Oh, well... this one didn't meet half the expectations that I had upon discovering it in the Supercomputing 2005 conference. It's a novel, yes, about computation, yes, but it fails miserably at telling a cohesive, engrossing, and entertaining story. The best I can say about it is that it's a novel for the computer science geek, like me, that may motivate one to go hit the books on computability and theory of computation again.
The plot is simple. A romance starts in the Greek isles between a cyberwizard woman and an archaeologist. She leaves Greece all of a sudden abandoning her lover Alexandros, who is compelled to seek her out later on the global internet. In this search, he stumbles upon Turing, who is purportedly, some type of AI program (perhaps one which can pass Turing's test). Turing would have been constructed as some kind of teaching tool to educate people on computation. As the character Alexandros and Turing interact, the reader is presented with many a lecture on computer technology and computation, which fail to advance the plot in any way, shape, or form. The tutorials are very interesting and present concepts in Math and Computer Science with considerable clarity, but then again, I failed to see how they fit in the story. (I find it extremely hard to believe, however, that anyone without a solid background in Computer Science could muster enough interest to get through these lessons.) In the meantime, the other two legs of the love triangle meet, fall in love, and develop a relationship, a plot element that was as exciting to me as watching an egg cook in boiling water.
Arguably, this "novel" would want to fit in the cyberpunk genre and reach a different kind of height than the works of William Gibson, but it doesn't. It seems to me it was only a vehicle for teaching scientific concepts poorly disguised as literature. The romance which develops into a love triangle is insipid, the characters thin, and the resolution of the story anti-climatic.
On the other hand... I enjoyed the discussions on Cantor's diagonalization proof, on Turing machines and the halting problem, and other Math/CS topics. They made me want to go back to my old books and refresh all that beautiful theory.
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