Halting State

Halting State

  • A science fiction written by Charles David George Stross in 2007
  • Reviewed edition by Ace from 2008
  • A paperback has 320 pages
  • ISBN 978-0-441-01607-5
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A bank robbery.

Investigation ? Nothing to it ...

Take the witness statements.

Get the recordings from the security cameras.

Maybe even follow the trail that the robbers have left behind.

Except there is a catch. The bank is none other than the Central Bank of Avalon Four, a popular virtual game world. The robbers are a band of orcs, with a dragon thrown in for fire support. And the witnesses are managers and employees of Hayek Associates, a security company that was supposed to prevent the theft in the first place.

Why call the police to investigate in the first place, you ask ? Sue, our lucky sergeant answering the call, is asking the same. But the answer turns out to be simple: securing virtual game worlds is a big business and the robbery, which should have been technically impossible, is likely to ruin Hayek Associates.

Of course, that is not all. Big business means big investors, who are rightfully concerned. Not about the fate of Hayek Associates, of course, but about the details of who gets to be blamed, and, consequently, who gets to foot the bill. Therefore, enter one Elaine Barnaby, a financial auditor, and one Jack Reed, a game programmer recently turned consultant ... and the investigation can begin ...

Spoiler

As soon as the investigation begins, Sue, Jack and Elaine all settle into the expected roles.

Sue would be the typical cop with a pragmatic attitude - she sees the whole thing as one white collar robbing another, something that ranks very low on her list of things that the society needs to deal with. Besides, she does not really have a clue about the technological aspects of the robbery, so she sticks with the proven combination of interviewing and bullying to see which witnesses start cracking under pressure.

Jack is the technology wizard who never grew up - the robbery attracts him as a puzzle to be solved, and the repercussions it can have in the real world are not quite real to him. Of course, that is only until the point when only a folding keyboard saves him from being knifed by one of the suspects he just wanted to chat with. (Are we close to the times when folding keyboards stopping knives replace pocket bibles stopping bullets in mainstream fiction ?)

Finally, Elaine is the manager - a well meaning person in charge of many things she does not really understand. She is the inquisitive character that Jack can address his explanatory monologues to, and the damsel in distress that Jack can fall for.

As the first clues begin to appear, Jack and Elaine find themselves targets for whoever is behind the robbery. The ante is quickly upped from threatening messages to murder attempts, luckily none of them succeeds. Eventually, the pattern of the attacks suggests that the culprits have very unusual resources at their disposal - from an international network of agents to a quantum computer for cracking encryption keys. Which narrows the suspects down to either the sinister government or the sinister foreign intelligence (all right, it probably could have been a sinister multinational corporation too, it is just not the case in this book).

In the end, it turns out to be both the government and the foreign intelligence, just not in the usual manner ... and describing the details here would mean giving away too much :-)

Review

Charles Stross was once a programmer by profession, and it certainly shows in his writing style (no, I do not think I would come up with the same observation without knowing the biography of the author :-). This is perhaps most evident on the technology related scenes, which carry a surprisingly realistic feeling (even if some Python fans might argue that Guido van Rossum would never allow the language version number to be bumped up to 3000).

What is, however, perhaps a bit uncomfortable, is the methodical precision with which every part of the plot is justified. Same as in any good program, where all the loose ends need to be tied up, so are all the loose ends meticulously tied up in the book. It could be just me, but I would certainly not mind if some mysteries remained without a definitive explanation.

And what about the content ? Although the book masks itself as a detective story, it is really all about the way in which various technological advances combine to influence human society. Rather than the revolutionary vision of Accelerando, Halting State gives a picture of creeping changes that appear innocent until they combine in unforeseen ways and produce unforeseen results. In the age of global communication, with billions sharing in the craze of social networks build on technologies that perhaps mere thousands really understand, the picture is anything but far fetched ...

Rated as good by Ceres on 2010-07-03

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