Racism
There is a strangely persistent focus on racist attitudes and perspectives expressed by the narrator and the characters in the novel. Nothing at all suggests that this is an expression of the author’s own views so one must approach it as a somewhat significant part of the story’s foundation. The racist attitudes, it should be mentioned, are very often expressed through imagery rather than direct attribution of opinion:
Now these Chinese are sophisticated urbanites, not suntanned yokels who’ve never seen cars before—they’ll get out of your way if you drive fast and honk your horn. And indeed many of them flee to one side of the street or the other, producing the illusion that the truck is moving faster than the forty-three miles an hour shown on its speedometer.
Entropy
Imagery is such a useful literary tool for the talented writer that it can be utilized even for the purpose of lending a certain level of immediacy and concretely vivid pictures of something as relatively vague and nebulous as the concept of entropy. Entropy is a term related to the tendency of everything to eventually break down and it can be a difficult concept to warp one’s head around relative to non-organic material:
The hills had thrown entropy into the system. Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. The entropy manifested itself as swirls and violent gusts and ephemeral vortices. All of these things were clearly visible, because all summer the air of full of dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblow snow.
Scientists
The book is chock full of scientific types. Trying to convey the excitement of being a scientist is not far removed from the difficulty of trying to convey the creative spirit of writing. In fact, it is probably true that more memorable films have been made about scientists than writers because at least mathematical calculation can be made visual in a way that writing usually can’t:
He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry’s computing machine.
What is This Com-pew-tor?
This is the ultimate geek culture novel for the geek culture that finds the nerdy scientists on The Big Bang Theory too mainstream to truly qualify as geeks. But, of course, not every reader will be a member of the subculture and so the author occasionally takes the time to make it clear he is aware of this gap in information and experience:
“Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah,” Waterhouse says, or words to that effect.
