The nonfiction debut from the author of the international best seller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding
Geek Sublime
The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
- Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?
Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of Abhinavagupta, the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of Abhinavagupta, the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
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About the Author
Credit: Melanie Abrams
Praise
- “[Geek Sublime's] ambition: to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds—the cultures—of technology and art.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “[Reading Geek Sublime is] a marvelous, peripatetic experience that will change the way you look at everything from iambs to your iPhone. . . . Endlessly fascinating.”—San Francisco Chronicle
- “[Geek Sublime] dwells on Chandra’s gripping personal narrative. . . . as well as his sometimes spiritual exploration of computer language, the ancient Vedas, and the way they share so many traits with fiction.”—NPR
- “Chandra, a novelist, blends memoir, social criticism, and the study of linguistics to consider the claim . . . that writing code is an art form akin to writing fiction.”—The New Yorker
