WWII, year 1943. The allies have already cracked all the Nazi codes. They know where the military convoys are going and where enemy submarines are hiding. But if British destroyers will start finding and sinking Nazi submarines every time without any problems, Germans will figure out that their codes have been broken and will change them. That's why it's necessary to fool the enemy. For that reason, the special British-American secret unit 2702 was created...

"The Bible" of cyberpunk (or cypherpunk? :) about the creation of the computer world. There is everything in it: love, war, betrayal, treasures on the bottom of the sea, and even exile from Eden...

Dans une Chine rétro-futuriste partagée entre réseaux neuronaux, rebelles intégristes néo-confucéens et comptoirs occidentaux, l’Itinéraire d’une toute jeune fille guidée par les préceptes de son étonnant mentor électronique… Un roman interactif et frénétique, électronique et victorien, érotique et poétique, où l’on verra intervenir une actrice au grand cœur, un producteur trop curieux, un savant pas si fou que ça, un mandarin, quelques nobles actionnaires, plusieurs petites filles, une armée de rebelles, des hordes de réfugiés et la reine Victoria II…

Entre Jules Verne et William Gibson, voici une épopée délirante qui allie les inventions du cyberpunk et les images des clips vidéo avec la tradition du roman-feuilleton et le charme suranné des poèmes victoriens.

Malmenant les genres, mêlant science-fiction, théâtre, poésie, récit d’aventures et conte pour enfants, dans cet hommage irrévérencieux à Samuel Coleridge, Lewis Carroll et Edgar Poe, voire Michael Moorcock ou Georges Perec, Neal Stephenson s’affirme avec ce roman dense et foisonnant comme l’étoile montante du nouveau fantastique américain.

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.

For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces and , leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.

From a recent (4/29/99) interview: