Halting State

I read this in my quest to read the entire list of Hugo & Nebula nominees & winners, #412 of 629. It was Hugo nominated in 2008, and it was the last of the seven listed Stross books to read. I read Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise (sequel) & Accelerando in quick succession. The latter was incomprehensible; the other two were solid but took a little work to get through.

Halting State was very enjoyable though. It's essentially a cyberpunk detective mystery, where the lead characters are working to solve a robbery that takes place within an online game & carries impact into the real world. The best part of this book was its laugh-out-loud use of metaphors. I listened to the audio, read by an actor with a Scottish accent, which only made it that much funnier.

The one odd thing about this book is that it's written entirely in the second person. This is easy to adapt to, but you have to pay attention because there are only short pauses when switching characters, and if you don't detect the switch, it can get confusing (see what I did there). For that reason, sight-reading might be preferred, but then you'd lose the great narration. That's where I took one star off. There is a sequel called Rule #34 that I'll read at some point; from what I can tell, it's a separate story set in the same world.