Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.
I have a mega-backlog of reviews to give you. And it’s the holidays. So here’s some ones that stood out for me over the last few months. I’ll start with the comics, and do separate posts for different sorts of books.
And I haven’t read ANY of them. Yikes.
So, I just finished reading Halting State.
This is the best fictional take ever written about virtual worlds. It beats out Cory Doctorow’s “Anda’s Game” and Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, IMHO. If only because it just nails the actual consequences, the actual way things work, and so on. It helps that it’s wrapped in a tasty virtual bank heist, with spy story overtones.
Among the stuff that pops up, “namechecked” so to speak: PvP sploits. God mode. ORLY. Zombie flash mobs. Leveraging ARGs for real work. Impositional game design. VC bubble shenanigans. Cross-world avatar portability. Cons and cosplay. Discworld. LARPing. 4th edition D&D. Second Life. Mirror worlds.
I could go on, but it’s clear that Charlie knows his stuff. I now have this sneaking suspicion he’s been lurking among us for quite some time, quietly spying. 😉
It’s Banned Books Week.
Go read one.
There’s a great list here of the top 100 banned ones lately. (I’ve read 28 of them… unless you break apart the series, in which case it’s more).
SF REVIEWS.NET: Halting State / Charles Stross
The story opens in the very near future in Edinburgh, where police sergeant Sue Smith is called in to investigate a bank robbery. The catch is, the robbery has taken place, not in the real world, but in gamespace, in the online environment of Avalon Four, an enormously popular MMO. A band of marauding orcs plus one big dragon have virtually invaded a virtual bank and virtually made off with all manner of virtual loot. It seems absurd at first, until the possibility of very real corporate espionage is raised. In-game assets can make you real-world money. (I’m a casual gamer, but not an MMO guy, and I was personally stunned to hear some years ago that people were making some pretty damn good coin selling fully-developed high-level Everquest characters on eBay.) The bad news for Hayek Associates, the company whose job it is to oversee security issues for Avalon Four, is that once word gets out of the game’s vulnerability and the loss of so much digital loot, the game loses players by the millions and everyone’s stock prices take a nosedive.
Oh, I definitely have to read this. 🙂 Glasshouse is still in my backlog pile…
