Charles Stross is climbing my personal rankings of authors I should read more of. Even as Rule 34 was entertaining and thought provoking, Halting State proves to be an equally fun and wild ride- and one that I almost preferred to it's sequel, Rule 34.
Halting State is once again set in Edinburgh in the not-to-distant future (this time it's 2018) and Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh Constabulary is called to the offices of Hayek and Associates, a new dot-com start up company where a robbery has just taken place. Only this robbery is unlike any robbery that Sergeant Smith has ever dealt with. The prime suspects in this robbery are orcs and instead of big guns, they brought a dragon along for fire power, for you see, the bank in question is in the virtual world of Avalon Four- and robbing a bank in Avalon Four was supposed to be impossible.
Hayek and Associates are scared: if word gets out, their company is going to crash and crash hard and as the case gets bigger and bigger and the boundaries between the virtual and real blur more and more, Sergeant Sue Smith finds out that there's much more to this case than just a simple bank robbery in a computer game and powerful people are watching, waiting to make their moves.
And yes, that's all the plot I'm going to give you kids because for the rest- you'll have to read the book!
Stross is on point with this novel and digs a little deeper into concepts surrounding LARPing and Multi-Player Online games/worlds (like 2nd Life or World of Warcraft) and how suspectiable they would be to manipulation. (In a minor spoiler, it turns out that various intelligence agencies are running some to build a human intelligence network on the cheap- a concept that I found fascinating because it makes perfect sense. If you're into LARPing, who wouldn't jump at a chance to play James Bond in real life?) And then there's the concept of virtual versus real and how those boundaries are starting to blur... (when news of disasters/weirdness in World of Warcraft makes it to the BBC News front page, you know this trend is going to continue...)
All of it makes for mind-bending, thought provoking science fiction, set in a world of the future that might prove eeriely prophetic if the EU can claw it's way back to fiscal sanity and Scotland decides it wants to be independent. Even from a law enforcement point of view, I don't think Stross is all that out of whack- though people in British law enforcement might disagree, the trend of integrating more and more technology into law enforcement is one that's accelerating industry wide. VR-type goggles that record everything to a central server (what the characters call COPSPACE) might seem a little 'Demolition Man' when read in the world of today, but when things like e-citations are starting to get popular here and there, it's not completely out of whack to imagine such technology emerging in the future- especially in the heavily CCTV'd and surveilled British Isles.
Overall: A wild and entertaining ride through early 21st Century Scotland. Stross seems to blend cyber-punkish concepts with old school cop-noir-mystery type of concepts with near perfection and plays with the raw edge of the possibilities of future technology with wild abandon. I say **** out of ****.
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