A review...

[the_eggwhite]

“Halting State” - Charles Stross

First Draft - this will change and evolve!

Good when it should have been great

The first thing I need to say in this review is that I actually rather liked this book. I think it's a good book, chock full of great ideas. That said, I also think it's a flawed book for various reasons. I don't think any of these should be enough to put anybody off reading it, but they did turn what I thought could have been a fantastic book into just a good one.

A different point of view

Something that will become immediately apparent is that the book is written in the second person. For those not of a grammatical bent, this means that it reads as if you are the characters and that the events are being explained to you. As a long established roleplayer and gamer, this is a form that is completely and utterly familiar to me, albeit one that is unusual to see in a novel. I'm used to being told that things happened to me, and being able to translate that into things happening to a character.

I'd imagine that following this might be a bit more of an effort for those who are less familiar with gaming, but I suspect such people are going to have a few more hurdles to deal with upon reading Halting State. The entire book is based around events in an online roleplaying game, after all.

A personal identity crisis

So, the second person narrative isn't an issue in and of itself. The difficulty comes because there are multiple viewpoint characters. Whilst the start of each chapter tells you who the viewpoint character for that chapter is, it's still a little jarring. Especially if, like me, you tend to mentally skip the chapter titles. It takes a short while at the start of each chapter to work out which “you” is being written about, leaving you with a minor identity crisis until things fall into place and you settle back into a nice, steady read.

This wouldn't be a problem if the characters had strong identities and voices. Regrettably, not all of them do. If I had to find a consistent problem with Charles Stross's works, it would be the slightly erratic characterisation. I can tell there's strong characters there, and I can tell that the author knows them well and knows how to make them behave, but unfortunately this doesn't always come across very clearly in the writing when he's writing outside of his comfort zone. By this, I mean that he's very good at writing what is familiar to him (as far as I can tell what's familiar to him, anyway), but less so at giving a distinct voice to the characters who he can't identify with directly. They're not actively bad, but they have something of a tendency to blur into each other a little.

In his other work this is much easier to forgive, as you can sit back and bask in the strength of the ideas that drive his books. Unfortunately, combined with the second person narrative in Halting State, it becomes an issue. It creates a stalling point at each chapter break as your brain tries to realign itself with a different character. Some are easy to jump into, others less so. It does also mean that if, like me, you read whilst commuting and have to avoid missing your stop by putting the book down mid-chapter, It can be a bit of an effort to pick it back up again. A day of work can lead to forgetting which “you” you are, and so might require a bit of hunting around to check whose viewpoint you're supposed to be in at any given moment.

Technology that makes sense

Now I realise that I've just spent five paragraphs getting to the point about a minor quibble, so I think it's time to move on to something I did like.

Unsurprisingly, it's the technology. This is a Charles Stross novel, after all. I'm sure the man has a subscription to lifestyle and gadget magazines from at least a decade in the future, as he understands ubiquitous computing far better than anybody else who's writing it. From my experience, he also understands it better than many who are researching or designing it. He doesn't just understand what's possible, but how and why people might use it – and that's a rare talent.

In halting state, we see a solution to server load problems that's so completely credible that many readers probably won't realise it's not how things are done at present... at least not until they realise that the software is running on phones. Likewise, we see a thoroughly viable approach to how technology might actually be used by the police force, as well as an extension of the kind of mashups we already see on the web into an augmented reality environment. All of this is presented in a way that makes so much sense that you have to wonder why you're reading about it in an SF novel and not hearing about it in the mainstream press, or just using it day to day without even thinking.

I particularly like the way that the technology isn't all presented as shiny and new, despite being set only a few years in the future. It's just there – commonplace and widely understood at the user experience level. If more product designers and programmers would think about how and why users interact with technology as clearly and thoroughly as Charles Stross does, we'd be seeing a lot of much better products out there – both physical and software. But my personal lament for the lack of good user interface and user experience designers is a topic for another post entirely...

Caught wrongfooted...

Unfortunately we now come to another place where Halting State was, to my mind, a little weak. Not the central plot itself - that's solid and enjoyable – but the pacing as it unfolds. I can't quite pin down exactly what's wrong here, or tell exactly what would fix it, but something just felt slightly off at a couple of points right around some of the bigger revelations.

In any story, major events need to sit at just the right point – when you read them, they need to feel like they're happening in the right places. Halting State manages this most of the time, but once or twice I just felt somehow wrongfooted by events. I'd have been quite happy to be surprised by certain major events, so long as they felt necessary at that point in the story, rather than cutting off avenues that were still interesting and still unexplored.

As it was, once or twice I felt like I'd just witnessed the author skipping ahead a few pages to get to the good bits! He knew what was coming, so he may have built a good head of frothy enthusiasm for them... but my brain was still invested in the bits he skipped over, and this new stuff left me wrongfooted and saying “Huh?” instead of “Cool!”

I'd get to the “Cool!” eventually, but on those one or two occasions it came a little later than I'd have liked.

In Conclusion

Halting State is an enjoyable book, flawed a little by some pacing and characterisation issues. These flaws are balanced adequately by an insightful view of near future technology and a nice set of compelling mysteries within mysteries. The overall result is a book that could have been great, but was held back by it's flaws, making it a good one instead.