Let me say upfront that this is a book for gamers and geeks and technology is one of the main characters. It might be a bit hard-going if you do not have a familiarity with virtual reality worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft (more so World of Warcraft than Second Life) and basic concepts of networking. Stross does a bit of explaining but he expects the reader to know about routers,bandwidth,TCP/IP, and similar concepts. I could hold my own because I have a Second Life account, have played a bit of World of Warcraft, my job involves servers and routers, and I read blogs like Gizmodo, Techmeme, and TechCrunch. I don't want to scare non-techies away from this book; it is a cracking good story and the technological implications are fascinating. You might want to use it as a starting point to learn more about a probable technological future.

Halting State is written in third person imperative computer game voice. If you have ever played any of the text based games (i.e. no pictures) you will recognize it immediately, e.g. "You are are in a forest. A path leads qway from you to the north. In the distance you see a cottage."

The story begins with a virtual bank robbery. A band of orcs rob a bank in the virtual reality world of Avalon Four. The stuff in the bank isn't real in the physical sense; it exists as table entries in a database. Least you wonder about the value of stealing virtual objects, you need to know that in our present, it was only lat year that eBay decided to prohibit players from autcioning off gold, weapons, armour, booty and other virtual objects acquired in World of Warcraft on eBay. Virtual objects can have real world value. The Real World is sometimes referred to as "meatspace" in this book.

Complicating the investigation is the arrival of a team from the company that vetted the company, Hayek Associates, before it went public. They want to make sure that they are not to blame if Hayek fails.

The point of view shifts between three main characters: police sergeant Sue Smith, forensic acountant Elaine Barnaby, and consultant/game programmer Jack Reed. The steps each take to solve the problems that arise are well done and interesting. Sue goes at the problem as a pollice officer while Elaine and Jack go into the game.

I can't go into too much more about the book without spoilers or writing an impossibly long review. Let's leave it that the story is more than a virtual theft and ends up a matter of the security of the world-wide network infrastructure.

All of the technology used in the book is entirely plausable and not that far in the future. Cell phones are considerably more powerful and capable of acting as distributed network nodes. People have glasses, not for improving vision, but for acquiring and processing information. The police have CopSpace.Wearing glasses, a police officer can see the world overlayed with the information they need. Massive multitasking capabilities. Other profession see overlays related to their needs. A gamer can actually enter the game using the glasses as an interface.

The author works in some digs at the U.S. and predicts that by 2018, when this book is set, the United States has become a minor player in the world due to an obsolete information infrastructure and our desire to keep rusty aircraft carriers afloat. This isn't all that unrealistic. Our broadband access lags far behind a lot of other industrialized nations (yes, they are smaller in size and telecom is state-owned) and advances in cell phone applications take years to make to the U.S.

Stross also considers the use of virtual worlds as untraceable conduits to pass information. Recently there was discussion that Second Life might be used as a virtual training ground for terrorists but the reality is more that terrorists could meet in a virtual world to exchange information,information that could be embedded in objects that are exchanged as just one of other of the millions of transactions that occur daily.

I started off by saying that this is a book for gamers and geeks. I suggest that you shouldn't be put off from reading Halting State if you don't fit one of those categories. Stross has important things to say and there are implications for our future if we continue to lag in development of our information infrastructure. That and it is fun to see what could be reality in a few years.