Book Review: A Unified Theory ‘Geek Sublime,’ by Vikram Chandra

NYT | SUNDAY MAGAZINE
By James Gleick

Pablo Delcán

For the last half-century we’ve had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two — the literary and the scientific. Which side are you on? Vikram Chandra is a wonderful novelist and apparently knows his way around an algorithm, too. His new book is an unexpected tour de force, different from anything he has done before. It has the oddly off-putting title “Geek Sublime,” which disguises its ambition: to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds — the cultures — of technology and art. Chandra begins a journey into what he calls the Sanskrit cosmopolis: “the Sanskrit-speaking and writing ecumene which, at its height, sprawled from Afghanistan to Java, across dozens of kingdoms, languages and cultures.” [link]

GEEK SUBLIME
The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
By Vikram Chandra
Illustrated. 236 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $16.