a decade in the future, the novel follows three characters who are dragged first into an unusual crime, and then down the rabbit hole into a world that is much stranger than the one they thought they inhabited. These characters -- a Scottish police officer,a forensic accountant and a video game programmer -- are brought together by an unusual crime. A bank in an online video game is robbed, which threatens the business that operates it. The first half draws in the police, who are at first puzzled about why they have been brought in on the case -- until people start showing up murdered. The second brings in our accountant, a youngish accountant with a gaming background, who enlists the programmer to guide her (and more importantly, us) through the wild world Stross has built.
As a gamer, it's nice to find fiction that truly understands the appeal and strange worlds that can be built. While the near-future has a more immersive world than present, the realities of actually playing games remains largely the same. Stross has great fun digging into these new realities.
Stross' breezy, easy-to-access style is present is present here (and that's no complaint -- novels should be more about the story and less about the author showing off) except that it is told in an odd, second-person style (the reader is addressed as "you" throughout, even though we see the book from three characters' perspectives). I think I understand why Stross took this approach -- much of the book is about assuming different characters and roles ini games -- but it makes the early part of the book difficult to get into. Later on, I just ignored the second-person intrusions and dug into the story. No matter the slight narrative weakness, Halting State is a up-to-the-second science fiction that doesn't forget what brought the reader to the table in the first place.
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