Cops and insurance companies get involved and investigate. I admit I didn't quite follow all of it.īut basically, it goes like this: crime is committed inside a video game when a bunch of in-game objects (spells, swords, treasure) are stolen. Everyone will be a gamer, to the point where a virtual crime committed inside of a game could have global economic effects to the tune of billions of Euros! Possibly. The only difference is we will use VR goggles (the future of 1994!) and the U.K.
In 202X, we'll all still be playing online games with fantasy-themed avatars and using the same tired netspeak. Stross plays it safe by predicting almost nothing. Near-future stuff is tough because if you predict wrong, you just look silly (where are the intergalactic army brigades of 1997, Joe Haldeman?). If you do not, though, it is a dull, unimaginative slice of near-future sci-fi that was quite possibly dated before the manuscript was fully edited. Maybe if you play Everquest enough to think it is funny to call it "Evercrack" (do people still play EverQuest?), then this book is a hilarious romp of in-jokes and references. I did not like this book, perhaps because it is about the online gaming community, by which I mean obsessives who spend way too much time playing World of Warcraft, and my idea of a video game binge still tends more toward playing through all of Super Mario World in one night. Then I realized that it is obnoxious to force readers to suffer an affected writing style or stylistic quirk unless you have a really good reason, and "because it's cute and mildly thematically relevant" is not a good enough reason, are you listening, Charles Stross? Then I thought maybe I would do the whole thing in code like a l33t haXor, which would have been appropriate since this book finds it the height of amusement to throw around with-it language like "n00b" and "pwned." I briefly toyed with doing the same for my review, but then I remembered that I already did that, and it wasn't that amusing. Charles Stross decided it would be a good idea to write Halting State entirely in second person.
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