Halting State
Charlie Stross
351 pages
published in 2007

It's ten years from now, Scotland is independent and uses a proper currency, the euro, there's a new internet boom, phones have eaten the personal computer just like they've eaten digital cameras and mp3 players for most uses, security is everywhere, and various forms of massive online and alternate reality games are mass pastimes made possible by the ubiquitous overlay of offline reality by online reality in ways only hinted at by Google Earth today. Twenty years ago the internet was still a playtoy for academics and Cold Warriors, ten years ago everybody knew about it but still thought of it as an addon, today it's an essential tool for most white collar jobs and in 2017 it's literally everywhere to the point that getting lost in a strange city is no longer an option. In short, online and offline reality are intermixed to such an extent that a bank robbery in an mmorpg can have very real offline consequences.

Which is where Halting State starts, with sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police force being assigned a confused case which may or may not be a robbery, which after some further confusion turns out to have been a bank robbery in an online game, with which the local police force should never have become involved. It's a hacking incident, with the nasty overtones of an insider trading financial scam, as Hayek, the company running the bank, has just had its IPO and its shares will tank once the news leaks out. For Sue, this means she's up to her neck into something that's not just above her, but which also has the potential to go political, quick. Not what you need to keep your scores up and your bosses happy.

At the other end of the clusterfuck is Elaine Barnaby, a highly specialised insurance auditor who because she's a larper is part of the team the insurance sents to see Hayek hasn't done anything stupid that will get them into trouble. Since she's actually not too familiar with mmorpgs, she arranges for a friendly local to be her interpreter. Enter Jack Reed, just fired developer on another massive multiplayer game, a football hooligan simulator, that drew slightly too much media and political attention when it turned out the neds where using it as a practise range. Both Jack and Elaine have also played the alternate reality game SPOOKS, a spy game for adults. This may not be coincidence, as the bank robbery turns out to be slightly more than it seems at first.

If you've been following Charlie on his blog while he was writing Halting State you know he was attempting to write as bleeding edge a science fiction novel as possible, not so much set in the world of tomorrow as the world of two hours later. That is, take a long hard look at where technology and society and such are at right now, then make some educated guesses at where it's moving, using the way the web developed between 1997 and now as his model and applying it to large scale multiplayer games made popular by World of Warcraft and its ilk (though all that has its roots in D&D of course and even older stuff).

You may also know that the plot has already been partially overtaken by reality before the book was even completely written, let alone published. So I think he may have succeeded in his goal; he certainly has for me. I'm not on the leading edge of geekdom myself, being a couple of waves behind but still somewhat ahead of mr and mrs everywhere; a lot of what Charlie has put in Halting State is stuff I was sort of aware of being in the pipeline. This is the first science fiction novel where I'm so aware of the roots it has in our present without it being just a funhouse mirror of it. This is no Stand on Zanzibar where contemporary fears and obsessions were projected unto the future.

Interestingly enough, having read a slew of newish science fiction novels this year, it does seem as there's a sort of consensus future emerging in science fiction again. It's a future that's of a continuum with the present, not radically different from where we are now, but one where lots of seemingly small, subtle changes have added up to massive differences behind a seemingly unaltered facade. It has much more intrusive security measures everywhere largely accepted as par for the course, more of the economy moved online, less techno exuberance and more of a grumbling accomendation with a shitty world made more liveable through better toys, neither dystopia nor utopia, but leaning slightly more to the former. It's here, in Ian McDonald's Brasyl, Jon Courtnay Grimwood's End of the World Blues and Ken MacLeod's Execution Channel.

So yeah, I inhaled Halting State today and I kind of liked it, as you may have noticed. The only real quibble I had with it was that many of the characters had the typical Strossian tendency to talk in infodumps, in the way your favourite nerd might explain the work they did today to you when you barely know the outlines of their jobs. It's not full on "as you know Bob", but it can be a bit wearing if you're not used to it or are sensitive to this sort of thing.

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