Customer Reviews

Turing's Delirium

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Take a Third World, South American country modeled on Bolivia, toss in a democratically elected former dictator, mix in a neoliberal privatization of the country's electric utility in the hands of an Italian/American energy conglomerate that immediately doubles or triples electricity rates, add in an incipient local Internet characterized by a virtual reality world called the Playground, a healthy handful of hackers, and a resistance movement, stir everything up with a secret government code-breaking organization called the Black Chamber, and you have the ingredients for a thriller, a cyberpunk novel, and a commentary on the tragedy of IMF-backed globalization in developing countries. Such are the elements and themes of Edmundo Paz Soldan's powerful and captivating new novel, TURING'S DELIRIUM.

The title, of course, refers to the infamous code-breaker and father of modern computing, Alan Turing. In this case, Turing is the nickname given to the cryptanalyst Miguel Saenz by his boss, the mysterious Albert, founder of the country's Black Chamber. Miguel earns this name by virtue of his seemingly magical ability to break the secret codes of anti-government messages and help the government of President Montenegro sustain its ruling power. When we meet Turing/Miguel Saenz, he is nearing retirement age, a relic of past days when code-breaking was as much intuitive as intellectual, holistic rather than strictly mathematical. His former boss, a man of mysterious origins named Albert, exists in a delirious, nearly comatose state. He imagines himself as the immortal spirit of cryptography, having lived multiple lives as the code-maker or code-breaker for most of history's greatest moments. Miguel's wife, Ruth, teaches the history of cryptography at the local university, while their daughter Flavia writes about hackers and discovers that she has surprising talents in the cyberworld of the Playground and beyond.

A host of supporting characters orbit around Turing, Ruth, and Flavia in the city of Rio Fugitivo. The most important one is Kandinsky, a hacker extraordinaire who establishes a resistance movement within the virtual world of Playground as a dry run for creating the real thing in the real world of President Montenegro's government. Through his experiences in the Playground, Kandinsky recruits a small group of like-minded hackers who use the Internet for attacks on the government and on multinational conglomerates through Internet graffiti, hacking into secured files to release the information, and "denial of service" assaults on selected websites. Turing's current boss, a former NSA operative named Ramirez-Graham, sees the capture or elimination of Kandinsky as his crowning accomplishment, after which he can return to the United States with head held high. Ramirez-Graham charges his subordinates with identifying and stopping Kandinsky's resistance movement, even going so far as to recruit the teen-aged Flavia (Saenz/Turing's daughter) to help. Along the way, Flavia witnesses the shooting death of Rafael Corso, a Rat (informant) with whom she was quickly moving from teen-aged infatuation toward full-scale romance. Mixed in among these various characters and sub-plots is Judge Cardona, the horribly liver-spotted, drug-addicted former Minister of Justice. Cardona is bent on revenging the death of his cousin and Platonic first love, Mirtha, by killing Albert and Turing for their roles in decoding and unveiling her role in a Marxist-Leninist movement many years before.

TURING'S DELIRIUM alternates its views from chapter to chapter, giving us a peak inside the heads of each character as the story progresses and occasionally even bending its chronology with jump-forwards. Yet despite this omniscience, the story unfolds gradually into an increasingly complex web of lies, deceits, misdirections, and misunderstandings as some truths are (at least partially) revealed. In Paz Soldan's Rio Fugitivo, nothing is as it first appears, and everyone's notion of reality is warped by their own, sometimes willfully limited, view. Thus, Turing is preparing to tell his wife Ruth he wants to divorce, not knowing that Ruth in turn has decided to divorce him while also revealing everything she knows about Turing's secret work for the government and the harm he has caused to others' lives. Flavia is certain she can catch Kandinsky, Albert believes he will be reincarnated in another cryptologist, and Turing basks in the laurels of his accomplishments unaware of their true nature until it is too late.

Edmundo Paz Soldan renders these twists and turns masterfully, presenting a book that reads both as a thriller and a critique of globalization's negative impact on the Third World. As well, he suggests that we are all living a sort of delirium. Cardona's and Flavia's infatuation-induced deliria and Albert's death-bed hallucinations are only the most obvious, while Turing's is a product of self-deception. Another character's nearly insane desire for iconic fame leads to the book's climax and sets the stage for Kandinsky's own future.

In ancient times, a philosopher suggested that perhaps he was a butterfly who was just dreaming of being a man. In the Internet age, Paz Soldan hypothesizes that perhaps we are just avatars, characters in a virtual reality game being played by beings at another level of reality while we are busy creating avatars of our own. Perhaps that is the intended message of Paz Soldan's television personality, Lana Nova, who delivers the country's nightly news even though she is herself an avatar, a virtual being programmed with just enough range of emotion to recite the government-approved version of the day's "reality." TURING'S DELIRIUM is an outstanding read, fast paced and filled with surprises as well as offering a biting commentary on globalization and America's role therein.

This book caught my eye the other day simply because the title included the word "Turing". When I realised that it was a South American writer I was all the more fascinated.
This is a wonderful read combining themes of mid to late 20th century South American politics (read military dictatorships), the sad rationalisations of those who compromised during such regimes and the impact of modern hacker/cracker culture.
But for me the thing that really set the book apart is the unmistakeable South American voice. Soldan belongs to the relatively new McOndo literary tradition who have sometimes been accused of the McDonaldisation of South American writing. However, I think that charge is particularly unfair in the case of this book. Soldan is very much concerned with some of the most difficult issues of South American life but addresses those issues in the modern environment of cyberculture and commercialism.

This is a fast-paced story that plays on the astounding paradoxes of arguably the most backward country in the Americas. It could have been set in a more developed place & work just about as well. Paz-Soldan tells it from mutiple perspectives & the story just keeps twisting & changing as it moves along. Not only are the characters not what they seem to be, but several are not even what they think they are. Never-the-less, they are are quite believable (particularly for those who have experienced the strange mixture of background & nationality of those who come to Bolivia to "hacer las Americas." The biggest shortcoming, as far as I'm concerned, is that the author could have added more of the incredible culture of this enigma of a country. Maybe because the book was originaly written for Bolivians who take for granted the uniqueness of their land, he just lightly passes over some of the more interesting aspects of Bolivian life; we see no cholitos or "indios" and the only foods mentioned are the Americanized junk foods--no saltenas, quinoa, or those amazing puffed noodles. Still, the book is intriguing & well-paced. I imagine it would make a great movie (especially if it were filmed in Bolivia).
By my preliminary reading, Paz-Soldan seems to come to the conclusion that although the global economy is certainly screwing the world over, nobody seems to be able to put forth a viable answer & that most of us, regardless of our position, are manipulated & driven by forces we are ignorant of. I'm going to have to read more of his work to see what, if any, alternative he offers.

This book is a fascinating look at the evolution of technology and the role it plays in the culture and governance of an emerging nation. Set in modern Bolivia, the story pits a group of activists against the government, the activists use both traditional and technological means of protest, and the government has a secret department of cryptologists to oppose them. Anyone who enjoyed Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon would find a lot to enjoy here.

(4.5 stars) Dense with ideas and complex in its plots, Turing's Delirium confronts the issues of globalization and the conflicts generated by a perpetual underclass, bringing social unrest to life within a thriller set in Rio Fugitivo, Bolivia. Young intellectuals, who have always relied on strikes, demonstrations, and indigenous riots to emphasize their grievances, now have a new weapon, the computer, and hackers are the front line in the waging of the new war.

Several plot lines develop simultaneously here: The main character, Miguel Saenz, also known as Turing, a famous code-breaker from the 1970s, is now in charge of the archives of the Black Chamber, the Bolivian security agency. He has recently received a coded message accusing him of murder. Trained by the elderly Albert, "the spirit of cryptanalysis," who is now delirious and dying in the hospital, Turing works for Ramirez-Graham, an American-born Bolivian recruited by the vice-president of Bolivia to modernize the Black Chamber.

A local judge, Judge Cardona, wanting to avenge the suspicious death of his cousin, intends to put Bolivia's President on trial as soon as he returns to civilian life, but Cardona also wants to incriminate Turing and his wife, another cryptanalyst, for their support of the President. Kandinsky, a young expert in creating viruses, is the chief hacker into the government's computer systems. Like many of the young people involved in the resistance, including Turing's daughter Flavia, he participates in the virtual "game" of Playground, in which young hackers try out techniques for conquering the enemy. The fact that "virtual" reality is "virtually" identical to "real" reality is a keystone of the novel.

Gradually the separate plots and numerous characters begin to overlap, with murder the end result. At the same time, however, the author is exploring complex metaphysical ideas--the nature of reality as opposed to virtual reality, the mechanisms of thought, concepts governing identity, and guiding principles of the universe.

Throughout the novel, Paz Soldan uses the second person point of view to reveal Turing's thoughts, raising the question of whether Turing is a reliable focus for the novel, while Albert's delirious reminisces about his past lives echo as a haunting refrain. As the murders mount, the reader questions whether Kandinsky is a "good" person, whether Turing's motives are "pure," whether Turing's daughter Flavia is following a "thoughtful" path to solving the problems of Rio Fugitivo, whether Judge Cardona is an avenging angel or a vengeful criminal, and whether the problems of the country can ever be solved.

Dense and often philosophical, the novel lacks a main character with whom the reader can fully identify, and it may keep some readers at a distance, but the novel provides a vibrant picture of life in Rio Fugitivo and leaves the reader wondering about the universal meaning of "progress" and its particular meaning in Rio Fugitivo. n Mary Whipple

This novel is too ambitious, but its complicated structure fails to engage the reader, and is composed of elements that are too conventional. The Kandinsky character is boilerplate stuff; Turing has many edges, but is rather incoherent. Albert is just a vehicle to tell the history of cryptography, and clumsily at that, embedded in a torrent-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo. Did you count how many times "electric ant" is mentioned?
Besides, for the geek within us, there are several errors. Cryptography does not have anything to do with cybersecurity and forensic analysis. People don't use 3l33t-speek in chat rooms. "Cyberhacktivism" just does not exist (hacktivism already includes the "cyber" sense within it). If you want cyberpunk, go to the classics. There's no Stross or Doctorow here. Might be in the near future, since it has some promising traits, but not there yet.