Turing's Delirium in Around the World in 80 Books

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Nov 30, 2023 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels, setting-south-america, translated-fiction

Picked this up in my quest for Bolivian fiction in translation, and can't say it really holds together some 15+ years after its publication. The author has ambitiously tried to create a kind of commentary on modern Bolivian politics and neoliberalism using the scaffolding of the cyberpunk genre. However, it's all somewhat scattered, and the "cyber" aspects never felt particularly plausible or immersive.

At the center of the book is a cryptanalyst named Miguel Saenz (aka "Turing"), who's faithfull Picked this up in my quest for Bolivian fiction in translation, and can't say it really holds together some 15+ years after its publication. The author has ambitiously tried to create a kind of commentary on modern Bolivian politics and neoliberalism using the scaffolding of the cyberpunk genre. However, it's all somewhat scattered, and the "cyber" aspects never felt particularly plausible or immersive.

At the center of the book is a cryptanalyst named Miguel Saenz (aka "Turing"), who's faithfully worked as a codebreaker in the "Black Chamber" (kind of a Bolivian NSA) for whatever government has been in charge. One day he received an encrypted email accusing him of being complicit in the crimes of the dictatorships he's served. Meanwhile, protests in the streets against the government's turning over the electrical grid to a French-American corporation are turning up pressure on the government, while Evo Morales gains popularity in the background.

Meanwhile, a cyberactivist group led by the mysterious "Kandinsky" are conducting online sabotage against the government and foreign corporations. There's also a judge and former government minister whose conscience is now leading him to seek revenge for the torture and murder of the cousin he loved. Saenz's daughter Flavia is a kind of online journalist covering the world of Bolivian hacking, and cyber-prodigy in her own right. And Saenz's mentor, a mysterious probable ex-Nazi lies in a near coma, hallucinating through fragmentary snippets of his past lives as a cryptographer. There are just a lot of characters and ideas, none of which are deep enough to ground the story.

There's also the whole construct of a digital world called "Playground" that the hackers organize in -- sort of a Second Life place with more rigorous rules. Among the many elements that are not really clear why any of the true hackers would actually use that pay-to-play space. It seems like the author was semi-interested in the whole concept of real vs. virtual worlds, but by the time this book came out, that had been done to death, and in much more interesting ways. I also felt like at a fundamental level, the author was not altogether clear on the distinction between cryptography and cybersecurity. On the whole, the book was a bit of a slog with no real narrative momentum, staggering to a relatively unsurprising conclusion. ...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Ching-In marked it as to-read

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Jul 06, 2014 Vesra (When She Reads) marked it as to-read

Shelves: e-book, author-p, fiction, t, science-fiction-fantasy, pc-300-399, pub-mariner-books, c-black, tbr-2013

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Around the World in 80 Books