I wandered into Waterstones’ sci-fi section in Piccadilly the other day and before me stood the strangest book cover I’ve seen since Seth Godin‘s Purple Cow:
Halting State, by Charlie Stross.
What’s clever is that the praise for the book isn’t on the back, the praise is the cover. The fact that the first quote was from William Gibson and that Eric Raymond is in the acknowledgements meant that I purchased a copy straight away. I later found out that the author is a Linux guru with a subsection of his homepage dedicated to published writings on Perl!
If a great cover, a Gibson quote and an author who uses Linux isn’t enough to sell you this book, check out Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing boing:
Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you’ve got something approximating Halting State.
