Review: Halting State by Charles Stross

On my recent trip to Atlanta, I took along my copy of Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives. I finished it (review to come on an upcoming episode of the podcast), and was looking for something to read on the flight home. There, on the bottom shelf of the smallest SF section I’d ever seen was Stross’s Halting State.  By the time I finished reading the back cover, I had cash in hand and was looking forward to diving in.

In the year 2018, a daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. But Sergeant Sue Smith discovers that this virtual world robbery may be linked to some real world devastation.

Oh, hell yes.

As the blurb suggests, this is a book set in a time when virtual economies have matured to a point where they impact real-world economies. There are businesses which assist in the managing of assets for these virtual worlds, and Hayek Associates is one of these.  As the book opens, a group of players (orcs and, yes, a dragon) steal all the items from one of the vaults in a Second-Life-like setting called Avalon Four.  What is fascinating about this premise that while none of the items exist  in the physical world, they all have economic value, and that value is what could cause ripples of unpleasantness for the owners of Hayek.  In tech-speak, someone stole a database table, and it is worth millions.

Stross’s world is set in a time when virtual reality has moved beyond the desktop: special eyewear and real-world interactions transform VR games into Augmented Reality Games (ARGs). This is not science fiction…ARGs have been around for a while¹ and as technology advances, it is inevitable that reality overlays will become more common as a gaming experience. The brilliance of Stross’s execution is in extrapolating this into the near future, where vestiges of the old world (read: where we live now) are still visible. Currently the majority of people are not involved in playing a VR/ARG. In Stross’s world, the majority of the people are involved, and the perception of reality is changed by the interactions present.

There are a number of things Halting State I find endearing, such as an unwillingness to shy away from tech jargon and slang. It’s got all the crunch I could hope for, but lest you think this is only fare for the tech-savvy, let me clue you on the clever: he tells the story through the eyes of three characters, each of whom have varying degrees of experience with Virtual/Augmented Reality Games:

• Sue Smith, Edinburgh Detective Sergeant (not very experienced with ARGs)
• Elaine Barnaby, insurance fraud investigator for Dietrich-Brunner Associates (Plays Regularly)
• Jack Reed, recently laid-off programmer of the fictitious company and game, Steaming, and expert on MMORPGs (creates and knows the inner workings of ARGs)

For an added twist, Stross uses the second person point of view to relate the story. In essence, the book itself becomes an ARG of sorts. While each chapter is told from the POV of one of the three characters, everything the character does is related as “You look around,” or “You say…”  It reminded me of playing an interactive fiction game, and I settled into the rhythm of the narrative after a chapter or two.

I enjoyed this book. It left me wanting more. Everything Stross posits is not only possible, but it also makes sense given the world we currently live in.  You can see how we could get from here to there in ten years, and that made the book extremely engaging for me.  As someone who loved Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, I found this book to an excellent way to spend time. I hope you’ll give it a try.

1. Think Majestic or I Love Bees [↩]

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