Review: Halting State, by Charles Stross (spoilers)

Summary: In Charles autopope Stross' novel set Twenty minutes (more like ten to twenty years) into the future, Constable Sue Smith, just your average happily married lesbian Edinburgh beat cop in the recently independent Republic of Scotland, gets called in to investigate a bank robbery. Nothing new there, except that the "bank" is completely virtual, set in a Warcraft-like MMO and the bank robbers were a platoon of orcs run by Pakistani gold farmers backed up by a dragon.

That's weird.

When Elaine, a forensic accountant with a love of broadswords, and Jack, a burned out games programmer whose whole life is literally online are called in by the MMO's insurance firm to investigate, things get Political very fast and the line between the games people play and the Games governments play start blurring rapidly together.

That's scary.


( It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand )

Damn, Damn, DAMN!

The Good: Finally buckled down and got an account at Smashwords so I can format The Dragon's Companion and Unexpected Diversions into Kindle and other e-publishing formats to sell.

The Very Bad: I. Can't. Find. Diversions'. Word. File.
As in, I've checked both PC's, my laptop, my thumbdrive, everything. It's dissapeared. The only place left MIGHT be the harddrive of our dead PC box, but that's so corrupted I'm hesitant to try and pull it out and hook it up to one of the other computers.

In other words, if I want to e-publish Unexepected Diversions again, I'm going to have to put all of the individual stories together again in one package and re-edit them. Again.

Whimper.

I think Speilberg is committing an act of war against Belgium

He's working a live-action/motion capture animation version of Herge's comics classic The Adventures of Tintin

The stills released from the project are, er... interesting.