author : Neal Stephenson

It's all here: cyberspace, samurai swords, cyber viruses, and pizza delivery.

It's the nanotech future -- MCs (matter compilers) can make almost anything people want, and a global encrypted communication network keeps everyone untraceably in touch. Nation-states have dissolved, and people chose which phyle to join. The neo-Victorians are a phyle with a strict moral code, and one of their leaders want to make sure his granddaughter has every opportunity. So he commissions one of his nano-engineers to design a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer -- a "book" stuffed full of nanotech and pseudo-intelligence. But an illegal stolen copy falls into the hands of Nell, a young street kid. It has an amazing affect on her life, and on various people connected to her through it.

Stephenson paints a vividly real picture of a nanotech future. The multitude of different phyles, with their different cultures; the MCs making everything from rice to buildings to motorised horses to coral islands; the nano-defence grids and toner wars; the design of nano-devices and rod-logic; the Mouse army -- there is loads of great detail, integrated into a very different, but believable, world, full of people who are completely at home with all this "magic". Stephenson definitely has an eye for this kind of detail.

The Primer is great (I wish I'd had one!) -- with its story telling, puzzles, and lessons. There are some nice scenes, and some laugh-out-loud moments. The description of its "fractal" structure is interesting -- with Nell delving deeper and deeper into some scenes, and rushing through others. (But the main reason for the Primer was to teach "subversion" -- and I'm not too sure how it does that.)

The plot itself is fascinating, weird, and exciting, as Nell grows up under the influence of the Primer, and various political events make the world around her slowly change, too. There are interesting scenes comparing and contrasting Confucian and neo-Victorian politeness protocols.

The ending is very abrupt, with some loose ends left flailing. But there is a satisfying convergence of the major threads, and it's a wonderfully illustrated journey getting there.

Here we have a double tale of cryptography, charting the code-breakers of WWII, and some of their present-day descendents attempting to set up a data haven in an independent offshore kingdom. As the story progresses, these two strands become intertwined.

This might not technically be SF, but it's seemingly written as if it's SF. It is just brilliant, and is told with the same crazy attention to the minutest detail, and lunatic highlighting of the oddest points, that Stephenson lavishes on his SF tomes. He's equally happy meticulously describing how to eat breakfast cereal, the zeroes of the Reimann zeta function (complete with equations), how to fairly divide property that has both financial and sentimental value, the chaotic properties of whirlwinds, or the design of Japanese hotel bathrooms.

The plot, while intruiging in itself, is really just a device on which to hang all these glorious details. But it's not a light frothy comedy -- Stephenson expends the same effort and care describing the horrible experiences and deaths of soldiers and civilians during the war. The whole thing is a fascinating glorious confection. And unlike most of his previous novels, which tend to stop suddenly, this actually ends (albeit suddenly).

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This is a gradually unfolding tale of philosophy, science, religion, Platonic idealism, alternate cosmological and cognitive theories, and much much more. It starts slowly (I think they are still winding the clock around page 100), but it gradually picks up pace, and slowly you realise that all that stuff that appeared to be merely decorative detail is actually crucial, several hundred pages later.

I'm not even going to try to overview the plot, because it would be one massive spoiler after another. Suffice it to say, it is a first person Narrative by Fraa Erasmus, a young avout at the Edharian math, and fid of Saunt Orolo. What, you don't know what those words mean? Well, hold on, because there's a lot more like that. But Stephenson leads you through it all, so that you know, or discover quite soon, what you need to know as the story progresses. And the cumulative effect helps you understand how different, and how not so different, this world is from our own. I know that all this "worldbling" has come in for criticism from some, but I think it is absolutely necessary for what Stephenson is doing here. And moreover, that's what (good) SF is all about: new, weird worlds that you have to think about, that you have to puzzle out. It's all about SF reading protocols. As James Gunn says: "the SF reader ... files this information away, confident that it is important information that will be explained". It is, and it is.

There are many lovely passages here, whether it's about explaining the maths of phase space, quantum physics, orbital mechanics, certain philosophies of cognition, Erasmus being hit by a large clue bat, whatever. Some of the fun is mapping the technical bits to what they are called in our world, but most is in following the slowly building world-picture that Stephenson is painting, the slow revelation of what he's really on about. It's slow not because there's unnecessary padding, it's slow because it's dense with meaning, dense with clues. There's a real plot here, it's as SFnal as you can get, and it has a real ending. This is Stephenson's best work yet.

It's not all philosophy lectures, of course. It is leavened throughout with Stephenson's trademark humour (which not everyone seems to get). One bit that really tickled me was when Erasmus is given a penance by the Warden Regulant. This is to memorise, and be examined on, the first five Chapters of the Book.

The very idea of the Book is fun. And there's that niggling suspicion that Stephenson just might be referring to the very book that you, the reader, are holding in your own hands at that moment. But if so, he's pulling your leg. The book is fun to read, thought provoking, illuminating, educative, and a marvellous paean to rationality. Oh, and I want to live in a math.

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