It’s taken me quite a long time to understand the complaints against long books.  I’ve been hearing about “tomes” and “doorstoppers” ever since I started reading adult Spec Fic.  But for some reason, I could never figure out what these people were talking about.  Long books are great, right?  More story, more action, more characters.  I used to defend these to the death.  But not anymore.

When I first got into stories with longer books, it was the short books that started to lose their luster.  Why did those authors always have to skip things, pass huge amounts of time in a sentence, turn on the hyper-drive and skim to the end just when I was really starting to enjoy the story?  I was all for RJ putting out larger and larger books for the WoT when I was in high school.  If nothing else, it made me look a lot more intelligent to race through these monsters in two days.

But now, for one reason or the other, I’ve burned out on long books.  Maybe it’s lack of energy, maybe it’s an increase in discrimination, maybe it’s because long books now are longer than ever.  Right now, I’m 239 pages in Steven Erikson’s Reaper’s Gale.  Before this I was reading Charlie Stross’s Halting State.  If I was reading a similar book now (instead of this monster of Malazan) I’d be two thirds done.  But that’s just not enough for Erikson.  I’m only a sixth of the way in to Gale. 

It takes Erikson four times more pages to tell a (n incomplete) story than it takes Stross to tell a complete one.  “Oh, well, that’s not fair,” you might say.  Erikson is writing a multi-volume epic fantasy, and Stross wrote a single book of science fiction.  Erikson is dealing with thirty characters, and Stross might have five.  Erikson’s story has to cover so much more ground.

Well, yes.  That’s my point.  It’s been quite popular in fantasy lately to deal with bunches and bunches of perspective characters, continents and continents of people.  Thousands and thousands of years of history.  The broad scope.  That’s why it’s called “epic” fantasy, duh.

But that’s just excuses.  The truth is, these authors lack focus.  Large scope does not require a large cast.  You can treat all sides fairly without showing them all equally.  Not every bit of information has to be explicitly portrayed.  Sometimes, it’s okay to have a little mystery. 

In fact, one could argue that less is always more.  More tension, more conflict, more shades of grey.  More engagement with perspective characters.

Now, enough bashing Erikson.  Let’s move on to an author I enjoy even more:  George R.R. Martin.  I’ve heard many, many people complain that just as they really get into one character’s story, the author whisks their attention away to another.  Just at the moment of highest tension.  And it’s true.  Erikson also does this frequently.  It’s begun to really tick me off.  Really, really, really, tick– 

–Oh… err, back to Martin, yes.  Martin enjoys this trick as well.  And, to make matters worse, these high tension jumps often lead to scenes carrying almost no tension at all.  The returned exile has just taken back command of his people and they are on the brink of war.  But no, no more of that.  It’s time to move on to these five people travelling through a mountain pass.  And talking.  (Okay, that’s an example from Erikson, but whereas Gale is right next to me, ASOIAF is a four hour drive away.  Expediency.)

And that’s the problem right there.  Long books have no legs.  They almost always suffer from the most common issue of having to tell four or five—or ten—different stories in the same book: structural flaws.  Every new transition is a chance for a new fuck-up, and these authors seem to have the worst luck.

Here’s an easy rule-of-thumb, guys—story always flows towards the tension.  When you jump between two stories (and yes, these books are most often many small stories as opposed to one large one) you don’t move from high tension to low tension.  You can move from low tension to high tension.  A common saying is that you give the perspective to whoever has the most to lose.  Low tension means less to lose, so it’s a great place to shift gears. You can move from low tension to low tension, although you risk the reader getting bored.  You can even move from high tension to high tension, although you risk the reader getting burned out or still annoyed. 

But, for the love of whatever gods your characters believe in, do not jump from high tension to low tension.  It’s like jumping out of a drag racer going full speed off a cliff.  It hurts.  It’s bad for the readers’ health.  Just like runners have to cool down after a race, readers need to come back down gradually.  And you just can’t do that when they were watching their favorite hero lose to the Evil Overlord one second, and reading about Princess Violet-Eyes combing her long golden locks the next.

Well, that’s one issue.  It took up a little more space than I thought, so we’ll look at other problems with long books next time.

I told myself that I wouldn’t jump in on this best of the decade that everyone else has been doing on just about every online printed source, but after seeing a couple of very good and a couple more very confusing ones, I went through my bookshelves and pulled out several books that were my favorite, and in my opinion, best genre books of the past ten years.

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
This book was released earlier this year, and while I was unfamiliar with Mr. Bacgalupi’s shorter fiction, I was singularly impressed with his first novel, The Windup Girl. I’ve already reviewed the book in length here, but in retrospect, this will likely stand up as one of the best genre books in the past ten years. The Windup Girl is not only well written, it’s well conceived, which is just as important, I think, for a future world. Bacigalupi puts together a compelling, terrifying and ultimately believable near future, with relevance and everything that good science fiction should be.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Suzanna Clarke
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was one of the books that took me a long time to get into and to finish – I stopped and started it several times since I got it, but was never able to really get into it before I actually made the time to read. It’s a challenging book, with an older style of writing. Once I had gotten into the proper mindset, I was pulled right into Suzanne Clarke’s alternative world of Wizards, Napoleonic War and fate, and loved every minute from that point on. Clarke dispels with the very common notion of sword and sorcery fantasy novel by setting it in a far more relatable London, and approaches the subject matter in a far different manner than other books of the genre.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman
American Gods is another novel that I had to take my time to read, stopping and starting a couple times before really getting into the proper mindset that was required for Gaiman’s world. This sort of mythological story is an interesting concept, where belief begets creation, and there is a conflict brewing between the old and the new, with the protagonist, Shadow, caught in the middle. The story is a profound one, and one that I’ll likely return to someday.

Soon, I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
Where a couple of the novels on this list have been akin to great feasts of old, Soon, I Will Be Invincible is a modern day family dinner, a bit rushed, fairly complete but really good. Author Austin Grossman creates an entire superhero mythology, split between a hero and villain, in a modern day setting. Where a number of comic books have stagnated, with the same characters recycled year after year, we are party to a mythology that is put together with the benefits of a realistic society. Grossman’s superheroes are just as messed up as the rest of us, and this is where the book is an incredible amount of fun, because it’s like the Marvel Universe, but all grown up.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is the brother of Austin Grossman, and like his twin brother, he takes what was a well tread-upon world and tweaks it to become more relatable in The Magicians. Here, rather than superheroes, we are treated to wizards, and a magical academy. The style here is very different, and while there are similarities to Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, they act more as references and influences than they do style and feel. Grossman’s Brakebills College is realistic where Rowling’s Hogwarts is not, and imagines the fantasy world as one akin to ours.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
I learned of Scott Lynch through a friend of mine, and when I picked up his debut fantasy novel The Lies of Locke Lamora, I was already pretty excited, and was impressed with Lynch’s style of storytelling – his fantasy world is different from the typical sword and sorcery take that a lot of fantasy novels seem to have taken on. Like other authors on this list, he has put together an incredibly well conceived world, one that was vibrant, dangerous and interesting all at the same time. Lynch’s follow-up novel, Red Seas Under Red Skies was just as good, and I’m eagerly awaiting the third installment of his series, The Republic of Thieves.

Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
Altered Carbon debuted with quite a bit of buzz, when it was released. Richard K. Morgan’s first book about a noir mystery in a conscious/body swapping sounds like something out of the worst dregs of B-movie Science Fiction, but the result is a dark, exciting and intelligent SciFi thriller that I think of as Blade Runner, but more violent. The first of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, Morgan weaves together a complicated and twisting futuristic tale, one that had me guessing throughout the book.

The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
Where Harry Potter was the real fantasy show stopper of the decade (and for good reason), I’ve always thought that Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass) was a bit marginalized. Pullman’s fantasy tale is more than that – it pulls in elements of science fiction and alternate worlds to put together an epic story that goes from a childhood fantasy adventure to discovering the nature of existence itself, while a war between two sides of that sort of question rages on across multiple universes. The Amber Spyglass, the conclusion to the series, is heavy with meaning, questions and utter brilliance, and is far above and beyond most genre books to begin with.

Coyote, Allen M Steele
Allen M. Steele’s Coyote was first serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and is still a joy to read after several sit-down sessions. Grounded in quite a lot of hard science fiction, Coyote tells the story of a near future colony of humans who steal a massive space ship from their fascist American government and find themselves on Coyote, the moon of a distant planet that was deemed a good candidate for colonization. The story follows several characters as they learn to exist on this hostile new world, in a story that is very reminiscent of the origins of America. The follow-up books in the series are good, but this is easily the best. While the story isn’t groundbreaking, it is a great deal of fun, covering a number of popular themes, chief of which is exploration and discovery, which helps to remind me why I love this genre so much.

Halting State, Charles Stross
Charles Stross is one of the preeminent science fiction writers of our time, and his novel Halting State demonstrates that he’s really clued in to what might happen in the next couple of years. Halting State is a book that I’ve talked about before, but what makes this stand out for me for the past decade is Stross’s understanding of how the future might work, from technology to politics to economics, all of which are brought in for this story, expertly woven into the actions of the protagonist, and really make this a stellar read.

City of Pearl, Karen Traviss
Karen Traviss has been making a name for herself with the tie-in world with Star Wars, Gears of War and Halo, but this first book in her own universe outshines them all. City of Pearl is a wonderfully realized book, the first in a six book series that puts together first contact, interstellar politics and warfare, environmentalism and bioethics. Spanning the course of several hundred years and across a couple of planets, this book puts all of that in with a number of intriguing characters and well conceived plot lines. The bonus is Traviss’s cynical attitude towards humanity, which makes this book a bit of a break from most of the human-centric stories that I’ve read.

Think about this, I think that this is a good list to have put together. In a very big way, the past decade has been the most formative when it comes to my tastes in books, music and movies, and where my interests in Science Fiction, Fantasy and related genres really came from. This decade marked my high school years, where I not only transitioned from a Star Wars only diet of reading material to the larger classics: Dune, Ringworld and Foundation, to name a few.

While I got most of my base from these classics, most of the books that I’ve picked for this list are far from the classics – at points, they take a lot of the best themes and turns them on their heads, realizes a number of well conceived notions in new light and makes the genre something new and interesting to read. While reading these books, I’ve come to realize that the field of science fiction is not one to be left mired in the b-movie territory that long characterizes it; it is a dynamic and interesting field, one that will continue to thrill fans in the future.

My rating: 4.5  of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Halting State, but that probably won’t be universally true. If you don’t have a hook into the world, I think you might find it difficult to be drawn in. I’d still encourage anyone willing to stretch to give reading it a try

In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that’s just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…

If you are a gamer (computer, D&D, anything of the sort); if you are a technology fan, wondering where we’ll go next; if you are fascinated by the implications of technology on society; or if you read science fiction on a regular basis, then you’ll probably enjoy this book. If you like a good spy novel/techno thriller, I  recommend you take the time to get into this book.

Otherwise, I just don’t know if this book will be worth it to you. But consider giving it a try.

Luckily,  I used to be a techie, and I’m still very interested in the issues surrounding technology.  I knew enough of the acronyms and concepts to be interested and able to go with it.

I had a slow time getting started with my reading. It felt like the same issue I have getting into Jane Austen– sometimes I can quickly slip into the language and the world, and sometimes it takes a while before the story flows. It certainly isn’t that it is badly written, just that it is different from what I usually read.

The book is set in 2018, and in many ways this view of the future is very similar to our current society.  High tech has been on a fast march, and once you look past the surface, evidence is everywhere.  All of the changes are based from current technologies, whether it is the increase in sophistication in on-line multi-player computer gaming, Virtual Reality goggles that allow you to add an additional layer as you walk down the street,  or remotely operated taxis to drive you to your destination.

The book is told from 3 alternating POVs– Sue (a police officer), Elaine (a forensic accountant) & Jack (a game programmer). Their viewpoints allow us to understand the world the story is set in, and introduced us to the other characters.  None of them had any prior knowledge of the crime they are tracking down, and the further secrets behind it, so we learn about what has happened as they do.

This isn’t a character-based book, but the three leads are fairly well fleshed out.

Once the background is out of the way the story really gets going, and it goes into full adventure mode– with chases, virtual battles, dangerous mistakes, giant leaps of logic, boy meets girl moments, and so on.

I found Halting State fun and mentally stimulating.

I read this for my Book Club M.  I think all of us present enjoyed it, although I would have been interested in hearing the view of our member who was on vacation and does not fall into any of the categories I listed above.

We spent some of our discussion time talking about how plausible the time frame of the book was, we didn’t convince each other in the end, but walking away with divergent viewpoints is fine.  The conversation drifted to technology in our lives, how much we do (or don’t) trust it, and where we thought high tech would take us.

I think this book was a good choice for our Silicon Valley based book club, which enjoys reading a wide variety of books.

Charles Stross’ Halting State is about a bank robbery in a MMORPG (like World of Warcraft, but it’s the future so it’s some different game). I like most of Stross’ books (the Jennifer Morgue ones don’t do much for me). His characters are competent and witty and they get up to some interesting stuff. There are cool things happening with interesting ideas behind them. The thing I was a bit meh on in this one was the second-person narration. It became invisible quick enough but still.

These things are pretty light reading and the neatness of the ideas are clearly primary. I mean, the characters are easy to root for but in kind of an action movie kind of way. They’re just a vehicle for describing the interesting things that are happening. That’s not a crippling fault by any means, but this doesn’t have the same brain bendingness that something like Accelerando had.

I read George Orwell’s 1984 when I was way too young and have carried its message with me – possibly too closely – through my career in technology and media.  Working in the space, its far too easy to see how the tables could be turned, allowing for a society with pervasive surveillance and monitoring to arise.  I already live in a country that’s covered with CCTV and find it a little too Big Brother like (and i’m not talking about the TV series here, folks).

In reading Halting State by Charles Stross, a similar – but less sinister and more dysfunctional – world view emerged. 

Stross creates a world where technology has (largely) been developed with the best of intentions but sometimes its failures or misuses lead to disastrous consequences.  In his near future, the characters wear glasses that automatically anticipate what their wearer needs and projects it for them – very cool – at first I couldn’t wait to sign up to get a pair.

But, what happens when these don’t function QUITE as you’d expect – at one point a policewoman wearing them has CopSpace (the all pervasive police information service that communicates with her glasses) crashes in the middle of a police manuever leaving her helpless.  Do we want to be THAT dependent on our techology?  The idea of CopSpace is sinister enough – but devices that make us dependent on it and that aren’t reliable make it seem truely scary, to me. And what of the character who’s fighting in a virtual world on his and ends up getting stabbed in the real world because he forgets the guy he’s fighting in the virtual world is standing only a few feet away in the real world? 

One chapter is called “Systems Fail People Die” – and I think this illustrates perfectly what could go wrong in a world where we become overdependent on underperforming technology and systems. 

The plot of Halting State revolves around a blur between the boundaries of reality, gaming and other media.  Pervasive gaming – via the video glassses – is prevelant and characters are faced with deciphering when messages they get from their ‘games’ might be from authorities in the real world and not just characters.  Initially, it sounds cool and entertaining – but as the characters find out that these systems could be using them as pawns in something far more sinister, it becomes creepier.

Please don’t read this as me being anti-technology – I’m not.  Much of the technology that Stross describes could be wonderful and make our world a better place – but there’s a fine line between personal services and surveillance systems.  Thanks to Phillip for suggesting this good read.

On the upside of this and back in the real world, I heard from Ken Brady (CEO of Genkii) today about the launch of Sparkle – the first live mobile touchpoint that allows users to communicate into virtual worlds while they’re on the go.  Seems great to me – allowing users a pervasive connection to their virtual lives (ok, it’s only Second Life for now but that’s still damn cool) can only strengthen their relationship with the content and services there.  From what I can see (still wishing for an iPhone here!) this is a great first step towards something I blogged about shortly after I met Ken in Korea last year.

Check out this video of how it works and the coverage its had on TechCrunch:

Where do you begin with this book.  When books have great thoughts in them and I’m in a remembering mood I bend back the lower corners to be able to find whatever it was made you chuckle, or roll your eyes back and think, at the time.  This book has a host of them.

First comment has to be the narrative style — I’d heard of Second Person narration, but can’t remember second person narration that shifts in each chapter and is identified up front.  As Cory Doctorow points out, it works.  And it makes the tech fiction in the pieces really punch.

Your smartphone’s nagging you about hitting your transferrable overtime limit, and you’ve already blown your quota for time off this month; if this goes on you’re gonnae have to put it on upaid hours and file for a time credit from Human Resources.  It’s even been threatening to snitch it to the Occupational Health Department that your Work/Life Balance is out of kilter; if this goes on, it’ll be off to the compulsory Yoga and Aromatherapy classes with Stress Management for you.

Classic to think what a public service employee (she’s a Scottish Cop) will have to put up with when the phone is tracking time and talking to the bureaucracies.

In the office we’ve started using both enterprise video conferencing and local Skype or video ichat.  No longer first generation, but hardly ready to jump the Chasm.  Here is a great one for when video interviewing is in full adoption — and the computers have the ability to manipulate the signal in realtime:

‘Good.’ Mr. Pin-Stripe nods, jerkily, at which point the brilliantly photorealistic anonymizing pipeline stumbles for a the first time, and his avatar falls all the way down the wrong side of uncanny valley — his neck crumples inwards disturbingly before popping back into shape.  (You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the pixels all of the time.)

And of course the implication of ubiquitous broadband wifi, gps-driven data overlays and internet-enabled glasses could be quite useful to the police — or Polis as they are called in independent Scotland in the 2020s.

CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course.  Blink and it descends in its full glory.  Here’s the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath (orange jackets,blue probation service tags saying they’re collecting litter.)  There’s the green tree of signs sporouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat.  Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticket, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social services case files, where applicable.  There’s a snowy blizzard of number plates sliding up and down Bruntsfield Place behind you, and the odd flashing green alert tag in the side roads.  This is the twenty-first century, and all the terabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world, sprayed across it in a Technicolor mass of officious labelling and crime notes.

Sound far-fetched?  Consider the Lumus glasses that were at CES this year.

Of course it doesn’t have to be technology to be good science fiction.  It can also be something as archane as describing bureaucracy … just in the future.

‘It’s about the car insurance.’ [...] ‘What’s the damage?’ ‘Well, Sally’s carrying six points on her license and she had that car-park smash last year.  She’ll lose her no-claims discount, which’ll cost us about eight hundered extra when we renew the insurance.’
‘Ouch.’  Driving’s an expensive pastime even before you factor in deisel at €5 a litre, speed cameras every quarter kilometre on all the A-roads, and insurance companies trying to rape the motorists to recoup their losses on teh flood-plain property slump. ‘Who are you with?’
‘Nationwide.’
Well, that’s a relief – an old-fashioned mutual society, instead of a pay-by-credit-card web server owned by Nocturnal Aviation Associates Dot Com (motto: ‘We fly by night’) out the back of a cybercafe in Lagos.

Or just some fun — thinking of how unsettling virtual reality can be when mixed with real life.

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man that wasn’t there.  He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.

You realize while reading Halting State by Charles Stross, you don’t understand spoken English anymore. You understand geek talk, most of the cryptography, TCP/IP routers, even the MMORPG scenarios. But not most of the book conversation between Beings with English as Native Language.

You convince yourself that is only a minor distraction because you are young enough to be out of touch with the future in which the virtual reality theme story is set. But before long this minor distraction threatens to blow up once you are lost also in the second person narrative covering cyclically three protagonists in successive chapters.

You agree the ploy is creative story telling nevertheless annoyed every time you loose track of which protagonist the you is midway in a chapter. You need to flip to the helpful chapter title (with the protagonist name) to get your bearings.

Before long you end up wondering how you managed to pick this book. You realize you have not read SF for a while. So after consulting Cosma, Jennifer and Wikipedia (in that order), you decide to choose from the Hugo losers because of your underdog stature. And you spot Halting State, the 2008 Hugo nominee, at your book store. So you better justify your money spent. The book is getting insteresting anyway. Finish it, you tell yourself.

And you did it by the next day, bleary eyed.

You want to give a plot summary of the story but was warned by Google that someone had gone steps ahead in the Wikipedia. So you link to the page before being warned. But you know not many of the few who read this review would click that link. You proceed to summarize.

In the near future, a bank is robbed of unknown assets (a cybercrime) inside a multiplayer video game. The bank is supposed to maintain a stable economy inside the game to maximize fun. In real life, an employee of the company that manages the bank panic and call the real cops. Then a geek who is on the pay roll of the company goes missing. Before long it is revealed that the company is just a front for other cryptographic activities. Three protagonists, a cop, an insurance agent, a geek, try to comprehend and take turns to reveal and explain whats going on. They start separately and their wordlines meet and mingle. Stumbling through a few MMORPG scenarios with frantic search for and reclamation of the loot, two real life murders, a few revelations later the mole is ferreted out and captured.

In between you encounter various ways of how virtual reality and extreme dependency on it in the future can go wrong. How a nation state can be captured without physical war, but simply by capturing and controlling its communication networks. The title Halting State, you gather, is a pun on such a stand still. Just as in any computer program the final equilibrium state beyond which transition is not possible is its halting state.

And along the way you enjoyed the authors take on techno-babble and techno-clutter. And enough snazzy observations strewn around to make you smile. Like the one where

You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the pixels all of the time…

And of course, the book is full of video games. You have played some for many long hours. You have grown-up cousins who twitch their thumbs in sleep, blowing virtual worlds to smithereens in their dreams. You have long stopped playing role playing games. You have long realized the difference between habit and addiction. Your idea of fun has changed. So you shudder when you read the geek in the book, while playing a video game, observes:  

Someday we are all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their life out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow…

You are reminded of The Matrix (and how the sequels gloriously deconstructed the idea). 

Nevertheless you are thankful that the future depicted in this book, a future where virtual and real merge consciously and judiciously, a future where cops operate in a higher tech. level to protect us, a future where humans make love normally, cry, eat eggs and are allowed to walk on roads, is much more sensible and pleasant than those in other futuristic SF. You think it is because the author is intrigued and secure with his current reality, he doesn’t require to create a future one different in every other way from his living one. But you know there you are just guessing. 

You suddenly think two of the three protagonists are not required to tell this story. But by then you have finished reading the book. 

And you realize your second person did enjoy it.

Halting State cover art

“he turns the charm on you with a nod and a great white smile that reveals about two hundred dollars’ worth of American dental prostheses that he probably wears because it’s the only way to stop the bairns from screaming and running away before he can eat them.”

(It also says a lot about how immersive Stross’s style is that my best friend got half way through the book without noticing that it was voiced entirely in the second-person.)

Anyway, go read it: you’ll enjoy it!

I finished Charles Stross’ most recent novel, Halting State, last night.  This is the third Stross book I’ve read in a row, and this novel reinforces my admiration for his writing.

Halting State takes place in the very near future – about the year 2025 in a newly-independent Scotland.  It’s a policing/detective novel of sorts, with an introductory whodunit that the main characters try to solve as the novel progresses.  The scene of the crime?  A massive MMORPG run by a shadowy gaming firm based in Edinburgh.  Someone has hacked into the game and stolen a truckload of virtual-reality goods that can be sold for real cash on eBay.

Of course with Stross, this is just the beginning of a massive web of intersections and extrapolations.  I won’t give too much away here.

After having read this novel, I continue to see two general weaknesses in Stross:

1. His characterization is often fairly flat.
2. His endings are rushed and/or tangential.

Stross tries hard to flesh out his protagonists – Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby – but he’s no Pynchon.  There’s one particular backstory with Reed that in particular is supposed to get us to see deeper into Reed’s motivations, but I felt it was almost tacked on as an afterthought.  And the denouement is really a birds’ nest of intertwining threads that he tries – and almost succeeds – in wrapping up neatly.  Almost.

So – enough with the criticisms.  I actually loved Halting State.  I would recommend it to any sci-fi fan.  It’s not quite the book that Accelerando is, but that’s saying a lot.  Accelerando is up there in my “book of the year” lists.

One final nitpick: I started reading this novel with the hopes that Stross would explore the term “halting state” as used near the end of Accelerando – that is, a mental or cognitive block that affects wetware.  This novel didn’t really get into AI much at all, so I was left wanting.

The last few years have been a particularly good time to be a fan of hard s.f.  The latest crop of writers have been the strongest to hit the scene since the Golden Age, and the most prolific of these writers by far is Charles Stross.

Stross’ early works put him at the forefront of Singularity (the rapture of the geeks) stories and set him apart as a writer of incredible ambition.  Accelerando in particular was a novel with some lofty goals, which was doomed to failure.  The story is a generational saga that begins in a future that is at the outer reaches of human comprehension and then leaps forward from there, making it nearly impossible to read although worth the effort of trying.

His more recent novels have been far more controlled, and all the better for it.  Glasshouse, which was up for the Hugo last year but lost to Rainbow’s End, was one of the most enjoyable and imaginative reads I’ve encountered in years, combining the Singularity with Desperate Housewives and game theory.

In addition, Stross is also notable in that his stories tend to be focused largely on the economic aspects of the worlds he creates.  He’s not unique in this regard (Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom springs to mind), but he may be the first major s.f. writer to make it such a reoccuring theme of nearly all his novels.  Besides the economics 2.0 of Accelerando he’s also written of a bank heist in a virtual world (Halting State) and an entire series on Mercantilism (The Merchant Princes), all of which are well worth reading.

Stross has become a key part of any modern s.f. collection, and he’s only getting better.

Tonight is the Hugo deadline, which means I need to stop procrastinating and actually figure out what I like best.

Hugo voting works on an instant runoff system. Here’s my order, and why:

1. Halting State by Charles Stross
2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.
3. The Last Colony by John Scalzi
4. Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
5. Brasyl by Ian McDonald

Halting State is first because it was the most exciting story of the four I read. It was also the most daring, breaking literary conventions by narrating completely in second person—and yet was still readable, even enjoyable. Highly enjoyable. I don’t necessarily think it will win, but it’s my first choice, because Stross took real risks and managed to produce something worthwhile and insightful, as I said earlier.

I really liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but it’s not science fiction. It’s speculative fiction, and the only thing that sets it apart, genre-wise, from plain ol’ ordinary boring literature is that it’s speculating about an alternate past with imaginary people, rather than just imaginary people. It’s not even fantasy! However, of the five books up here, it’s the only one that stands on real literary merit, and it was nominated.

What’s the difference between literary and non-literary? Most science fiction is rote description of events in some order, sometimes even delving into the complicated literary event of the flashback (note the irony), with some character development. Intermingled are usually plain descriptions and dialogue about various scientific ideas. But nothing transcends.

“Transcends?” What the hell kind of jargon talk is that?

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—that book has a completely different relationship with language, description and ideas than the others. Chabon doesn’t just describe the world, he brings it alive. Take this character:

Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.

Make sense now? You just don’t find that in any of the other books. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is like that at every turn—not science fiction, but better fiction than all the rest combined. Number two.

A side note: The sad state of science fiction is that only one book on the Hugo nominees list reads like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and it’s not really science fiction or fantasy at all. For pure writing, that book was meat, the rest are candy. Let’s just keep that straight, alright?

(The other sad state of the Hugo awards is that all the nominees are old(er than me) white guys. But you know, let’s leave that one the hell alone for right now.)

This is where it gets hard:

The Last Colony doesn’t deserve a Hugo, because it’s not that great, but neither did Sawyer’s Hominids. I can only speculate that the other books that year (2003) were truly horrible or everyone was suffering from a bad case of mass hallucination. I like Scalzi’s writing in general better than I like Sawyer’s—even though I thought Rollback was a better book than The Last Colony. On the off chance that neither Stross nor Chabon wins, I’d like to see Scalzi walk away with a Hugo for the whole Old Man’s War saga, even though it’d be represented by the weakest of the three. If Zoe’s Tale is a good as everything I’m hearing, Scalzi will stand a chance to pick one up for Best Novel next year—his career is still rising. Scalzi third, Sawyer fourth.

Brasyl is number five because I was unable to read it. I sat down earlier today and tried—but I couldn’t seem to get into it. In the eleventh hour, that makes all the difference. Next year I’ll hopefully be able to get to the books earlier. I’m sorry, Mr. McDonald, if you ever read this, it’s nothing personal.

The only other place I feel qualified at all to make judgments on voting is the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, because I’ve seen four of five of those:

1. Stardust
2. Enchanted
3. Heroes, Season 1
4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
5. The Golden Compass

Quickly, The Golden Compass sucked in so many ways. I didn’t see Harry Potter, but it had to have been slightly better. Heroes was wonderful until halfway through the season, when they dropped one of the most important minor characters with… no explanation whatsoever. I know the mother of one of the stuntmen in Enchanted, and she speaks worlds of good things about him and the movie. Stardust was a beautiful book and a beautiful movie.

Done, and done. Now we wait.

At Circus Smirkus Camp, I worked with an aerialist who would tell campers when introducing a particularly painful stretch, “New stretches don’t hurt. They’re new and exciting!”

Halting State, by Charles Stross, is new and exciting. It’s different from anything I’ve read before, simply because the narrative is written in second person rather than third or first person. Instead of introducing you to the thoughts of an outsider, or letting you see through a protagonist’s eyes, Stross puts you through the story, tells you the manic jumble of tangential thoughts that you are experiencing right then and there—as if you are a character in his world. It is a mad experiment that seems to work, and in fact probably carries the book.

The year is 2018 and you are either or all at once Sue the police officer, Elaine the forensic accountant, or Jack the computer programmer. Extrapolate current online gaming culture to a future with easy wearable computing and fast distributed networks. Everyone has a head-up display (a la Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, or Elizabeth Bear’s Undertow), everyone is playing one game or another. Only, some games are more reality-based than others. When an online bank gets robbed, the effects reverberate through the real world.

Halting State is a bold and refreshing take on narrative storytelling, which happens to be set in the exciting world of computer crime. It adds a new skin on subjects that many authors have touched before. Books like the Dream Park novels by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, parts of the Otherland series by Tad Williams, and even Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson come to mind.

Aside from being difficult to follow at times (because of the experimental structure), the novel suffers from the a few of the frustrating afflictions that one sees in other science fiction. Everything turns into an international terrorist plot, with the characters mingling with super-double-secret organizations to beat the Bad Guys, as well as the burning desire to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and tie up loose ends with a final chapter of exposition. The characters suddenly gain lucidity they didn’t have and always seem to be able to make the right decision at the end and be redeemed.

Halting State does drive home one sad fact about the current gaming industry. Most games that see mass-market are based more on business models and earning potentials than innovation and good gameplay. In the future Stross creates for the industry, things do not seem much better.

At the end I found myself thoroughly satisfied. This is definitely not a book to rush through, but to savor the many delightful moments that make any geek giggle. Stross is not only a mad genius but also a sharp, witty writer, producing philosophical gems such as, “If only families came with safewords, like any other kind of augmented-reality game.” The book isn’t perfect‚ in fact, it probably rides mainly on the strength of its new narrative approach, but it makes for a fun read, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve still got to read Brasyl, by Ian McDonald. Three more days!

Lindsay and I have been attending “light things on fire and blow them up” celebrations, and will continue in that manner through much of the weekend. This evening we hung out at Whitehorse Beach in Plymouth, MA. Two miles of bonfires and fireworks:

I finished Hugo-nominated Halting State by Charles Stross and found it thoroughly enjoyable, exciting, and daring. A much more in depth review will follow before the voting deadline on Monday, I promise.

Happy Independence Day! Let us know what you blew up!

I vintras läste jag en radda SF-böcker. Tyvärr visade sig alla tre vara riktigt torra och oengagerande.

Halting State

Charles Stross, 2007, 368 s

Charles Stross igen. Jag har blivit besviken på flera av hans senaste böcker, men återvänder trots allt som en fluga till lågan; han är en ovanligt produktiv idéfontän och det är hans extrapolerande fantasi som lockar. Tyvärr lyckas han sällan lika väl med själva handlingen i sina böcker och Halting State är därför en ganska typisk Stross-bok. Denna gång är ämnet massiva online-spel och Stross har som vanligt gjort sin läxa: terminologi och nisch-fenomen känns äkta för den som tillbringat (alltför) mycket tid i dessa spel. Som vanligt finns här ett antal intressanta idéer, men intrigen känns krystad och förvirrad samtidigt som jag egentligen aldrig bryr mig om hur det går för bokens karaktärer. Motivationen minskar och de sista hundra sidorna är mödosamma att ta sig igenom. En mycket typisk Stross alltså, tyvärr.

Spook Country

William Gibson, 2007, 384 s

William Gibson skriver mycket bättre än Stross, men det räcker tyvärr inte denna gång. Spook Country är en fortsättning på Gibsons tidigare bok Pattern Recognition och är snarlik när det gäller miljö, handling och karaktärer, bara mycket tråkigare. Det är synd, för Gibson är en av SF-genrens bästa stilister och är ofta ett nöje att läsa enbart för prosans skull. Dock inte denna gång. Tre parallella historier sätts igång och de ska uppenbarligen flätas samman mot slutet, men det känns som om Gibson helt enkelt tappade sugen. Inspirationen saknas och allt faller platt till marken. Läs Pattern Recognition i stället, det är en betydligt bättre bok.

Execution Channel

Ken MacLeod, 2007, 288 s

Detta är den första av Ken MacLeods böcker jag har vågat mig på, och tyvärr, förmodligen även den sista. Handlingen inleds lovande: ett kärnvapen används vid ett attentat i Skottland och en komplicerad intrig fokuserad på konspirationsteorier och organiserad disinformation, särskilt via bloggosfären, sätts i rullning. Tyvärr är MacLeods karaktärer dödligt träiga; de raderar effektivt ut det eventuella läsnöje intrigens idéer kunnat bjuda på. Tyvärr trasslar även intrigen så småningom in sig i ett ogenomträngligt grått nystan och jag får verkligen kämpa för att orka till slutet. Pust.

Ska jag ge upp hoppet när det gäller SF, eller har jag bara haft en ovanlig räcka med otur?

I was talking to a co-worker at the store the other day when somehow or another the 2nd person perspective came up.  During said conversation I mentioned, in half-seriousness, that it should just be called the D&D perspective since it used so often there (You step into the room and…., As you open the door….; You set foot into the obviously untrapped hallway….).  Little did I know the current Hugo nominated novel Halting State by Charlie Stross is written in the 2nd Person.  I’m interested in giving it a shot, but I can’t say I’d like it.  The idea just so seems so counter intuitive to how I usually approach fiction that I’m not sure I could stomach it for long.

Regardless you can check out this post from Adventures In Reading for a little more info and on the blogger’s (Joe Sherry) difficulty with the novel; oddly enough the 2nd Person thing only played a part in his difficulty.  Read on for his take.

If you’re a programmer/gamer geek and looking for a gripping book that you won’t be able to put down then look no further than Halting State. I’ve been on a Stross kick for the past few months, having read Accelerando, Glass House and Iron Sunrise. Halting State is easily his most engaging book I’ve read so far.

It takes place in the near future where ubiquitous computing has started to take hold via mobile phone networks. This is a future where online roleplaying games and live action roleplaying games are an international past time (as we already can see happening now with the gaming industry being a bigger industry than the movie industry). The story starts off in with a bank robbery by a band of Orcs in a virtual world — a band robbery that should not have been possible because of the digital cryptography keys involved.

As much as I enjoy video games and fantasy settings, the book thankfully takes place mostly in the real world — although in the age of ubiquitous computing and common place augmented reality, who is to say what is real? It reminded me of War Games meets Cryptonomicon and World of Warcraft. Stross manages to get all the geeky elements right, and I’m not just saying that because my player character in my weekly table-top campaign is a were-bearbarian.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but this is a wonderful whodunit, and if this is what Charles Stross has in store for us in the future then I’m going to have to make more room on my shelf.

Favorite quote: “It’s TCP/IP over AD&D!”

Also see

• The Attention Age, an essay I was inspired to write after reading Accelerando
• Stross’ blog
• Interview with Stross on io9.com