Hmmm. I was a bit underwhelmed by this book that I was told was a classic of post-cyberpunk. It was the first of Stephenson’s books I’d read – he’d been recommended to me by a couple of people in my book club as a master of his genre.
I should declare I’m more a lover of literary fiction than genre fiction, but I like to think I’m open-minded to good writing, whatever its form. There’s no doubt the author has a a vivid and rich imagination, and his ability to predict the online virtual future way back in 1993 when he wrote this is pretty impressive, but I found reading the book a bit of a struggle to be honest. The biggest problem was I couldn’t really get myself worked up to care about the two-dimensional cartoon-like characters.
Having said that, the author’s exploration in this book of the origins of language in the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian civilisations, and how he neatly ties that up with the binary machine code that underlies all computers, including, in this account, the brain, was fascinating.
Lovers of Philosophy 