I’m nearly finished with Halting State, by Charles Stross. The book is a not-quite-cyberpunk/near future emerging infotech conundrum story that would probably be entirely unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t spent way too time nerding about with computers. I have spent a lot of time doing that, and there are plenty of points where I have to re-read something three times to see if I’ve got it before moving on with a shrug and a slightly lessened sense of interest.
The premise, such as it is, has to do with a mysterious and supposedly impossible in-game robbery that takes place within a Scotland-based (as in, that’s where the servers live) MMORPG. Considering that it’s a gamerobbery, the reader might think it doesn’t make 640K worth of difference, but considering the fact that more MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds (ie., Second Life) have items ranging from swords to ”real estate (a bit paradoxical, that) that retain an actual cash value in the real world, the notion that a multi-million dollar robbery could take place through the assault of a band of orcs on a virtual castle is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
You follow the story from the perspective of an unlikeable lesbian cop (whose orientation plays absolutely NO role in the story other than to remind us that hey, lesbians matter too), a mousy-but-aggressive forensic accountant trying to determine liability on the heist, and an insecure but brilliant game programmer brought in for his expertise. The story is told, by the way, in the second person perspective, and I can’t help but wonder when reading “You’re looking out across a verdant green rain-forest canopy that sprawls across the foothills of a mountain range so tall that the peaks are a vulpine blue haze in the distance…” if Stross wasn’t trying to evoke the text-based role playing games that were popular when I was a kid in the 1980s. Or maybe a choose-your-own adventure, which was just a print version of the same thing.
I almost expected Stross to write, “You see a stone. There is a castle to the East, surround by a moat.” At which point, I would type: “Pick up stone” and the computer would respond, “You have a stone”, and then I would of course type: “Go East” and the description would change yet again.
I’ll admit that I nearly put this book down more than once in favor of some of the others in my cue - I’ve been chewing through novels, six in the past month - but the story redeemed itself somewhat past the halfway point. This is post-modern sci fi, mind you, not the richly textured and written out worlds of John C. Wright and Michael Flynn, whom I have been enjoying immensely since discovering them in April.
But sometimes Stross gets it right. As the story moves from financial gaming anomaly to cloak-and-dagger international espionage story, the pace picks up and the themes get more interesting. This morning, I came across one section that falls squarely into my concerns about the future of America. Interpreting things rather differently than Tom Kratman did in Caliphate, Europe has (without demographic explanations offered) overtaken the United States to become one of three economic power players in the world of Halting State. One of the government intelligence honchos in the story has a moment to perform a soliloquy, bringing the players (and the readers) in this crazy alternate reality game turned real up to speed on what’s driving the world powers:
“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happens in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree - his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and France - and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of - sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache - a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”
Who is we? That’s the question you’re asking yourself…
” ‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in - call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play - they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. but today, our infrastructure - Europe’s - is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out…”
If Kratman is wrong, and Europe doesn’t become a Sharia-ridden Muslim conglomerate (a Caliphate is a bit too far-fetched for me), I think this scenario is a likely one. As discussed here yesterday, manufacturing in places like America is dead. “Infrastructure” isn’t just roads and airports and rail-or water-way systems anymore; it’s equally if not more importantly about bandwidth. Information is what drives our economy now. Where that leads us, it’s hard to say.
Not having finished the book just yet, I can’t say I’d recommend it. The stylistic choices made from second person perspective to geek speak to phonetic representations of Scottish linguistic eccentricities make it, in some spots, more trouble than its worth to read. The policewoman who gets to tell at least part of the story is a throwaway character; she’s abrasive, a bit stupid, and annoying. The story only gets better when her role in the tale diminishes, and the other two characters (who are less two-dimensional) get a chance to shine.
I’ve been entertained by it, but I can’t say it lives up to the glowing praise on the jacket or that I’ll go out looking for more of Stross’s books.
Incidentally, I finished the first-and-a-half draft of my first Science Fiction short story last night. It weighs in at about 7100 words right now, and needs some pruning, watering, and a lot of editing before I decide if it’s fit for general consumption. I cannot describe to you, however - regardless of whether it ever sees daylight - how great it feels to have finally finished one. (I’ve only finished one other story since the first one I completed in the fifth grade that won me a writing contest and a trip to a publishing house.) I was ecstatic as I drove home from the train with my notebooks full of scribble and ten typed pages on a jump drive in my pocket.
Here’s to hoping that I’ve broken the dam, and that many more stories are to come.
