Halting State (Halting State Series #1) Book

+1 to the list of notable books written in second person, which is only slightly longer than the list of notable books written solely to criticize them.

Halting State has a cool premise. I mean, aside from the fact that it was dated by the time it came out (goggles, really? That's your immersion technology. I mean, we've gotten to the point where we can read your mind. But hey, if you wanna strap a small TV to your face instead, whatever.)

Let's ignore specifics about Halting State for a minute, because like most people I was delighted to see nerdy nomenclature littering its pages. And kudos to Charles Stross who, despite the certainty that he's never gone beyond noob-level on any game whatsoever, writes a decent characterization of someone who has.



Let's look instead at how thoroughly idiotic it is to write in second person. Some of you probably tried to ignore this fact as a function of your open-mindedness.

The funniest side-effect of second person narrative is that the reader will continuously forget the protagonist's name. What could have been a name or a pronoun or "the stranger" or "the warrior" becomes a banal "you."

Version 1: The shadows shifted and a figure stepped out. "What the -" began the guard as an arrow struck him in the face.

Version 2: You step out of the shadows. "What the - " begins the guard as your arrow strikes him in the face.

The second version doesn't sound too bad, right? Now imagine being stuck in that point of view for an entire book. You cannot zoom, or pan, or examine a scene or character from another angle. It's as though a movie like Inception were shot entirely from Leonardo DiCaprio's perspective, a camera literally strapped to his forehead for every scene without so much as a fancy lens. Now you're getting the limiting factor of second person. Inception would still have been a good movie, don't get me wrong; but it would have been nothing compared to the effect of panning the view at just the right moment, the right angle to to let you see something that perhaps the main character cannot, or to show you someone else, etc.

Scenes like this would be impossible:





Only first person perspective would be allowed. You'd never know what the main character looked like, or what other people were seeing or feeling or smelling. You wouldn't even know what's going on outside your immediate POV. It makes for a very dull story.