Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. ... The story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco -- and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel. |
