Halting State

Halting State is a novel by the English writer Charles Stross, published in the United States in 2007 and in the United Kingdom the following year. Stross has described it as a thriller set among the software houses that write multiplayer games, and it was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards.

The book opens with a bank robbery carried out in an online game world, at a company whose finances and reputations are bound up with the game. The case falls to Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police, and it does not fit any of the categories she has been trained for, because what was taken is not money and the scene of the crime does not exist in the ordinary sense.

The story is shared between three people: Sue, a games company employee called Elaine and a security consultant called Jack. Each of their sections is written in the second person, with that character's private thoughts in the first person, and the chapters follow one another in the same repeating order. The book is set in a near future of heads-up displays, server networks running over mobile phones, and economies in which the boundaries between games and finance have stopped being clear.