On one hand, this is a novel about romance: Alexandros meets Ethel on a sunny Greek Isle, loses her, she takes up with another, and, well, I dont want to give away all of the plot. On the other hand, this is a textbook about computation: computers, algorithms, complexity, NP-completeness, and exponential growth. How is this accomplished? Enter Turing, a self-described interactive tutoring program, which takes Alexandros under its wing (after Ethel dumps him), and attempts to teach him the truth. Exactly why Alexandros needs to know all about computation is not obvious, but Turing thinks he does. Perhaps it has to do with the mysterious artifact Alexandros has found from the third century BC.

Papadimitriou weaves together pedagogy and romance in equal installments. Clearly, few people are more qualified to write about the nature of computation than Papadimitriou, whose textbook [1] is a classic, and who has done quite a lot of work in that area and others. In his novel, Papadimitriou has Turing range over a wide variety of topics, from the Hilbert program and the halting problem, to Turing instability, network protocols, Euler circuits, and the history of artificial intelligence. Roughly half of the book is given over to these and other topics. Their exposition is clear, and designed for the general reader. Few computer scientists will be knowledgeable in all of the areas discussed, but much of the discussion will be rather familiar. When it is, it quickly becomes obvious that it gets in the way of the plot. Computer scientists will want to skip ahead, while many general readers will be wondering why they are being told all these interesting things. A limited audience, however, will find this intellectual landscape tour to be simulating and intriguing.

The novel is set in the near future, with Ethel as the designer of a new approach to net searching (relevance algorithms), and Alexandros as an archeologist with a passion for women. As might be expected in such novels, a third character, Ian Frost (the charismatic hacker) enters to complicate the picture. The plot involving these three is enjoyable, but there just isnt enough to satisfy, and the 10 to 20 page digressions into computers and computational theory simply break the narrative flow. Papadimitriou does use a number of interesting structural devices in the book, including periodic short musings by Turing about life (or is that Alan Turings voice we are hearing?). There is also an appendix of fictional emails about the book itself, which serve as footnotes, references, and, amusingly, self-critique. But in the end, there are just too many narrative voices here.