And while there's no sense in going all alarmist and paranoid about things (except inasmuch as it makes for cracking storytelling), real life security concerns really exist, and one would be naive to think the worst dangers stop at identity theft and pirating movies. If anything, a book like Halting State sounds the klaxon that - fictitious though the scenario here may be - everyone ought to make themselves just a little more knowledgable about what the wired generation really means, not just to you, but to global economies and geopolitics, and the alarmingly easy reach tech-savvy terrorists might have to being a few mouse-clicks away from destabilizing whole nations. While he may be limiting his audience to folks with the kind of IT/programming/computer background necessary for fullest understanding of the concepts he introduces here, I think he still does an admirable job of making his narrative accessible for the bulk of readers who haven't a clue what goes on under their computer's hood and don't care as long as they can check their email and surf MySpace and download porn all they like.

Stross has never been a writer who goes easy on readers whose eyes glaze over at the liberal application of techie jargon. Charlie's stroke of genius here is in his story's use of massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) as a tool by which governments and their shadowy intelligence apparatuses recruit 'useful idiots,' unwary meat-puppet operatives who do the dirty work of infiltrating networks while under the belief they're just running around hacking up goblins in a virtual gaming environment, thereby allowing the Powers That Be whatever plausible deniability they wish. And not only is this a situation that people have come to accept, it's one in which they are active participants and enablers. For one thing, it's actually about what it would (will?) be like to live in a true spook country, where nearly every vestige of privacy you thought you might have had is nothing but vapor. Halting State is the book William Gibson's Spook Country should have been.

Halting state by charles stross