![]() ![]() The tale grew in the telling, as the saying goes, and it ended up being a trilogy: QUICKSILVER, THE CONFUSION, and THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, bound and sold separately. Avon Books, 27.5 (928pp) ISBN 978-6-0 Big, complex and ambitious, the new cyber-thriller from the talented author of Snowcrash and The Diamond Age. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision that I would write a prequel set around the time of the birth of the Royal Society. The fact that Leibniz and Newton were at war with each other for most of their careers suggested it was a fertile source of plot. Of interest to me was that CRYPTONOMICON had been all about computing, codes, and gold. The other was with Steven Horst, who mentioned Isaac Newton's tenure at the Royal Mint and his obsession with alchemy. One was with George Dyson, author of DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES, in which he talks about the deep roots of computing in the work of Leibniz at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring. As I was finishing CRYPTONOMICON, I had two chance conversations with old friends. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephensons most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. The gold was stolen by the Japanese during the war. An unexpected byproduct of CRYPTONOMICON that ended up taking over my life for a number of years. An American computer hacker operating in Southeast Asia attempts to break a World War II cypher to find the location of a missing shipment of gold. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |