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Since I enjoyed Charles Stross's "marketed as fantasy but actually sci-fi that happens to have castles and swords and stuff" Merchant Princes series, I decided to check out some of his actual sci-fi. The friend who turned me on to him in the first place suggested that I might like Halting State, so I picked it up on a recent bookstore trip and read it this month.
It was immediately apparent why my friend recommended this book. Set in the very near future, it centers around on-line gaming. It's no secret to any of my friends that I'm into roleplaying and that I play Guild Wars, so of course a book that features gaming is a good choice to try to get me back into sci-fi.
What also became apparent as soon as I delved into the first chapter was that this book is written in the second person point of view. For those unfamiliar with that POV, here's an example: You're reading my review. As your eyes reach this line, you start to get annoyed, because you hate the second person point of view. You start to feel the need to bludgeon me with a rock, except I distracted you with a shiny object.
Yeah. I hate second person point of view. Even a single short story written in it can set my teeth on edge. The idea of an entire novel from that POV was almost enough to send me screaming from the room. But darn it, I paid full cover price (less my B&N club card discount), and the concept sounded intriguing, so I was going to slog through it. I determined to read a chapter a day until I was done.
While there were a couple of days when I didn't read at all, due to entertaining a house guest, on the days when I did read, I found myself reading multiple chapters. As I got sucked into the story of game-business-based intrigue, I found the POV slipping into the background, only occasionally popping back up when it failed in its stealth roll. It hasn't changed my mind about second person. I still hate it. But I can admit now that it is possible to have a book written entirely in second person POV and have it not suck.
Halting State follows three characters as they try to solve the mystery of a seemingly impossible in-game bank heist. Our three protagonists are Sue, a police office; Elaine, a forensic accountant; and Jack, a gaming programmer. None of them really want to be investigating the crime, but they found themselves drawn into the mystery and they work together to come to the shocking conclusion.
Several things work in the book's favor. All three characters were likable and believable, though Sue came across as the weakest and least interesting to me. Perhaps Elaine and Jack came across stronger because they're not only gamers, but they're interacting with each other frequently, whereas Sue gets stuck mostly interacting with minor characters.
But the strongest point of this book is that it's clear that Charles Stross is either a gamer, or did some serious research for his book. The futuristic gaming systems are a mostly-believable extrapolation from our current technology, and the gamer characters act like real gamers, not cardboard stereotypes. I found myself warming to the book because it understood gaming, and didn't treat it as a silly novelty. In addition to MMOs, Halting State touches on the worlds of LARP and historical reenactment, as well as game development and brief mentions of good ol' fashioned tabletop roleplaying.
Halting State takes place in Scotland, and is littered with slang, some of which I got right away and some of which I had to infer from context. The settings are pretty well-described and allowed me to form a pretty good picture in my mind, which is good since I've never been to Scotland.
If I had one non-POV based complaint about the book, it would be that one aspect of futuristic gaming didn't seem very likely to me. In the future, gaming companies break each other's EULAs by allowing players to transfer their characters and swag from one game to another. While that's an idea that would have any long-term gamer salivating at the prospect, it's also one that we all know wouldn't work too well. It would be hard enough to migrate my Level 20 Dervish to World of Warcraft, let alone take any of my brothers' City of Heroes characters to Warhammer Online. Although there is some overlap in character classes in some games, each game tends to have its own flavor, its own level progression, its own skills and ways of purchasing them. Trying to migrate a character from one system to the next would be a nightmare, without even taking into consideration the differences in equipment and other forms of loot. At best, a new game could offer high-level players from other games some sort of incentive to migrate - starting with a high-level character, or double EXP gain or some such, but even then I suspect that the players on that game who had earned their high levels would complain.
Aside from this gripe, Stross has some pretty interesting ideas on the future of gaming. And since it's in the near future, barring any accidents or the end of the world, we'll all still be around to see whether his ideas are spot-on or if his book will be as humorously outdated as many 1960s sci-fi novels now are.
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