*Mild spoiler warning* Asgaard wrote:

No. From this excerpt, I draw two conclusions:

1) The author is keeping up with some well known (at least to longtime readers of the cp list) concepts of future consequencies of information technology.

He is. Stephenson's an occasional programmer and mentions a few cpunks from Communities.com at the end of Snow Crash. He also throws in tasteful renditions of old hat stuff like Turing machines (hardly the pinacle of high tech processing power), and does a great job with an example of parallel processing stolen from A Fire Upon the Deep (but *so* much spicier!). Who would have thought sex orgies would be a model for computation? Or ritual drumming as IPC...? I can just imagine a unix kernel for such a machine...(or beast?)

2) Around these, he weaves a boring, artless plot.

Actually the plot is rather well done and does not focus nearly as much on tech Snow Crash did. It's more of a story-telling novel with some very cute literary devices. It's got to be the only children's book I'd recommend to anyone, especially people you'd like to interest in basic CS concepts or crypto-anonymity issues and who wouldn't be caught dead reading sci-fi, much less cyberpunk. I don't consider it to be a thriller (though it has more sex and violence than your average kid's book.). It was even a bit sentimental. Those of you who enjoy conclusive story resolution, will not like Stephenson's open-ended finale (though *I* think he got it right this time, unlike in Snow Crash). It has me wondering was what a real "Young Lady's Primer" complete with gentle cartoonesque intros to CS, crypto (recreational crypto maybe?) and chaumian concepts would invlolve. I do remember Phil Z. mentioning on the list that his original exposure to crypto was as a child by just such a book (he announced this the day the author died). I have heard of the occasional video game that teaches assembler or typing, it might be interesting to create and release such a thing on the net for the topics discussed among us (for all age groups). Anyone for a crypto-anarchy game .wad?