Halting State: a thriller set in the MMORPG industry

October 8th, 2007 by tim finin

Halting State is a new science fiction novel by Hugo-award winner Charles Stross that the author describes as a “a near-future thriller of skullduggery and rules lawyering in the shadowy world of massively multiplayer virtual reality games”.

“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…” (link)

If you are intrigued, you can read the first prolog and the three chapters (1, 2, 3) posted on Charlie Stoss’s blog.

Great title, by the way. Amazingly, when I googled for ‘halting state’, all but two of the top 50 results were about the book. So much for automata theory.

Posted in MMOGs, social media |

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