Geek Lit

SweetBirdOfTruth

ok, way OT here but ...

Geek Lit. Don't know if you know, but Granta magazine have picked their twenty "Best of Young British Novelists" for 2003. One of them is a guy called Hari Kunzru, who created a bit of a hype-driven storm last year, his first book was sold for some obscene amount of money by some publisher.

Anyway. he's on the list. The current issue of Granta has excerpts from each of the 20 novelists. Kunzru's story is called Lila.exe and is about a computer virus, I guess similar to Melissa only more lethal:

How many did she infect? Thousands? Tens, hundreds of thousands? Impossible to count. Experts have estimated her damage to global business at almost a billion US dollars, mostly in human and machine down time, but brute financial calculus does not capture the chaos of those days. During Lila's brief period of misrule normality was overturned. Lines of idle brokers chewed their nails in front of frozen screens. Network nodes winked out of existence like so many extinguished stars. For a few weeks she danced her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step.

Anyway. I wondered what techies would think of Kunzru's story (well, is actually an excerpt from a novel in progress - so don't read expecting something to resolve). So, is here, if you have the time/energy/interest: http://www.loopdiloop.com/f451/HariKunzru.asp

Techie hats on, what do you thing? Would you rather stick with Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon?

echomadman

its allright, doesn't grip me the way gibson/stephenson/sterling does
Have to wait for the book and see.