Halting State by Charles Stross

Book vs. Blogger: Who Wins?

I have been trying for a couple of years now to read at least one book by the biggest guns the industry. So far I’ve managed to line up and knock down authors such as Iain M. Banks, Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers, just to mention a few, and I have books by Peter F. Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds waiting patiently on the Stack. Charles Stross is a highly critically acclaimed SF author who’s been on the Hugo ballot for four (!) consecutive years with books such as “Accelerando” and “Glasshouse”. He’s known for writing pretty hard SF, and after having read “Halting State”, I can vouch for that statement. This book is practically brimming over with hard core techno-babble that’s obviously not intended for a seventeen years old Norwegian n00b with no computer skillz whatsoever. In the end I felt like it became a battle of wits between me and “Halting State”. Who would cave and admit defeat?

Since this is a review of “Halting State”, you can safely assume that it was indeed I who managed to swim through the acronyms and bring the cup home. It was a hard fight, but in the end I’m glad I persevered. This is a good book with a lot of strengths, and easily the book with the most original plot, narrative and ideas I’ve read this year.

This is a newly released book that hasn’t gotten its European release yet. The only reason why I managed to set get this beautiful hardcover was because I happened to stumble onto it when I was trolling a SFF stores in Oslo when I was visiting family a couple of weeks ago. I remembered having read a really interesting plot taster by John Scalzi around the time this was released. Since I most likely won’t be able to be more eloquent than Scalzi, I think I’ll rather just quote what he said in his book pimpin’ Ficlets blog post:

“Halting State by Charles Stross is just your typical black comedy heist caper taking place in a massively multiplayer online role playing game kind of story. Wait, what? You’re telling me that there’s no typical black comedy heist caper in a MMPORG, because there’s no other story of this sort? Well, fine. It’s the Platonic ideal of that newly-emerging subgenre, then. Get it while it’s hot. “

Of course, the story is much more challenging than that, but I think it gives you a fair idea of what to expect from this 351 pages long book. Because in addition to the strangeness described above, it’s written in a second person narrative. Yes, that’s right, not first person, not third person, but second person narrative – a style I’ve never tried before. It gives the book a very special feel and, to my amazement, I have admit that I thought it worked really well. You got the best of both worlds, which is the ability to jump between different characters (three, in this case) all the while you still feel like the text retains some of the intimacy you gain from the first person angle. Not that I don’t think “Halting State” could have worked equally good in third person, but as an experiment I thought I was fairly successful and interesting.

It took some time before this book really grabbed me. It wasn’t until I passed the first hundred pages that things started getting really interesting, and even then it wasn’t unusual for me to zone out every ten pages or so because of a techno-babble overdose. I really struggled with understanding what the characters were talking about at times, and that took a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience and often left me a bit disoriented. It did get better as I continued onwards, but I really think that you need be an extra-sized computer geek to really get what the hell was going on at times.

So when all this is taken into consideration, I’m at a toss up in whether or not I should recommend this book. It’s got a lot of strengths and really fascinating ideas, but the characters aren’t super, nor did I feel like Stross did the best out of what he’d created. I guess you’ll just have to decide if you’re up for a challenge or if you’d rather spend your time with more… understandable fiction. All I can say is that I don’t regret reading this book and I wouldn’t be loathe to pick up the next book by this author. At least I’d know what cutting edge sci-fi looked like.

7 /10