Two timelines. Codebreakers at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and their grandchildren in the nineties trying to build a data haven in Southeast Asia.
Nine hundred pages with long digressions on cryptography, on the correct way to eat cereal, on the economics of gold. The digressions are the book. If they annoy you by page fifty there is no recovery.
Six years after Snow Crash and a much more serious book, with the jokes mostly traded in for research.
Read April 1999.
