Halting State feels like a very "now" novel—but really, it isn't.

One of my more vivid memories from 1986, the year I graduated university, is of watching the sun rise over the back of a computer terminal I was using very unofficially. I was logged in over JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network, which had recently begun exchanging data with an odd network of foreign computers called the "internet"), to a mainframe at the University of Essex, which was running a game called MUD—Multi-User Dungeon—the text-only predecessor to today's World of Warcraft. You had to use your imagination in those days: the network was flaky and slow, there was no graphical content, just text, and the whole thing ground slow with only a handful of players logged in... but it was there, and I had a feeling that it was going to be big.

Fast-forward to 1996. My home PC was probably about as powerful as the old DEC PDP-10 mainframe that used to run MUD. Graphical games like DOOM were all over the place, and the internet had sprouted this weird efflorescence called the World Wide Web. I was a bit faster off the mark—I'd figured that the web was going to be big back in 1993, and by 1996 I was doing consultancy work for an internet service provider while keeping an eye open for a new dot-com startup to join.

Fast forward to 2006, and I was getting my ass handed to me on a plate by some monsters I'd invented (the ignominy!) back in the prehistory of Dungeons and Dragons (rewind to 1976, when I was a spotty teen), rendered in loving colour, on a multi-player graphical computer game that eerily preserved many of the sensibilities of those earlier media. (And my mobile phone was probably about as powerful as that early PDP-10...)

The thing about the future is this: it creeps up on you stealthily, then springs with terrible force, and it's only after it's happened that you realize it was there all along. Halting State happened that way; I had a feeling that the logic of games was going somewhere very strange. I had an itching in my fingterips, a gut feeling that the promise of virtual reality (invented back in the 1980s) which had never really come to fruition, was about to bear strange fruit in a most unexpected way. Then I began paying attention to MMOs, and realized that it was already happening. People were asking divorce judges to divide up their in-game loot; people were being prosecuted for fraud for selling magic items on eBay that didn't work!  When this kind of phenomenon bites you on the ankle, you pay attention: the tiger is already tensing his muscles to pounce.

I decided to get there before the tiger did. And that's where Halting State comes from.

—Charles Stross