[books 2010] Halting State
Apr. 23rd, 2010 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro25. Halting State by Charles Stross
Crime novel set in a near-future Edinburgh. So far, so Night Sessions[1]. But this one's all about an in-game robbery that has real-world repercussions and the associated fallout.
For the first 40 pages or so, the second-person narrative (as if you're in a RPG, geddit?) annoyed the hell out of me, but as the action picked up I stopped noticing. At times it reads a bit like Cory Doctorow with the descriptions of the tech. So it ended up confusing my poor brain horribly.
I found it dragged a bit towards the end, but I liked the characters of Elaine, Jack and (to a lesser extent), Sue.
In short - pretty good actually, but neither a patch on Night Sessions nor on the other Stross book I've read, The Atrocity Archive. I'm still unsure whether I'm a fan of Stross in general or just the Laundry series.
[1] Night Sessions came out the following year, which in effect means that Stross and Macleod were writing at the same time. Sadly there are no lekis (crime-busting robots) in Halting State.
Crime novel set in a near-future Edinburgh. So far, so Night Sessions[1]. But this one's all about an in-game robbery that has real-world repercussions and the associated fallout.
For the first 40 pages or so, the second-person narrative (as if you're in a RPG, geddit?) annoyed the hell out of me, but as the action picked up I stopped noticing. At times it reads a bit like Cory Doctorow with the descriptions of the tech. So it ended up confusing my poor brain horribly.
I found it dragged a bit towards the end, but I liked the characters of Elaine, Jack and (to a lesser extent), Sue.
In short - pretty good actually, but neither a patch on Night Sessions nor on the other Stross book I've read, The Atrocity Archive. I'm still unsure whether I'm a fan of Stross in general or just the Laundry series.
[1] Night Sessions came out the following year, which in effect means that Stross and Macleod were writing at the same time. Sadly there are no lekis (crime-busting robots) in Halting State.
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Date: 2010-04-23 11:24 am (UTC)And, of course, only a few miles apart.