Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. Interface. Bantam, 1994.

Imagine a presidential candidate who often has memory lapses and uses the wrong word and who mostly campaigns from his hometown, rarely traveling while campaigning. His running mate is a black woman who is fairly well known but who has had limited political experience.

No, this is not about the 2020 American election. This novel came out in 1994 and imagined a 1996 election with unusual circumstances.

The current president in 1996, who is never named, decides to solve the national debt by simply erasing it—or as he puts it, “forgives” the debt. Yes, that is the word he uses. No, not just college loans but the trillion dollar biggie. Needless to say, the current president’s popularity tanks, giving an opportunity not just for the opposition party (also not named specifically) but also for a third party candidate.

Immediately, we understand that this is a political novel that has something to do with integrity. “In the old days, contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy, fraud, were taboo for the average people.” (23) But not for the elites. Governments can do anything they can get away with, so it seems. At one time it was the robber barons. Nowadays it is Silicon Valley. Stephenson and George present a warning, but also a very entertaining tale.

A political advisor and de facto campaign manager says:

“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 [seduce women] and send us to Vietnam.” (92)

What does contemporary politics focus on, then?

“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 rack in the public square in some medieval [backwater] 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.” (92)

This analyst goes on to confess, “We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness” (94).

One joke that might be slightly dated is what Interface calls the common overnight delivery service. Back in the nineties FedEx really had no competition and seemed to be everywhere. In the novel, they call it Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems, or GODS. It still rates a chuckle, though now in my neighborhood Amazon trucks are closer to being omnipresent. (The name GODS reminded this reader of Wallace’s Organization of North American Nations or ONAN, another deliberately pointed acronym.)

The main thrust of the story, though, is the interface between neurosurgery and microtechnology. A Silicon Valley/Delhi corporation has developed a microchip that can interface with the human nervous system. One of the early users of this system is the governor of Illinois, Willy Cozzano, who has suffered a stroke—with all of the mental and physical side effects you would expect. But his handlers keep him sequestered during his recovery—a recovery which a chip implanted in his brain expedites or, perhaps, causes.

If Interface sounds a little like the Manchurian Candidate, it is. Only the power that “helps” Gov. Cozzano is not a foreign government, but a kind of industrial cabal, the contemporary version of the robber barons. It includes some old money and titled Europeans as well as Silicon Valley types.

Cozzano does have one thing going for him besides his popularity as governor. His daughter is a neurologist. She begins to understand what is going on, but to get her father back to his old self will mean a real struggle. When we study Hamlet, I tell my students that Hamlet is able to restore justice to Denmark, but it comes at a price. The same thing is true with Interface.

Typical of Stephenson, there is a lot of wit. I suspect Mr. George’s contribution was more on the political end of things. One great quotation from Eleanor Richmond, the vice-presidential candidate, nails it:

“Spending money won’t help. Neither will writing educational software to run on your home TV set. It’s just a question of values. If your family places a high value on being educated, you’ll get educated, even if you have to do your homework on the back of a shovel. And if your family doesn’t give a [hoot] about developing your mind, you’ll grow up stupid and ignorant even if you go to the fanciest private school in America.

“Now unfortunately, I can’t give you a program to help develop people’s values. Personally, I’m starting to think that the fewer programs we have, the better off we are.” (463-463)

If you are starting to think that Interface is a political screed, it is not. It is a tightly written and wild story. This is, after all, the same guy who wrote Snow Crash. If his The Big U skewers academia and Zodiac satirizes the environmental movement, then Interface raises interesting questions about politics, technology, money, and power. January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C. was a circus. What if there were something like that, but it was really organized with lots of money and powerful people behind it? Instead of a bunch of anarchists, what if Zuckerberg, Gates, and some folks from UNESCO had initiated it? What if such an international figure declares “We have solved the problem of elections” (522)?

There is one brief passage in this book that sheds a little understanding on the previous book we reviewed. In People of the Book, Hanna’s mother is a prominent neurosurgeon who is uncommonly overbearing. In Interface, Willy’s neurologist daughter explains that that is typical of the profession:

“Neurosurgeons are the ultimate macho [jerks] of the medical world. Nobody can stand them. Their solution to everything is cold steel.” (137)

Stephenson and George here use their imagination to construct a scenario that does not seem that distant. This is not colonizing the moon or creating a digital “metaverse.” We already carry chip cards and our pets have implanted chips. But there is more. This gets to two of the most serious questions we can ask ourselves: What is truth? What it means to be human? Their corollaries follow: How free are we? How free can we be?