Turing's Delirium
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Set in a near-future Bolivia, this "hybrid of cyberpunk and political thrillers [is] sleek, brisk, and clever" (Entertainment Weekly).
Set against a backdrop of advancing globalization, this award-winning, "fast-paced" literary thriller puts a cutting-edge digital spin on the age-old fight between the oppressed and the oppressor (The Miami Herald).
The South American town of Río Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution—not a revolution of strikes and street riots, but a war waged electronically, in which computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries. In this war of information, the lives of a variety of characters become entangled: Kandinsky, the mythic leader of a group of hackers fighting the government and transnational companies; Albert, the founder of the Black Chamber, a state security firm charged with deciphering the secret codes used in the information war; and Miguel "Turing" Sáenz, the Black Chamber's most famous codebreaker, who begins to suspect his work is not as innocent as he once supposed.
All converge to create a "propulsive" novel about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the real (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Turing's Delirium "combines the excitement of a political thriller with the intellectual ambition of a literary novel" (San Francisco Chronicle).
"If William Gibson were a Bolivian, this might be the kind of novel he'd be writing." —Chicago Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The landlocked South American nation of Bolivia, now politically stabilized, has long alternated democratically elected presidents with coup-installed dictators. Those coups provide the backstory for Paz Sold n's propulsive sixth novel (after The Matter of Desire): the character of the dying president, known only as Montenegro, is drawn from the two reigns of Hugo Banzer Su rez, dictator from 1971 to 1978 and an elected president from 1997 until illness and civil unrest forced his resignation in 2000. In this ultracontemporary thriller, looming revolution is fomented not by a restless right-wing military, but by a tiny clique of cyberterrorists led by genius adolescent hacker Kandinsky, an instinctive though not particularly ideological foe of transnational corporations. Charged with exposing Kandinsky and his incognito cohorts is the secretive state security organization the Black Chamber, established by Montenegro in his dictator days to spy on leftists and whose mysterious first director, Albert, may well be a figure from Hitler's Third Reich. Paz Sold n's textured novel (winner of Bolivia's National Book Award in 2002) is an engrossing depiction both of his nation's 20th-century political history and of the 21st century's confrontation with accelerating global hegemony and the conundrum (attention, cyberpunk fans) of virtual terror attacks.
