Another first for COL49.

[Haberberger,George D]

Excuse me for posting from work, but I just another first for COL49 on 
 salon1999's web page www.salon1999.com in the review of Po Brenson's 
 new novel "Code Boys"

To save you the time, I clipped out the paragraphs proclaiming COL49 
 the grandaddy of the Silicon Valley novels.


	          That promise was neatly framed 30 years
                          ago in what may well be the granddaddy
                          of all Silicon Valley novels, Thomas
                          Pynchon's 1966 "The Crying of Lot 49."
                          Pynchon's heroine, one Oedipa Maas,
                          stands on a hillside and looks out over a
                          development called San Narciso (it
                          happens to be in Southern California, but
                          it could easily be Santa Clara): 

                               "She thought of the time she'd
                               opened a transistor radio to
                               replace a battery and seen her
                               first printed circuit. The
                               ordered swirl of houses and
                               streets, from this high angle,
                               sprang at her now with the
                               same unexpected, astonishing
                               clarity as the circuit card had
                               ... There were to both outward
                               patterns a hieroglyphic sense
                               of concealed meaning, of an
                               intent to communicate.
                               There'd seemed no limit to
                               what the printed circuit could
                               have told her (if she had tried
                               to find out); so in her first
                               minute of San Narciso, a
                               revelation also trembled just
                               past the threshold of her
                               understanding." 

                          As she chases down clues to a possibly
                          conspiratorial private mail system that
                          seems to have existed for centuries,
                          Pynchon's heroine can never know for
                          certain whether her intimations of grand
                          patterns are genuine, or just metaphysical
                          static. Today's Silicon Valley novelists are
                          more convinced than ever that if only
                          they try hard enough, they can make our
                          circuit boards give up their secrets. But,
                          like Pynchon's Oedipa, they can never be
                          sure if they're right -- or just loopy. 
                          Feb. 13, 1997 

George