Interface - Neal Stephenson and Frederick George

A Manchurian Candidate for the computer age, according to Seattle Weekly.

Someone should have hired the candidate a bloody editor instead of a dim chimpanzee. There were so many mistakes in the book that I can only compare the reading to listening to a scratched CD. Stone the crows, that was annoying.

So, an utterly improbable sci-fi story, unless you are one of the conspiricists with tinfoil on your head. I'm not quite sure how implanting a stroke victim with a biochip that wires him into a computerised polling system renders him a special effect, as described on the back of the book. In fact, that's not the case at all. The li'l chip is courtesy of "The Network", one of those nefarious inchoate groups to whom the Government of the United States of America (God Bless y'all!) is but a means to an end. Naturally, that end is money - they've got the power already.

So, fella gets a stroke (he's already a Governor, so that helps), the Network offers to fix him up with this chip (after they practice on a bunch of Indian (India Indians) brain injury victims) which patches through connections from brain on either end of the damaged part. Neat idea. Of course, being all computery, it can respond to radio frequencies. So... the Network arranges for ongoing biometric polling of a sample of the electorate (far too small a sample, incidentally) that gets used live to advise the candidate via this chippy thing how to behave on the ol' election treadmill. And so on.

We therefore have a sci-fi commentary on 1) ethics in biophysical neurobiology (I don't know if that's what it's called... it's good enough for now), 2) American (God Bless!) electoral groundings, style over substance, etc, 3) a little bit of a cynical poke at the non-governmental power of capital flows, and 4) a plug for good old fashioned values of honesty, hard work, dignity, etc.

You know, I thought Neal Stephenson was a pretty decent sci-fi guy. This book... ah, he must have had an off day.