I really, really did not like Glasshouse, Charlie Stross’s Hugo-nominated novel from last year. I enjoy his “Laundry” books, though (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue), and at Worldcon I had a conversation with Robert Sneddon, who recommended the forthcoming Halting State as closer in tone to those, so I picked it up a few weeks ago.
Halting State carries back-cover blurbs from three people: 1) Vernor Vinge, 2) John Carmack, lead developer of Doom and Quake, and 3) Bruce Schneier, the noted security expert. That pretty much tells you what you’re going to get right there: a highly detailed near-future thriller built around Internet security protocols.
Halting State alternates between three point-of-view characters, all called in to deal with a single crime. Sue Smith is a cop in Edinburgh who gets called in to deal with a bank robbery, only it turns out that the robbery took place in the virtual world of Avalon Four, a Warcraft-like gaming world, where a bunch of orcs with a dragon in tow knocked over a bank and stole a bunch of powerful magic items. This isn’t supposed to be possible, and promises dire consequences for the company running the game.
Elaine Barnard is a forensic accountant brought in by the game company’s insurance company to look over the books and see what’s going on. She has some limited experience with virtual reality gaming, but not on the technical side, so she requests a “native guide,” and gets Jack Reed, a down-on-his-luck game programmer and enthusiast hired through a temp agency.
Of course, it quickly turns out that there’s more to the crime than meets the eye. The bank job is a threat not just to the integrity of Avalon Four, but computers in general, and our protagonists quickly find themselves drawn into a shadowy world of spies, people who might be spies, and people who really are spies, but don’t know it. The thriller plot is very clever, reasonably plausible, and well executed.
Of course, Charlie being Charlie, there are a few hiccups:
For one thing, the entire book is done in second-person present: “You’re four hours into your shift, decompressing from two weeks of working nights…” There isn’t any really compelling reason for this– I suspect it’s intended to tie in with the virtual gaming theme, as a kind of Zork tribute (“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”), or something, but it feels sort of like a stunt. The other second-person-present novel I’ve read recently– Shetterly’s Gospel of the Knife— managed to give a really good explanation on the final page for why the book was written that way, so I may have unreasonable expectations, but it was a little too cute, here.
The bigger problem, though, is that the narrators are not particularly distinct. If you’re going to do the alternating-viewpoints thing, the reader needs to be able to tell them apart quickly, and, well, they all sound kind of the same. More to the point, they all sound kind of like Charlie. Sue’s dialogue has a little bit of “dinna ken” Scottish dialect to it, but other than that, you pretty much have to figure out whose eyes your looking through based on which other characters get referred to by name. It’s a real weakness in the book.
It’s also a pretty talky book. It’s nowhere near as bad as Glasshouse because it’s not trying to be satirical, but there are plenty of scenes in which characters explain things to one another at some length. Which only exacerbates the “everybody sounds like Charlie” problem, because you wonder why they have to bother.
In the end, this was… pretty good. The writing quirks keep it from being really excellent, but it wasn’t actively painful, the way Glasshouse was. If this ends up on the Hugo ballot– and I suspect it will– I won’t be outraged. I wouldn’t vote for it, but I wouldn’t be outraged.