Halting State (edit title)

• Rated 3 stars

“A cleverly crafted near-future world that contains a gem of a story. However, this near-future world is so dense and complex, that unless you are a computer wizard, much of the peripheral elements will pass you by.”

• Rated 0 stars

“evaluating”

• Rated 4 stars

“Uhhh...I forgot to review it right after I read it, and so I had to actually go back and review the synopsis to recall which book it was.

In the end I feel positive about it; Recall a lot of the Stross humor, which I like, and will re-read it again sometime with pleasure.

Sometimes I read so very fast that the book is a positive blur...not quite compelling enough to make me slow down and absorb. That is the case here, though a re-read may change my review down the line...”

• Rated 5 stars

“What a fascinating book this was!

As a quick summary, this is a near-future electronic crime mystery more than a scifi novel, but it's still a blast to read. There's distributed computing, cryptography, games that are effectively MMORPGs, and Alternate Reality Games thrown in the mix. I'm actually employed in the games industry, so I know a lot of the buzzwords used here, but even so I was looking up stuff on wikipedia to gain a little bit of background on the topics Stross brings up.

The book is narrated in second-person, alternating between three different "you"s. Initially, this was hard to get used to, but that's overcome without too much trouble, and it feels like an homage to all the old Infocom text adventure games... "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

Toward the end of the book, more and more characters get involved in the storyline, and it began to get difficult to tell who was who. I kept feeling like I should have made a list of characters to refer to. And the final "battle" was sort of pulled out of thin air, making the finish a little let down, though other elements of the conclusion were fascinating.

Overall, this was a great read. It's got a William Gibson cyber-civiliztion feel about it, but hosted in the world of only a decade into the future, so the tech used to get there is actually understandable, and very much conceivable, rather than the mystical hand waving Gibson had to use 25 years ago. The book has its confusing spots, and I do worry about what non-techie-types will think of all the techno-babble, but Stross is someone I'll come back to.
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• Rated 0 stars

“Enjoyed it again the second time around. Perhaps my favourite of Stross' works, but I still have quite a few to read. They are being released slowly Down Under, licensing deals and management issues I guess. Decent characters, using a round robin chapter structure to cycle amongst our three protagonists. Twists and turns, more cold war thriller than sci-fi at times.”

• Rated 3 stars

“Interesting cross-genre mystery-thriller-sci fi, including a plucky lady cop, a plucky lady corporate drone looking for a way out, the shadowy underworld, a budding romance, a nerd programmer guy, D&D (I did a saving throw for not putting the book down when I realized the author was a RPG fan), Scotland, driverless automatic cabs, chicks with swords. It has it all. Actually, any excesses in the pan-genre grabbing-of-ideas were out-weighed by Stross' ability to tell a story. That's what this is: a good yarn. Not deathless prose, but a fine solid tale well told.”

• Rated 5 stars

“It took me a few pages to get into this one but I am glad I did. Really good read, chaos, confusion and thrills!”

• Rated 2 stars

“Seemed like a very interesting idea/concept, but the weird first person way it was written made it obnoxious to read, "you did this", or "you are feeling sad". Was just enough of a put off that I didn't finish it.”

• Rated 3 stars

“It plays around with some interesting ideas regarding gaming and the future of the information age. Unfortunately, it's also weighed down by jargon that makes the plot hard to follow.”

• Rated 3 stars

“Halting State has one of the most believable and engaging near-futures I've had the pleasure of reading about. If the characters had been more charismatic and natural and if the relationship between the two primary characters felt less contrived, this would easily have been one of my favorite books.”