Customer Reviews

Ciphers: A Post-Shannon Rock 'N' Roll Mystery

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An enigmatic and convoluted (snakelike, one might say) book, but eerily relevant and oneirogenic. Cyril Prothero and Polly Peptide join forces (and other things) when their respective lovers turn up missing. They encounter the mysterious Doctor Wu, Maxwell's Demon, Sophia, snake cults, voodoo, information theory, DNA, kinky sex, designer drugs, rock-and-roll, crytography, cyber-immortality, imperialism, gnosticism, bagism, fagism....all coiled up in this slithy tome like a slippery Joycean dragon. The cover art alone is worth the price of intromission. All I am saying is give this book a chance, because if you don't know by now, it ain't the meat it's the motion. (Hey, hey Paul, I can hear your heartbeat for a thousand miles!)

An immensely entertaining book. A test of cultural literacy (if you have to flip to the endnotes you failed). Lacks the depth and sophistication, especially when dealing with historical matters, of Pynchon. Reminds me more of Madison Smartt-Bell or Robert Anton Wilson than Pynchon. Good enough to buy a copy for a friend.

The general theme of information saturation, and the characters Di Filippo constructs to deal with it work very well. You'd be hard pressed to find a more frenetic paranoid book than this, and Di Filippo seems to work better in a novel than in his short stories.