Interface: Stephen Bury

Just how do you get elected President of America these days? You can sink a political career on TV in a few minutes if you make enough of fool of yourself; on the other hand if you look and sound good enough you can sway the nation. All you need to know is how well you’re going down with the voters. Take a politician who’s had a biochip implanted into his brain, linked to the computers that analyse the responses of the specially chosen market research volunteers, who represent the heights and depths of the great American people and you can work out exactly what you need to say to get your candidate elected. And then you control the President. Which is handy if you’re a worldwide conspiracy wanting to get a firmer grip on the nation to stop the Treasury reneging on the national debt and undermining all your investments.

Of course the politician and his family may not be that co-operative and the doctors and computer scientists you need to implant the chip and get it working may give the game away. Throw in the pollsters and political fixers, the secret compound under the mountain, the purpose-built hospital in India and the evangelical healer laying hands on a dying politician on live TV and you have a tale that veers from chilling to hysterical and back, via cynicism, technology and the manipulation.

But then what else would you expect from the inventive, twisted and yet ruthlessly logical mind of Neal Stephenson? If the similar cover design doesn’t give it away, the publicity material points out several times - no doubt to cash in on the huge (and completely deserved) success of the superb Snow Crash and the equally delightful Diamond Age - that Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for Stephenson “with another writer”. The other writer is his uncle, a respected University lecturer whose academic publishers would prefer him not to put his name to a big thick airport book. That’s how Stephenson sees Interface - a thick slab of a book that will seize your attention and hold it across the Atlantic. Interface is much better than that. It’s a fast-paced, compellingly believable tale that combines real people and real science with politicians who are so realistic that you’d like to vote them out of office, conspiracies that make sense of everything and sharp black humour that sees modern life through a twisted glass. It’s convincing enough to be scary, scary enough to keep you reading and wonderfully well written. Buy it even if you’re nowhere near an airport.