Mirrored Mind

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as longas he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary book he returns to hisearly days as a writer, when he was beginning Red Earth and PouringRain, and looks at the connections between these two worlds of artand technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style just aswriters are but do the words mean the same thing to both? And is it acoincidence that Chandra is drawn to two seemingly opposing ways ofthinking? To answer his questions, Chandra delves into the writings ofAbhinavagupta, the tenth- and eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker, andcreates an idiosyncratic history of coding. Part literary theory, part techstory and part memoir, Mirrored Mind is a book of sweeping ideas. It is aheady and utterly original work.