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Neal Stephenson. The Big U. HarperCollins. 1984

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.

I'd been thinking about what could be in short supply if we had anything boxes, and Stephenson added "people you can trust" to my list of volume, good locations (I'd been thinking in terms of natural wonders, but good (good having various definitions, of course) neighborhoods would also count), your own time, and other people's attention.

-- Nancy Lebovitz , rasfw, 2000.

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.

All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this:

Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

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.

I don't understand why people have a problem with Stephenson's endings. They always seem perfectly adequate to

-- David T. Bilek , rasfw, Feb 2002.

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.

When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable---there are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mr. Ford, such as the hand-brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid blocks of cahoutchouc.

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).