A great political thriller with a slight science fiction twist. Hits its stride best when it’s tongue is planted firmly and visibly in it’s cheek, but somehow the silliness of the entire affair still manages to have fantastic character work. A more mature feeling Novel from Neal Stephenson which I hope to see carried over into his proceeding works. If I have one complaint, the ending felt more like an extended afterward, with ends being tied up in an assembly line fashion. Great nonetheless.

Great insights to US presidential race and how media manipulates people to elect "right" candidate. In light of last US president election this does not seem very far fetch scenario anymore although some incredible technology is used in the story.

Re-reading this book again in 2021 and it absolutely floors me how relevant it is 27 years after it was written. The tech, the politics, it’s all still within the realms of possibility.

I've read a number of Neal Stephenson novels. All have been deep and fascinating. All feature self-contained worlds science fiction fans can get lost in.

"Interface" is an older novel, written with a co-author a couple of years after "Snow Crash." It's science fiction set in a contemporaneous world, based on the social, political, and technological realities of its era, the mid-1990s. Some readers may scratch their heads over the novel's pre-internet technology; those of us who embraced that technology in the mid-1990s remember how exciting and promising it was, and won't have a problem with the extrapolations Stephenson bases his novel upon.

The plot is simple: a popular politician, William Cozzano, suffers a stroke; experimental tech in the form of an embedded chip helps his brain forge new pathways, allowing him to regain speech and motion, and he enters the presidential race. Ah, but there are forces behind Cozzano's recovery and campaign, and it turns out the chip is being used to control him.

We learn about these forces through different characters involved in helping Cozzano recover, because each one of them is a part of The Network, the shadowy organization behind what turns out to be an even deeper conspiracy. These characters multiply like guppies, to the point where the reader can barely differentiate between individuals, and ultimately we learn there is an even more shadowy ... and ancient ... force behind The Network. But our plucky politician, helped by his daughter and a few trusted pals ... well, I'd better not give away the store, so I'll stop there.

Neal Stephenson is a windy bastard, and this is perhaps the windiest of his novels. There are far too many characters: every one of them gets pages and pages to show us what makes them tick, and many of them are just full of folksy observations and humor. It's really too much: the novel would have been tighter and more popular if background characters stayed in the background, but no, every one of them gets a lengthy solo, padding the story to the point where the reader starts flipping pages in search of action.

The villains in "Interface" are basically decent people who think they're doing good. Many of these basically decent people are campaign workers who, while nominally working for Cozzano, are in fact controlling him on behalf of The Network. In reality, decent people are few and far between in the political world: those drawn to political campaigns are venal, spiteful, petty, small, confused, incapable of working for any purpose higher than their own aggrandizement. As Stephenson peeled back the layers of his vast worldwide conspiracy, I couldn't suspend disbelief. I started talking to the book in my lap: "this could never happen" "no way Jose," "that's bullshit."

Despite the novel's windiness and the far-fetched political conspiracy at the heart of the plot, I think parts of this novel will stay with me. Overall, an interesting if sometimes frustrating read.

Why can't Neal Stephenson be our President? This is another brilliant novel in which Stephenson and George explore the intersections between politics, financial elites, and medicine. A secret network of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals conspires to correct an economic crisis brought on by an American President by creating a computerized medical device that can correct for mental and physical damage following a stroke. When an Illinois governor planning to run for President has a stroke, they put their plan into action. The novel explores how the public responds to political figures and why and how campaign managers capitalize on popular response to cater a campaign to the public. Eerie to read in this technologically dependent age. My favorite quotes:

"Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and they'll never know. But if you try to lie to them with the camera, they'll crucify you."

"If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox ... But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy ... With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished. - Plato's Republic"

"I'm stuck in a party that was once for the individual, and now it's dedicated to controlling the individual. The Bible thumpers and the single-issue people and all of those other control freaks have no idea of what the United States is all about. And they are going to win. But I will make my contribution. And here it is."

"The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to 'values.' If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason-race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective."

"'Did you hear about the programmer's wife?' Dr. Radhakrishnan said. 'She is still a virgin. Her husband just sits on the edge of the bed every night and tells her how great it's going to be.'"

"And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook her head, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room, sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it would take for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he really was. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor was shocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmed herself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, the harder he would fall in the end. Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man. But no one ever did. And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him."

"Positions change. People don't. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so-called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don't want to serve with him in the Senate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe you a job."

"All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit. And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don't really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values."

"In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam."

"Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media. The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish a candidate's fitness of office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations-whether his hands are held open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws."

"We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote."

Neal Stephenson formula -
1 - Create device to mobilize large sums of money / political will.
2 - Use money etc to push tech to extremes
3 - Add characters
Good formula. Loved it. Great book to read during presidential primary season.

If you love Stephenson and politics, you'll enjoy this novel. Maybe those conspiracy theorist, tin-foil hat kooks were right all along. I saw a few of the plot lines coming, which is rare in a NS book, but was still a great read. Especially loved the pre-neuromarketing-era quantified self tracker technology used for always-on focus grouping.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I've never before read any Stephenson, and this book was given to me as a gift. I think the behind-the-scenes look at politics was interesting, and the sci-fi / technology bend carried it along. However, I thought that the book was very slow to start, and took a long time to get to where it was going. Things finally picked up by the very end, but then the story finished rather quickly and abruptly. As far as structure and pacing goes, I think things could be a lot better.

Stephenson has an interesting style as an author. He tries a fair bit of humor, some which of was entertaining, and some of which, while fairly witty, I just didn't think was all that funny. One thing I did appreciate about his style is that he didn't leave unanswered questions linger for very long. He was quick to provide answers and not force the reader to dwell on things for too long. The problem, again, is that the pace is just a little bit too slow for my tastes.

I'm not sure how this book compares Stephenson's other novels, and I'm not sure what how much the co-author contributed to the actual writing. All in all, I'm glad I read the book. I hope that most of this book isn't true, because it would confirm my darkest fears about the political process and presidential elections.

This is not a very good book (I suspect Stephenson had a very minimal role in writing it). I would not recommend it. But reading it during the 2016 election was a creepy and surreal experience.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. Near-future political sf about politics and brain implants. It was written quite a few years back, and focusses rather intently on the hyper-scrutinized world of Clinton-era politics, which is a bit amusing and quaint, from today's post-scrutiny world. (Or still hyper-scrutinized, but apparently post-consequences? We'll watch your every move but then vote for you anyways, regardless of what you do or say?)

From the moment Orwell wrote his "1984" in 1949, it took quite a few decades, until we all realized it was no longer fiction. For "Interface", which Neal Stephenson wrote in 1994, this "bingo" moment is now. Change the fictional names and dated technologies to the ones from today's headlines - and that's it. All you wanted to know about the uncanny marriage of politics, money, biotechnologies and data science, is there. With all the potential to be a political blockbuster, the book for some strange reason is not as known as many other of his works, there was no even attempt to make a movie based on it, and the list of languages into which it was translated is surprisingly short. Could it be because Neal Stephenson was able to foresee more than expected and it is happening right now?

Enjoyed reading this story, found the adventures of Mary Catherine and Eleanor Richmond fascinating. Ogle's fate made me laugh. Quite an engaging cast of memorable characters.