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Halting State
- Narrated by: Robert Ian MacKenzie
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls Hugo winner Charles Stross’ novel Halting State a “brilliantly conceived techno-crime thriller.”
The year is 2012, and China, India, and the United States are waging an infowar for economic domination. With innocent gamers mere pawns in the hands of electronic intelligence agencies, programmer Jack Reed is tasked with ferreting out the plot of those who would gladly trade global turmoil for personal gain.
Critic reviews
Featured Article: Level up with 25+ awesome litRPGs
LitRPG means Literary Role Playing Game. Simply put, it’s the book version of watching someone play a video game, usually one that’s set up like an MMO (massively multiplayer online) RPG. It’s a blend of sci-fi and fantasy, depending on how it comes to be that our main character ends up living inside a virtual reality. the point of LitRPG is not how we get there, but that we get to be in this virtual reality period, living life as a badass video-game character. Beat the grind and submerse yourself in these addictive LitRPGs.
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Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself.…
By: Colin Bateman
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Going Grey
- Ringer, Book 1
- By: Karen Traviss
- Narrated by: Euan Morton
- Length: 22 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Ian isn't crazy. Life would be a lot simpler if he was. He's eighteen, on the run, and scared - the shape-shifting delusions he's had since childhood have turned out to be real. He's the result of a dynamic mimicry project intended to help undercover agents "go grey" and blend in unnoticed. Now the biotech company wants its property back, and the only people he can trust are two private military contractors sent to find him...
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Oddly wonderful
- By Barbara Kindle Customer on 08-24-15
By: Karen Traviss
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The Devil You Know
- By: Mike Carey
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stomping ground. It may seem like a good ghostbuster can charge what he likes and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle, but there's a risk: sooner or later he's going to take on a spirit that's too strong for him. When Castor accepts a seemingly simple ghost-hunting case at a museum in the shadowy heart of London, what should have been a perfectly straightforward exorcism is rapidly turning into the Who Can Kill Castor First Show, with demons and ghosts all keen to claim the big prize.
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Horror combined with misogynistic characters
- By Diana on 01-11-19
By: Mike Carey
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Reconstruction
- By: Mick Herron
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
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When a young man breaks into South Oxford Nursery School with a gun and takes a group of hostages, teacher Louise Kennedy is fearful. But Jaime Segura isn’t there on a homicidal mission. Bad Sam Chapman - head of the intelligence service’s internal security force, the Dogs - tries to find out what Jaime is after. But the only person Jaime will talk to is Ben Whistler, an MI6 colleague of Jaime’s lover, Miro - who has gone missing with a quarter of a billion pounds....
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worst reader ever
- By mimz on 06-25-21
By: Mick Herron
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Doughnut
- By: Tom Holt
- Narrated by: Ray Sawyer
- Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn't have any money. Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend, a renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died. By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit box to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions.
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A fun world for scifantasy fans
- By illgnosis on 06-19-13
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Cold Granite
- Logan McRae, Book 1
- By: Stuart MacBride
- Narrated by: Steve Worsley
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch: strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he's only the first. There's a serial killer stalking the Granite City, and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die.
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Great Story -- But NOT For The Faint Of Heart!
- By AK Raven on 06-27-17
By: Stuart MacBride
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Market Forces
- By: Richard K. Morgan
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you buy and sell when the global markets reach saturation point? The markets themselves. Thirty years from now the big players in global capitalism have moved on from commodities. The big money is in conflict investment. The corporations keep a careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution that burn constantly around the world. They guage who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence, and power. In return for a slice of the action when the war is won.
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Good easy listen
- By GGodman on 06-07-05
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London Falling
- The Shadow Police, Book One
- By: Paul Cornell
- Narrated by: Damian Lynch
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
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Performance
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Detective Inspector James Quill is about to complete the drugs bust of his career. Then his prize suspect, Rob Toshack, is murdered in custody. Furious, Quill pursues the investigation, co-opting intelligence analyst Lisa Ross and undercover cops Costain and Sefton. But nothing about Toshack’s murder is normal. Toshack had struck a bargain with a vindictive entity, whose occult powers kept Toshack one step ahead of the law - until his luck ran out. Now, the team must find a 'suspect' who can bend space and time and alter memory itself. And they will kill again.
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Team Quill
- By Tango on 05-03-15
By: Paul Cornell
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What listeners say about Halting State
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- C. Hartmann
- 01-08-12
2 Smart Books Well Worth the Listen - Great Reader
I enjoy hard science fiction particularly when it comes in very long books or multiple book series -- with one or more of the following themes: modern space operas, complex storylines, detective or noir/cyberpunk overtones, cascading clever thoughts/dialogue and/or military. This has led me to works by Peter F. Hamilton (Void Trilogy, Greg Madel Series), Dan Simmons (Hyperion), Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space Trilogy, Terminal World), Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon) and most recently Charles Stross.
Halting State and Rule 34 are a swirling, clever, funny and very complex pair of police procedurals done just enough into the future to look at the next big thing in social engineering, computing, communications and just about anything else you can imagine.
I initially found it hard to get into the three rotating storylines and the fact that the narration is, oddly, in the second person -- but it was worth the work to do so. If you start the read, stay with it. It is like a fantastic rollercoaster that is always running just a bit above your comprehension. Fun is made of corporate-speak, internet over-connection and geeks galore -- but at the bottom this is a rock solid procedural with a clever and appealing set of smart characters.
The initial mechanism of a bank robbery of a bank that exists only within an online game should not deter those who are not gaming fans....it is just a first step. The fun begins with the FANTASTIC Scottish dialect (and absolutely tremendous performance by the reader) and will sweep you away as the twists and turns look like a cross between HOMELAND and a LaCarre novel. I have moved these two book up to my top ten list -- and hope that we get a wee bit more in the future.
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23 people found this helpful
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- Sean Vikoren
- 04-29-16
Can the story survive the narration?
Probably not.
Dear Robert Ian MacKenzie, please do something else with your life. You are one of the worst narrators to have given it a shot...and kudos for trying, but unlike your friends, I will tell you the truth: you can't do this job.
Dear Charles Stross, you really need to take a deeper interest in the business of your life. You are a great writer, but you would have been better off reading this yourself. Your writing is buried here. Please get your books redone. Continuous rising intonation and surprise can not be used for story telling. It's funny in a surprising way for about three minutes.
A glorious story with deep truths about our world. Buy the paper or Kindle.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Ed G
- 09-21-17
A Challenging Listen
As is usual for a book by Charles Stross, this one is very dense with detail. If you're distracted for even a moment, you should go back and listen to what you missed. It's likely that there was something important and Mr. Stross will probably not repeat it.
I listened to this book twice in a row. Finished it and went right back to the beginning. I'm glad I did because I really enjoyed the story and the second time I got much more from it.
Much of the story takes place in an online game, and the book is written in a POV game style. I'm not a gamer, but even I chuckled at things like "You are in a small room, a large desk takes up three sides..." There are three "player" characters. This took some getting used to, but I ended up liking it.
Halting State was written in 2007 and the author didn't get our present quite right (phones and iPods still separate devices for example), but nothing so flagrantly wrong that it's too distracting.
I am certainly no expert of Scottish accents, but I think the narrator did an excellent job.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Doug D. Eigsti
- 10-23-15
Tame Police Procedural
I failed to engage with this novel at even the most superficial level so as to be able to follow the story. I blame myself. I did listen to the entire novel and even started the sequel before punching out on the series. It is in that frame of mind that I write this review. When I started the book, I was excited to discover another novel exploring the concept of virtual reality—hopefully in the nerdy vein of Daniel Suarez’ DAEMON, Ernest Cline’s READY PLAYER ONE, or Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH. But this book is more of a police procedural, going about solving a crime that just happens to have taken place in cyber-space, and not at all an attempt to give the listener a sense of immersion into a virtual world.
The decision of the author Charles Stross to tell the tale in second person is—intentionally or not—disorienting and distancing and therefore not entirely successful. There is no identifiable protagonist, or maybe there is a new main character in every chapter. I am confused. Each chapter is told from the view-point of a different character and the second person “you” forces the listener to constantly change perspective and, on this audiobook, if you aren’t paying close attention at the start of each new section, you don’t know who “you” are supposed to be. More than once I did not know if “I” was supposed to be experiencing the story through the eyes of a woman until “I” reached for “my” lipstick. I think that this second person narration was the biggest obstacle preventing me from engaging with the novel.
When I first began the book I was thrilled to hear the heavy Scottish brogue of Robert Ian MacKenzie. It reminded me of Monty Python. In fact the reading is so Pythonesque as to be a distraction. I just couldn’t take the book seriously. I did keep listening until the end because MacKenzie is easy on the ears and some of his pronunciations are worth a rewind. But his accent amounts to what I can only label a language barrier. So, the heavy Scottish accent, the second persond narration, and the rather tame approach to virtual reality resulted in a dissatisfying time for me.
As to the plot—I gather that there has been some sort of cyber crime, committed within a massive multi-player online game. Now, as to how they go about investigating the crime and whether or not they solved it, don’t ask me. After listening to the whole book, I honestly cannot give you a single one of the character’s names or recount for you even the most simplistic outline of the story. That is how detached I was from this book.
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 08-22-11
An excellent listen with a dynamite plot
CS has unleashed a real winner with Halting State. Set in the near future, the author combines the worlds of online gaming and cyber-espionage with a unique multi-1st person narrative style. Both worlds are evolved in ways that are not only quite convincing, but also reveal a keen sense of where things are going. For example, the fact that online games develop a level of complexity that requires independent companies to manage ingame economic stability in order to maintain a level of "fun" by the participants rings true as outlined. What begins as an apparent farce, the robbery of an online game bank (in the gamespace) is slowly revealed to portend dramatic ramifications.
The characters are believable and engaging each in their own way. The twists and turns, along with the many surprises, both inside and outside the gaming world make for a riveting tale. Most near future sci-fi tends to minimally extrapolate current trends with sci-fi elements relegated to batman "utility belt" gimmicks; Halting State manages to leap ahead without leaving the reader behind and produces a world one can imagine existing in the next several years that is substantially different from our own, but still quite recognizable.
The narrator also deserves special kudos for pulling off a reading of a story set in Scotland where the accents are authentic, but easily understood and not overwhelming.
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- S. Phillips
- 08-19-19
E nunc i ate... taken too far.
I hate to say it, but the narrator killed it.
The story seemed okay, but I just couldn’t handle the performance.
It’s like the guy’s third grade teacher told him to enunciate and he took it way too far. You might think it was the Scottish accent. It’s not. There are characters for whom he doesn’t do it. It’s just the default voice and many of the major characters.
I’m about half way through the book, and I just can’t handle the monotonous goose stepping of syllables any more. Ev rey sing le syll ab le is sep a rate ed, and it’s killing me. If gives the whole thing this monotonous tone that just makes it drag. It’s almost as though it’s delivered as a series of punchlines for deadpan jokes... that sort of British humor cadence as though you’re downplaying something funny you just said, but it’s not a joke. The whole damn book is read like that, with the rare exception of a few characters without this affliction just to remind you what ordinary dialogue is supposed to sound like and renew the annoyance.
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- Steve
- 08-16-11
not snow crash
I was hoping for something with the style and depth that Neal Stephenson brought to Snow Crash. It wasn't even close. The story is told from multiple perspectives shifting between three' maybe four characters, without warning and just in case the reader is unable to follow the story, the writer finds the need to recap events throughout the story perhaps 8 times. The story takes place a little ways into the future and relies heavily on descriptions of current state of art technology. These will be dated in few years. In the end, the writer had to explain what took place. And, yes it was necessary.
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- Dennis D Duquette
- 07-28-17
POV its only flaw
This would have been absolutely amazing if Stross had only used 1st or 3rd person. Addressing the reader personally makes it harder for me to stay in the story.
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- Norman
- 01-16-17
My favorite book
Any additional comments?
Near future sci-fi, with new variants on crime, computing and living, that are not just plausible but seem prophetic. The characters are real and would be great friends. the follow up book is not as good but Charlie Stross writes great initial books.
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- S. Yates
- 08-14-16
Fun, technical, with just enough thrills
Any additional comments?
This turned out to be clever, satirical, well-plotted SF/techno-thriller. I'm glad I kept reading despite my difficulty in getting into the book at first. Stross has used three POV characters and each line is told in the second person, a POV I haven't seen much since my "choose your own adventure" days. Moreover, with it told from the second person as if you were three different characters, it is all the more disorienting as you leap from Elaine (a forensic accountant with a medieval battle reenactment hobby), to Sue (a tough-minded Scottish police sergeant), to Jack (an insecure, unemployed game programmer). It helps that you get to like all three characters and that Stross has a good eye for the humor in our technological present and future, and a definite fondness for gamers and everyone's desire to escape their reality. The story is a little convoluted, but it still mostly makes sense and is complex in a believable way. Perhaps the highest praise I can give was I really wanted to know what happened to some of the characters after the story ended. If you like William Gibson-esque tech, but want a little Vonnegut humor and flair, you could do worse than Halting State.
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