The Hugo Finalists (novels), Part 6 - Halting State by Charles Stross

You're reading a book. A damn good book about a bank robbery that happens in a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), perpetrated by a band of forty orcs and a dragon. By page 150something the plot tells you that the case is not about hackers stealing magic blades, but a kind of financial terrorist attack that involves online gaming as a means to find an end. From the middle of the book onwards, the plot becomes a croudsourced spy-technothriller with Live Action RPGs. And you end up thinking: "why it couldn't be just about that damn bank robbery?" That's Charles Stross' Hugo-nominated novel Halting State, a book you like enough to recommend it, but not because of its execution.

Because you read Charles Stross looking for his ideas. And you saw so many of them you caught your head spinning in every chapter. Theory of fun, game economics, game culture, online games, cell-phones-as-grid-computers, quantum cryptography, augmented reality, global diplomacy and post-industrial economics, just to name a few, are stuffed in those 350 pages, a gamelike near-future science fiction that's really a discussion about life as a big game which roles one chooses to play according to the available setting.

And you are an old-time gamer. Both in tabletop RPGs, BBS MUDs, LARPs, RTSG, FPSG, and recent MMORPG, ARGs and virtual reality social medias. So you are actually familiar with the jargon Stross uses to invoke that sense of strangeness in his prose. And you also know why he uses the second person throughout the novel to describe the action. He wants a novel that communicates to gamers and wants to pay homage to those same games, from D&D to Crysis, and make non-gamers think about the impact of gaming culture in the next ten or twenty years.

There are three main character in Halting State. Sue, a police officer from post-independence Scotland that, like every cop, relies too much in CopSpace, an augmented reality web service that feeds info through specs and mobile phones; Elaine, a forensic accountant that, as a hobbie, is in a augmented reality LARP of medieval sword battles reenactment and; Jack, a games programmer, heavy player and a guy full of secrets.

You think the first half of Halting State is pure fun, specially because of all the in-game scenes and dot com culture. But precisely because you're a gamer, and more specifically, your group's gamemaster (or storyteller, or dungeon master...), you know the things that spoil a gaming group's fun. One of which is: you can't twist the plot too much. If you say the game's about X, then it becomes Y, that's ok. If Y becomes Z, then it starts loosing its focus. Also no-fun is to resolve the plot with the words of a non-player character, or even worse, explain all the plot out of character.

And when you realize Stross committed those three sins, specially in the final quarter of the book, you feel rather disappointed. Mostly because you know he's a good writer and that's a good story, but one that turned into something not as good as it could have been. The third sin, that happens in the very last pages, you feel the most. The second person narrative vanishes and gives place to a full explanation of the things that happened.

But in the end, you feel the week you spent reading Halting State was more pleasure than pain, even if there's a bittersweet taste left for not being the book you expected. In the least, you end up envisioning how the next decade will be, when all the gamers will be the active economic force. Specially for those involved in gaming culture, you believe that's a worthy read.