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. Urn:oclc:474021988 Republisher_date 20120312001402 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120309225513 Scanner Stross decided it would be a good idea to write Halting State entirely in second person. Urn:lcp:haltingstate00stro:epub:5400ed04-4a6a-4ed5-8be3-b8ecfd50e2a6 Extramarc Princeton University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier haltingstate00stro Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1hh7m60p Isbn 9780441014989Ġ441014984 Lccn 2007015872 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL17892761M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:49:06 Boxid IA174701 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid_2 X0008 DonorĪllen_countydonation Edition 1st ed.

Halting State by Charles Stross