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Halting State: that's it

(That's all of HALTING STATE that I'm able to post in my blog — for now. If you want to find it again, you might want to bookmark the permalink to this entry. (Or you can order your own copy by clicking the dustjacket pictures below.)


Prologue: We know where you live, we know where your dog goes to school

Chapter 1: Grand Theft Auto

Chapter 2: Stitched Up

Chapter 3: Steaming




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34 Comments

1:

this is torture, I'm hooked now, and importing the book is too expensive...

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2:

Was there a point to the epilogue that I missed in the dazzle?

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3:

thanks for the nibbles. Definitely buying the book after the prologue- may wait until I'm in London for Armistice/Remembrance/Veteran's Day for the pixel-ly cover. Any recommended bookshops in the city (staying near Holburn Tube)?

4:

...and both of those covers are gorgeous to boot. Fine, there goes another chunk of my meagre student income.

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5:

I've got a copy (hot off the Amazon trail) that arrived Wednesday. :-) With luck, you'll come to Boskone this year and might autograph it for me. (Oh, and I've recommended it to the entire interdisciplinary social informatics group at the university...and several of my colleagues have helped your royalties.)

6:

True for me as well -- sold after the Prologue alone.

7:

So your experiment in releasing your books online is over and your publishers have you leashed now?

8:

I guess I'll have to wait until next year for the economy class edition, but I'm curious how much of the final book the four chapters represent (i.e., how many chapters are there ...).

9:

Deb @5: Boskone's a possibility, but I'm not planning next year's travel just yet -- not until after I survive the next week and then Novacon.

Dan @7: You're jumping to conclusions. Let's just say that, the past two SF novels have come out months apart on different sides of the Atlantic and therefore the publisher who was late to the party objected to the book being available as a free download months before their customer base could buy the dead tree edition. The situation is likely to change.

(NB: I find your language somewhat aggressive. Bear in mind that I feel no need to provide a platform for people to be rude to me on. Consider this a friendly warning.)

10:

Oh well, we'll see when we can get an ebook of this. Hopefully Amazon and the like will sell once soon.

11:

David: I'm told that an Amazon ebook edition is due out Real Soon Now. (But I've no control over pricing or the presence/absence of DRM.)

12:

I'm assuming your publishers aren't into the Baen model of making the first quarter of the book visible. If they are then you clearly had to work hard to join and resolve 4 separate story twists in a mere 12 more chapters... :)

Re 11: I do hope a reasonably priced (as in priced like the Atrocity Archives) electronic version of this book shows up soon. I'm a bit concerned by the Amazon mention because (and I hope I'm wrong here) in the past Amazon has sold merely Adobe Crippleware which I will refuse to buy because of their quality habit of failing to make the DRM bit work with the latest Adobe reader...

13:

My copy is en route.

Given that the excerpts here are from the submitted manuscript (rather than the released version), I was wondering: how many changes happen between manuscript submission & published book? I expect that it varies from book to book.

I guess I'm curious about the contribution of editors. For example, in the recent Hugos, how do voters gauge editorial contribution? Or is it like coaches & sporting teams, where the team gets the kudos for success and the coach gets the sack for failures?

14:

Francis: note that Amazon own Mobipocket. I'm told a Mobipocket version of HALTING STATE is among the versions being prepared. (This is of interest to me as, aside from their DRM, mobipocket use an implementation of OEB and I think that's the emerging ebook standard.)

Part of my problem is that I actually have no fewer than four English language publishers (Orbit, Ace, and Tor being the main ones -- plus Golden Gryphon) who publish at different schedules and who have different ebook policies. This makes negotiations over ebook releases somewhat complicated, in some cases.

Soon Lee: quite a lot of changes happen between submission and publication -- at a minimum the book is copy-edited, the author vets the copy edits, then it's typeset, the author and hopefully a proofreader vet the typeset copy and apply changes (which are then updated), and so on. How readers should judge an editorial contribution is, well ... I'm not clear on that, either, because it's usually only obvious by its absence!

15:

[DELETED BY ANNOYED AUTHOR WHO DOESN'T APPRECIATE BEING INSULTED IN HIS OWN BLOG]

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16:

Yea that should do it. Well done.

If you use a brain cell or two, and a little reading, you'd know that getting the ability to publish your books online is a royal pain in the ass. Especially if you're trying to make a living from doing so.

When you're not Stephen King, piss not off thy publishers.

Mr S - just so I'm not further taking the food from your cats mouths' - is there a value difference to you on which book gets bought?

I like hardcovers, but like the paperback art... I'm looking for a deciding factor.

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17:

Three quarters through and I want slow down to make it last, but I can't! I have to agree with Cory's review, this is Charlie's best to date, and that is saying a lot. The reduction of stage from the galaxy to Scotland, and the near future setting really punch this one up, it's a page flipper like a classic Ludlum, with nearly Pratchett-esque insider humor.
But, I have to say I had a hard time swallowing the GNU radio - an A2D converter and bit of wire... harumph!

18:

*cries* Oh please oh please s/you/I/g ... PLEASE!

19:

Well, the price isn't such a big deal. For me the alternative to the ebook would be scanning and OCRing the paper book, so I don't mind paying for it as much. As the DRM, that's why there's ConvertLit :-) Considering the level of support for accessibility of MS Reader and Adobe when reading ebooks (best characterized as none) the only way for those of us who can't see screens is breaking the DRM.

20:

Charlie, was 'Zone' in the prologue a misspelling of 'Zope'? Also FYI, Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k"), is being released as Python 3.0.

Now I'm going to read the rest of the free sample... ;-)

21:

Serraphin: I get five times as much money from a hardback sale as a paperback. I get as much from a UK trade paperback as a US hardcover, and twice as much for a UK mass market paperback than a US one.

Sean: see this and finish masticating before you swallow. (GNU radio is a free implementation of a software-directed radio. It's real, although I extrapolated a decade forward in its capabilities.)

Michael: "Zone" is no relative of Zope. Alas, if I'd known Python 3000 was real I'd have called it something else. (Perl 6, maybe :)


22:

I bought the book yesterday, based solely on my complete enjoyment of "Accelerando". Keep up the good work! ;-)

23:

bought the book over the weekend... awesome, awesome!

24:

Nice! So far.. is there an Australian release or do I have to get it online?
And one thing I do have to know. I detect a bit of WOW flavour in Chapter 1. Did you A.-go out and buy it then write it off on bus expenses B.- borrow/share with a friend or C.-did you email blizzard, blow their minds with who you are and get a complementry account?
PS lol @ 15 -I love autodarwinism

25:

Aleph - the Australian release will be of the UK edition from Orbit.

26:

Forbidden Planet in London has got copies in, despite what the cashier told me a week ago - snaffled one immediately.

27:

Tony @2: I think in part the epilogue was showing where the proceeds of the original bank robbery went... but also it formed part of a nice bookending: the book starts with a `random' job offer that (very likely) isn't random, and ends with a `random' spam that (very likely) isn't either a spam, or random, but is every bit as targetted as the offer which started the book.

(Just my impressions after a high-speed first read: second to tenth reads necessary before I can be sure what's going on in there and just how the various threads interweave.)

28:

Nix @ 27: Yup, that was my reading as well, although the fake-random subtlety hadn't occurred to me.

Charlie: I loved the book.

29:

Oh, look, Harriet `review by reading the back flap' Klausner has reviewed Halting State on amazon.com. Her reviewing methods are laid bare here, because she *completely* misses what the book is about...

(I note that half the reviews give the book four or five stars and the other half are put off by the second-person tense. One reviewer bizarrely comments that the techspeak is too dense and that he'd have preferred a book more like, um, _Accelerando_...)

30:

A week ago FP in London *didn't* have copies in. A few days ago they did (US edition, dammit, I'll have to get the UK edition as well, just for the cover).

31:

I read all your books as they hit paperback.
Hardbacks don't travell well.
I look forward to this one and the others in the future. Take care of yourself & don't let the three ring circus of fans, suits, & media get you down.
I look forward to your future books.
If waiting years for the next Stross book is what it takes.
I can wait for a good book.

I have been out on a long motorcycle/sabbatical trip, aproximately 26 months & 64k miles.

Enjoying a lot more quality in my life.

Now, I am back working and trying maintain a good quality attitude in a working IT environment.

Say Hi to Marty Halpern !
I am a long time friend of his.

May you find the quality you need and more,
Randy Davis

32:

Just finished the book - started yesterday - down here in California. My only complaint is the same one I had for On Her Majesty's Occult Service: there had better be a sequel dammit. Those characters are too good to leave behind.

33:

Just finished it. Excellent. I thought at first I wouldn't be able to cope with the second person narrative ("You get into the car...") but after a few chapters I got into it - that technique, and the switching of viewpoint, gives a sense of immediacy that echoes game playing, perhaps?

Anyway it is really, really good, I would second the opinion above that there must, must be a sequel.

34:

@3 when I stayed in London last year at The Grange Holburn I used to walk down to Forbidden Planet all the time. Great store and a short walk from the tube station.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=WC2H+8JR&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=16&iwloc=addr