Halting State by Charles Stross

I discovered only recently that I'm a huge fan of science fiction. By 'recently' I mean a couple years ago, but considering that I've been an avid reader since before kindergarten, I'm surprised I didn't notice this before.

I specifically enjoy sci-fi stories that aren't cautionary. Cautionary tales are nice and whatever, but it has almost become a necessity for futuristic stories, and I like when writers are able to tell a story that uses the future as a setting, not a main plot point (and I feel obliged, here, to bring up "I, Robot," an Issac Asimov anthology which seemed to acknowledge that expectation and show the flip side. The 2004 movie ignored Asimov's original intention and transformed the anthology into a stereotypical cautionary tale again).

To foster this newfound love, I've been looking for enjoyable sci-fi stories, and I found one when I heard about Charles Stross' near-future novel Halting State.

Set in a 2018 independant Scotland, Halting State is not a cautionary tale about modern technology gone awry, as one might expect. It's set in a world very different from out own, but reading it you can see how things would progress naturally from here to there; the characters themselves comment on how different the world was just ten years ago.

Halting State is a crime fiction, about a bank robbery and a team of experts - Sue, the police detective; Elaine, an insurance fraud investigator; and Jack, a high-level computer programmer - who work to unravel the mystery and catch the culprits.

I can't get much further into my synopsis, however, without explaining the one thing that drew me into this novel before I'd even read it: the fact that it's written in the second-person.

Second-person, as in not first-person or third-person. As in 'you', not him or her or I but you. This is probably a weird concept for a lot of people, but it comes from the idea that video games are essentially stories told in the second-person, where the player takes on the role of the protagonist and makes all the decisions.

Zork is an example on an early text-based game, told in the second person.

This wasn't a random decision on Stross' part; his entire story shows how interconnected video games are with real life. In fact, the bank robbery itself takes place inside of a video game called Avalon Four. The game developers created the bank for players to store their items, in an attempt to boost game-economy, and at the start of the novel a band of Orcs, "with a dragon for fire support," break into the bank and steal everything.

I loved the second-person perspective, but I play video games and am thus used to second-person type storytelling; this writing style may not be for everyone. I know there were many reviews by people who couldn't get used to it, and I think that's a shame because Stross' story is wonderful even without the unique perspective.

Stross introduces us to this world sort of all-at-once, and it took me a little while to catch on to what some of the characters were talking about. This isn't a bad thing, though; in fact, this is how I prefer writers introduce us to their worlds, instead of stopping to explain the mechanics and such.

A somewhat eager example of how HUD might work in cars.

One of the major features in Stross' vision of the future is a pair of goggles that everyone wears everywhere. These goggles seem to connect to the user's smartphone via bluetooth and function as a sort of Heads-Up Display (HUD) for data, and there's no simple way to state how awesome these goggles were in the book.

Not only could the user pull up documents or messages to read on their HUD goggles, but they included multiple 'overlay' functions. Multiple times in the narrative one character would log a location onto their HUD, and then be able to see that location and a route via a city map overlay. Our cop character, Sue, was always logged into something called CopSpace, which allowed her not only to catalog evidence but also to identify everyone else logged into CopSpace, as their names hovered just slightly over their heads.

An example of a modern overlay feature, though not in HUD.

There's this scene as Jack, our resident gamer and programmer, heads over to the office of the robbed game company. To kill some boredom on the way, he logs onto a Discworld overlay, transforming the Scottish city into Ankh-Morpork, the capitol of Terry Pratchet's popular book series.

"The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of HistoryLand. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players heads, though - Discworld isn't too popular among the nine-till-five set."

This whole passage was wonderful, not only because I understood the reference (the author is from the UK, so he made quite a bit of references I didn't completely get) but because it beautifully illustrated how Stross' HUD overlay system works; it becomes important to understand this later in the novel.

Mostly, tho', I was just extremely exciting about the idea. It's not often you find a science fiction writer who isn't bemoaning the future, and even less often do you find one who presents a future worth looking forward too.

So far, however, I've mostly been gushing about the style and setting of Stross' story. While those elements are very important, the story itself was also enjoyable. As I've mentioned before, Halting State is a crime drama at its core, and it was interesting to see how the execution of the theft changed because of the sci-fi setting.

I feel like I was reading too slowly; there are a handful of side characters who I got mixed up or completely forgot about, through no fault of the author. Watching the mystery unfold was delightful, but I believe I would have gotten more out of it had I not confused some of the more important non-protagonist.

The UK edition cover, which I quite like

Through this whole book, however, I feel like there were only two negative points. The first is the matter of the accent; two of the three Protagonists are Scottish, and thus have a Scottish accent (one heavier than the other). I watch enough British telly to be able to affect an English accent, but it took me a while to get my inner-narrator to cooperate with the Scottish, and even then I kept having to remind myself.

The other negative has to do with how much profanity was in the dialogue. As someone who uses the internet often, it didn't feel like much more than I already have to read every day, but it was still more than I was used to seeing in a novel (in fact, it felt very much like how people might talk over the internet, but not how adults might talk in real life; I wonder if Stross did that on purpose, to demonstrate a cultural shift). I was happy to see nothing at all explicit or graphic, even when the author clearly had the chance to add something like that in, but I thought the language could have been toned down a bit.

All in all, however, this was a sci-fi novel that lit a light in my eye. Stross' writing was clear and inviting, descriptive without being flowery, and completely intriguing all the way through. The mystery was nicely timed without being too obscure or too obvious, and the characters all seemed well developed to me (though getting to play their part, as it were, with the second-person, may have made them easier to like). Stross' Halting State is a good reminder of what it is I like about Science Fiction, and why I'm glad to have been introduced to this genre some time ago.