Cryptonomicon

"This is a novel about a new world order where information is the currency, a virtual currency in the world. There is a Pacific island where the web server is kept and the server farm is out of the reach of all governments. It’s not exactly science fiction, but technology fiction maybe. It happens in the present but there are three timelines. One now, one during World War II on this island where the Japanese and the Allies fought, and one just before the war. The characters in all three are family-connected whether they are Japanese or American and at the end the three stories merge to reveal the whole structure and the inter-relation between the characters. It’s about the internet and information. So at one point society was based on goods – you give me something and I’ll give you something. Then in the 20th century it was based on money, shuffling money around; and in the 21st century, information is king."

"Cryptonomicon is a real humdinger of a novel. Stephenson is a hugely enjoyable writer of action and comedy – I find him a joy to read. This is a thriller set in the present day, about the establishment of a data haven, and it explains the significance and practice of cryptography to the modern world. It goes right back to its digital roots and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, like Alan Turing. It is a romp through the birth of the computer into an age where control over data and understanding of its flow are vitally important. And in the midst of all that, there are wars and pirates and love affairs. It’s an immensely enjoyable book. It’s a question about what might happen, rather than what will. There are already people putting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to novel uses, like lifting low resolution images directly from the visual processing part of the brain. There is a project that is trying to read images and meaning from the sleeping brain – from dreams. And all kinds of civil liberty implications are thrown up from being able to read images direct from the visual cortex, which raise interesting questions about where the boundaries for what is appropriate for the state lie. I think we have to have those kinds of discussions before the moment comes. I think it never stops. In a way we are still dealing with the implications of the industrial revolution. And it’s worth bearing in mind that we are not sitting on a platform of reasonable, effective government, positive financial control over the vagaries of the market or indeed a perfect relationship with our planet’s environment. The challenges we face are, as always, not technological but whether we as a society are capable of making the right decisions. You have to think about digital as part of the rest of the world. In the mid-eighties, when people started to think about graphic interfaces, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer , [the film] Tron came out and we first got the notion of the space behind the screen – a foreign land. When the Internet came along, it was the extension of that foreign land into our lives. We could now participate in that nebulous, piratic, free-speaking space that existed in no country and owed allegiance to no court and no crown. But that place never existed. It was never a separate space. Coincident with the arrival of the iPad and other touch-screen technologies where you can actually put your hand on the data, we have begun to understand that what is on the Internet is just what’s in our heads, and what we carry around with ourselves all the time."