This is the third book in a row recommanded by Christian. (Well, to be honest with you, I heard of it on Boing Boing before Christian posted his review.) Halting State (buy it from Amazon.ca), by Charles Stross, takes place in the near future where enhanced reality and virtual reality have become mundane. When a horde of Orcs and a fire-breating dragon break into a bank, in Avalon Four, and steal all the magical items players have been stocking there, consequences in the real world start to pile up. Elaine is hired to audit the meat-world company responsible for administrating the bank and to find out how on Earth were the rogue players able to break the virtual locks and accomplish their crime. Sue, a police officer from Edinburgh, is called on site and gets involved as she realise one of the employee went missing. Jack, who has just been laid-off, gets hired by Elaine’s employer to help her understand what happened.
As Jack, Sue and Elaine dig deeper into the evidences, they discover a plot with internationnal ramifications designed to bring the country down on its knees.

Charles Stross is an amazing writer. Halting State is well written, full of humour (without turning the story into a farce.) The 2nd person narrators and the scottish accent are a bit distracting (well, at least for somebody like me, whos native language is not English) but the rythm of the book is fast paced and the caracters are well defined, three-dimentional and credible.

I really enjoyed the book, maybe because I used to play all those games the caracters are involved in: AD&D, LARP, MMRPG, etc. Charles Stross does a really good job describing them, with all the implications those games could have, paired with the futuristic technologies available to the caracters. He manages to describe encryption techniques and other geeky concepts in a very convincing way. I also wonder if the choice for the 2nd person narrator wouldn’t be a reference for those old game books.

In a certain way, Halting State tells a story similar to Rainbows End that I finished a few days ago. Both stories depict a near-future world where augmented reality and very similar technologies set the basis for an international plot the protagonists try to understand. If you would ask me to vote for one or the other, I would pick Halting State without hesitating. The caracters are more interesting, the story faster paced, and Stross style funnier. If this is what you like in a story, head to the book store right now and pick a copy of Halting State, you won’t regret it!

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Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux