Lean and hungry geeks tend to be ambitious, and “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson’s latest book, fits the bill — it’s an insanely ambitious techno-thriller/historical novel that critics are mentioning in the same breath as Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s being labeled Stephenson’s “crossover” book, mainly because it doesn’t fit neatly into the same science-fiction slot as his last two novels, “Snowcrash” and “The Diamond Age.” But Stephenson hasn’t actually left his home territory. If anything, the truth is the opposite. “Cryptonomicon” is clear proof of Stephenson’s ongoing intention to delve ever deeper into the heart of the digital era, to lay out in detail both excruciating and poetic the awesome influence the computer has exerted on the 20th century.

“Cryptonomicon,” like “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is partly set during World War II. But it also takes place in the present day. The drama set in the earlier period centers around the invention of the digital computer as a code-breaking means of thwarting the Nazis. Meanwhile, in 1999, descendants of the WWII characters are gallivanting around the Far East, using computers in a venture-capital-funded attempt to set up a secure “crypt” for digital information. It’s all tied together by multiple conspiracies, the mysteries of code and lots and lots of stolen gold.

I caught up with Neal Stephenson as he came through San Francisco on his book tour. He’s not an easy interview (lean and hungry geeks rarely are) — but I already knew that from previous interactions. In person, he is measured and restrained, judicious almost to a fault, offering a sharp contrast to the flamboyant exuberance that makes his novels such giddy, enjoyable rides. He doesn’t get carried away. He doesn’t like interpreting his own work. He’s heard most of my questions too many times already. It is all too obvious that he is only meeting with a reporter because he is doing his duty promoting his novel, that he’d much rather be back home in Seattle pounding away at his keyboard, at work on his next delirious masterpiece.

His attitude is not uncommon in writers or, for that matter, computer geeks. And there’s no question that Stephenson is both. His credentials as a writer don’t need repeating. But his identity as a geek may run even deeper. He comes from a family of engineers and physicists, on both sides, and he was programming in BASIC when he was 15. He’s been programming all his life — he once even wrote an image processing program for the Macintosh — but never as a paying job. He certainly doesn’t try to hide it. When I meet him, he is wearing a T-shirt with the word “hackers” emblazoned across the chest.

I want to find a way to unleash the energy lurking inside of Neal Stephenson, the lean and hungry geek, but he’s too cagey for me. He anticipates the direction of every question. He even prefaces his answers with framing meta-commentary: “This is where I’m going to be annoying,” he says; “this is where I’m going to be evasive.”

“This is where I’m not going to be helpful.”

He’s never actually annoying. He’s quite civil, and he seems genuinely apologetic when our time runs out. But you sure don’t want to ask him dumb questions. Like, is he happy with the comparison to Pynchon?

“I’m not unhappy with it,” he says. He doesn’t actually roll his eyes, but you can feel him thinking, “Well duh, what ambitious writer who just wrote a technologically obsessed book set partially in WWII wouldn’t want to be compared to Pynchon?”

Well then, what about the problem of whether mainstream readers will be taken aback by the lectures on the mathematics underlying cryptographic theory, which Stephenson includes in his novel. Did he worry about that?

“Not really,” he says. “When it comes down to it, the few pages of the book that have equations on them don’t contain a whole lot of plot or character development. So if you skip over that stuff you miss very little.”

Indeed, to refrain from including the hard stuff, says Stephenson, would be tantamount to giving into what he sees as a popular reluctance to face up to the implications of technological progress.

“To me it seems like there is a kind of a strange denial in a lot of our culture, about just how important science and technology have been this century,” says Stephenson. “There’s just an unwillingness to come to grips with it at all. I don’t deprecate people who feel that way, but I do think that at the end of a century like this one it’s not the end of the world if you toss an equation into a work of art.”

“Cryptonomicon” is a book about many things — World War II, the Philippines, venture capital and the high-tech economy, to pick just a few — but the axis around which everything revolves is precisely that issue of how important science and technology have been — as viewed from “the end of a century like this one.” The novel’s journey back in time follows directly, Stephenson says, from his ruminations about the future.

“The more I thought about the future of computing the more interesting it was to consider the history of it. This is true not only in computing but in a lot of areas. Maybe we could have known more about what was going to happen in the Balkans if we paid more attention to the history there. I started feeling the need to put things in a longer historical context.”

Part of that historical context is the rise of what Stephenson calls “hacker culture.” Until very recently, the culture generated by computer hackers was an underground phenomenon, usually misunderstood by the mainstream as something illicit and vaguely dangerous.

Stephenson’s own success is one sign of the changing times. Before the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream phenomenon, before Wired Magazine suddenly promoted the prominence of the computer geek as a cultural icon, publishing “Cryptonomicon” as a major hardcover release would have made no sense. But the undeniable importance of techno-culture at the close of this century has spawned a widespread popular desire to understand how we got here. “Cryptonomicon,” which Stephenson envisions as just one installment of a series of novels taking place in the past, present and future, makes eminent sense when seen as a response to this social hunger.

Both the novel and the hubbub of contemporary computing culture are fueled by the energy that seethes though one crucial contradiction — the computer’s significance as a tool for both hiding meaning from view and for enhancing access to information. The word “code,” after all, can refer to something that has been encrypted and hidden, but it also refers to the basic building blocks of a program — something that, with a little knowledge, is right out there in plain view.

If Stephenson’s obsessions with the meaning of code weren’t obvious enough from “Cryptonomicon,” all one has to do is consider what Stephenson decided to do after finishing his humongous tome. He took a little “break” and dashed off a 40,000-word meditation on the cultural significance of computer operating systems, “In the Beginning was the Command Line.” Not only does the essay illustrate just how logically “Cryptonomicon” follows from Stephenson’s earlier work, but it also provides useful clues on how to view the evolution of Stephenson’s entire body of work.

“Ever since the Mac came out,” writes Stephenson, “our operating systems have been based on metaphors.” But as Stephenson matured as a computer user, he found himself increasingly disenchanted with the metaphorical stuff that came between him and his computer. He abandoned the Mac-style point-and-click “graphical user interface” (GUI). Instead he opted for direct contact via text input at the “command line” prompt.

Stephenson’s psychological transition was encouraged by his growing infatuation with the Linux operating system, the flag bearer of the so-called open-source software movement. “Open-source software” refers to software in which the underlying source code to a computer program is made freely accessible to all, rather than locked away from users as a proprietary corporate secret. For Stephenson, his change of operating system heart was a sign of upward evolution. He found it empowering and liberating to move from a metaphorical GUI desktop to a command-line interface, from closed code to open code.

Stephenson’s last three novels follow a similar trajectory. In “Snowcrash” Stephenson won the enduring adulation of geeks everywhere by delivering two fabulously cool metaphors for what the computer could offer the world — the Metaverse, an online reality in which hackers donned their favorite personas and acted out their fantasies, and the Librarian, a helpful digital entity, not unlike a real-life librarian, who is also a really, really neat way of imagining how we puny humans might some day be able to plumb the database of all recorded information. Then in “The Diamond Age,” he went a step further, entrancing his readers with the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” a “smart” book that delivered lessons in life and computer theory disguised as interactive fairy tales, all with the intention of educating its young female owner in how to thrive in a treacherous world.

In “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson cuts to the chase. Instead of elaborate metaphors for how the computer works or might work, he brings us directly to ground zero: Alan Turing, the creator of the first digital computer, is even a character in “Cryptonomicon.” As the novel flips back and forth across the last 50 years, we see both the birth of the computer and its current state-of-the-art implementation. Stephenson goes so far as to include actual code for an encryption algorithm in the text.

It’s as if, after giving his readers a pair of advanced metaphor-based GUIs with which to contemplate the role of the computer in modern life, Stephenson has now decided to show us the “source” — to deliver to us the truth about computing in all its raw, unblemished command-line beauty.

I lay out for him my painstakingly constructed analysis. What does he think? Is this a fair appraisal?

He nods his head briefly.

“That’s a good analogy,” he says. And then he pauses, waiting for the next question. (Lesson for would-be interviewers of geeks: Never ask them a yes-or-no question, because that’s all you’ll get in response.) But Stephenson does agree with the general thrust of my questions about the contradictory nature of code.

“That’s the basic contradiction I’m trying to deal with here,” says Stephenson. “There’s always been this duality between secrecy and openness. The digital computer as we have it today was born in the attempt to deal with codes, to go into these impenetrable messages and bring back the information. In that time the codes that we were breaking were to us a sinister force. We had to break these codes or the bad guys were going to take everything over. Now, the computer is all about openness and spreading information to every corner of the world. But at the same time, we’re finding that the more we do that, the more we are perceiving a need to encrypt our stuff, to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys.”

It’s a messy situation, especially for engineers and hackers used to thinking of the world in neat binary terms of ones and zeros, or as a set of problems that can all eventually be solved. The “open-source” advocates that Stephenson rhapsodizes about in his essay on operating systems are often the same people working hardest to ensure that individuals can keep their personal information private.

As our all too short interview comes to a close — Stephenson doesn’t want to keep a photographer waiting — I try, again, to pull his novel and his essay into line with one another. I observe that the very same open-source hackers who are luxuriating in Stephenson’s beloved command-line world are hard at work devising their own Macintosh-like GUIs. Isn’t this going backwards, I ask him? To me, it seems that the gist of Stephenson’s writing, his comments about the importance of science and technology and his enthusiasm for incorporating code and equations in his novel all add up to a strong authorial point of view stating that the world would be a better place if people were smarter about their relationship with computer technology. But those open-source hackers are busily striving to make it easier for people to be stupid.

Doesn’t the world need more smart users, I ask Stephenson?

“I think we need an upgrade path,” he answers. “I think we need a way to encourage people to become smart users.”

Is “Cryptonomicon” part of that upgrade path? Showing people the “source” — delivering to them the roots and history of computing culture — is this Stephenson’s contribution to social smartening-up?

“I can see where you are going,” says Neal Stephenson. “It would make a nice wrap-up for your story. I don’t know. I mean, the only way I could see that happening is if somehow this makes geek culture a little more accessible to people, so they don’t feel like they are becoming some kind of monster as they learn how to use this kind of technology.”

He is too modest — a rare compliment to bestow upon a hacker. With “Cryptonomicon,” Stephenson has embroidered the phrase “computer literacy” with a whole new layer of meaning. He has become the poet laureate of hacker culture. So why even bother with the dumb questions? Cut the book tour short and send this man back to Seattle. He’s got some more writing to do.

Event Horizon’s creators, Ellen Datlow, Rob Killheffer and Pam Weintraub, proudly describe it as a professional venture. To Datlow, a critically acclaimed editor, this means, “We pay professional rates and we have editors who know what they’re doing, who have some experience in editing, who have an editorial voice, who work with authors on stories, and who are not afraid to turn stories down.” This distinction is particularly significant in two mediums whose culture is dominated by fan efforts.

Yet professionalism has proved no hedge against declining circulation in the traditional science-fiction magazine market, as subscriptions to the big three — Asimov’s, Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction — continue to plummet. And professionalism in electronic publishing has yet to prove it can fuel a profitable business.

Although Event Horizon was partly designed as bait to draw attention to its successful parent Web production company of the same name, producer Killheffer stresses, “We don’t want to be a vanity project. ” And the site has drawn between 15,000 and 20,000 unique users per month since its inception in August. But is that enough to survive?

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Science fiction, of course, is ubiquitous on the Net: Multitudes jam the local area networks to download their very own personal copy of the newest “Star Wars” trailer, while TV-oriented sites like The Sci-Fi Channel’s Dominion host three-day electronic sci-fi conventions. Since its earliest days, science-fiction fandom has had a community sensibility, and it has flourished online since the first cyberspace pioneers — programmers by day, speculative dreamers by night — colonized the distributed bulletin board system that would become Usenet in order to have a place to talk about their favorite “Star Trek” episodes.

But the army of people interested in science fiction spun off from movies and TV far outnumbers those interested in the genre’s written words. “We’re not growing a bunch of new readers,” Killheffer admits. “The barrier that written science fiction has always had is the willingness of the reader to encounter unfamiliar concepts and do a little bit of work in reading. That barrier is as high as it ever was. ‘Star Wars’ is evidence that the imagery of science fiction has become familiar to people. They’ll buy stories in a familiar world with familiar characters, but there’s little evidence that they’ll pick up a new world — even when the book is aimed directly at that audience, telling a similar story of high adventure and using the imagery of science fiction in a similar way. They’re not looking for science fiction, they’re looking for ‘Star Wars.’”

Event Horizon includes few of the bells and whistles that mark other science fiction-oriented sites. “We try and make a story online look the same as a print story generally,” allows Datlow. “Although I’ve seen stories on a black background, I think it’s a really bad idea. You want to make it as easy on the eyes as you can.” And there are some advantages that virtual publishing has over print: Length is not a limiting factor, so novellas — a format science-fiction writers favor — can be more easily accommodated. Although the site does host a section called Superstrings — round-robin exercises in collaborative fiction among teams of up-and-coming talent — it eschews more elaborate hypertext experimentation. Datlow says: “I think the brain is still wired to read a certain way, and I don’t think it’s easy to get involved with fiction if it’s not written in a traditional structure, or one that the brain is used to following.”

The question remains: Can Event Horizon succeed where an established brand name like Omni — supported by the deep pockets of Penthouse publisher General Media — failed? Notes Gardner Dozois, editor of the venerable Asimov’s and a well-regarded author in his own right: “The problems with publishing fiction on the Net are two-fold: You need seed money to pay for editorial material — you have to be able to buy stories from authors. You need start-up money, pockets deep enough to allow you to buy stories until your site earns a profit. Which brings us to the second problem: How do you make money reliably by publishing on the Internet? The track record is not good.”

Was the Omni model that Event Horizon has adopted — a Web publication supported by ad revenues — simply ahead of its time? “In my opinion,” says Event Horizon’s Weintraub, “Omni was in step with its time. It had a tremendously recognizable brand name, it was linked ubiquitously throughout the Internet at many thousands of junctures, and it had a level of traffic” — approximately a million page views a day when the plug was pulled in April 1998 — “that other companies who spent far more are making a profit on today.”

Gerard Van Der Leun — a senior editor at Penthouse who is also an online veteran and co-author of “Rules of the Net,” a sardonic survey of Net manners — disagrees. “The site was not making any money because it was an ad-driven site and the ads weren’t supporting it at the level it needed to be supported — through no fault of the editorial staff. It was a great team and they all worked hard. But if you add up all of the Web sites that are free to users and what it costs to maintain them and then add up all the ads, the amount needed to support those sites is vastly larger than the amount generated from those ads. Especially when those advertisers figure out that they’re paying $5,000 a month for a tiny banner with two click-throughs. The model works better in the print world, when you don’t know for sure your advertising isn’t working.”

Event Horizon believes the secret to success is attracting the right kind of advertisers. The site has aimed to cultivate advertisers who specifically want to target a literate audience — book clubs, book publishers, publishers of interactive CD-ROMs.

“Maybe 1 percent of users on a ‘Star Wars’ site will respond to an ad. But on our site, every single one of our people will be interested in a product,” says Killheffer. “We may have a smaller audience, but we have a focused audience. If people come to our site, they’re declaring a certain kind of passion and devotion that is unusual in a market today. They’re making a strong statement about how much they want it. There remains a very enthusiastic and deeply intellectual community that engages in conversation about the literature.”

His new book, “TechGnosis,” casts a wide net, elucidating both the historical context and the meaning behind digital Gnosticism, technopaganism, William Gibson’s voodoo-haunted visions of cyberspace, the Extropians’ dreams of disembodied immortality, cyberdelia and most of the other odd phantoms of mind and spirit that seem to turn on the strange tribes at the edges of technoculture. This territory has been explored before by the likes of Douglas Rushkoff and Mark Dery, but it has never been so eloquently explained. Last month I sat down with Davis to talk about his work.

On the fringes of technoculture, there’s always been a link between digital technology and spirituality, or mysticism. Most commentators have written it off as mere eccentricity, but your book manages to make it all sound rather reasonable. Still, if you had to explain what that link is briefly, what would you say?

“TechGnosis” sets out to prove that technology and spirituality don’t exist in totally separate regions of human culture. That’s just not true. Modern technology is built on premodern dreams — whether Christian hopes for the New Jerusalem or animist ideas about electricity and the life force. Those dreams now lurk in the margins, in what I call the technological unconscious, but they continue to inform the fantasies, expectations and ideas that surround technology. For example, modern advertising is essentially a magical system of inducements deployed through technology. And it’s not simply an accident that occult material, however hackneyed, figures so predominantly in computer games.

You’re talking here primarily about technology emerging from spirituality. What about the reverse of that? Over the last century or so, human beings have taken flight, projected their voices and images across space and time and done a whole host of other things that earlier humans would have found (in the words of Arthur C. Clarke) “indistinguishable from magic.” And these things have stirred the transcendental hopes and imaginings of moderns as well. But are they actually magic?

Well, that’s a tricky question. It depends what you mean by magic. Ioan Couliano, the religious scholar who was Mircea Eliade’s greatest student, made the point that modern technology realizes dreams first imagined by earlier generations of magicians. That’s one way of interpreting Clarke’s famous quip. The fact that these things came about through the rational exploitation of natural law may be less important than we tend to think, because the social and cultural effects of technologies are often quite irrational, even mythical. One of the main aims of my book is to illustrate this. On the other hand, even if 20th century technology mobilizes these transcendental imaginings, subconsciously or not, they are also simultaneously “profane” and utterly removed from the sacred in any traditional sense. That’s the Promethean irony, the dark parody, of technomysticism. Jacques Ellul made this point as well: The machine generates ecstasy, but mechanizes it as well.

On the other hand, if combinations of digital technology, biotech, nanotech and other technoscientific forces are modifying who or what we are, what is sacred or profane might be up for grabs. Also, from the point of view of the jester or prankster — whose spirit you frequently cite — the profane is frequently sacred because it punctures the pomposity that gets attached to sacredness.

Well, you’re of course plugged into the playful animating spirit of “TechGnosis.” The archetypes that dominate technological culture today are either angelic or demonic — the New Jerusalem of the technoutopians or the evil Faustian Frankenstein monsters of the Neo-Luddites. But in my view, technology is more like a trickster: It scrambles established codes, overturns truths and constantly hoodwinks us with unintended consequences. And that’s especially true of communication technology. Remember, Hermes, the Greek god of messages, is both a trickster and a magician.

All the technological developments you name are pointing towards a future where mind — whatever that is, and we shouldn’t think for a moment that the cognitive scientists have any more of a clue than you do — can manifest itself in matter with greater and greater ease. Obviously this means values are up for grabs. But I suspect that some basic human questions, common to both practical spirituality and modern humanism, will still play a vital role in guiding our increasingly technological society. The trickster is not the only god around.

What questions, what practices, and what gods are most likely to emerge in a technoculture?

We know that information technology is changing consciousness. But the way it’s coupled with the current climate of late capitalism, it’s happening in a mostly banal way. We find ourselves living with a more multitasking, scattered, data-rich and high-velocity mind. We need to work with that mind, but also to recognize its profound limitations. Attention is the key, and any practices that refine attention will become valued in a technoculture like ours.

Now, to put on my pointed prophet’s hat for a brief moment, I’d say that fringe groups like Heaven’s Gate and Aum Shinrikyo will continue to mix up apocalyptic expectations and technology. The possibilities of artificial life and machine consciousness will also stir up all sorts of fears, fantasies and polytheistic projections, as we become more and more seduced into anthropomorphizing our increasingly animated machines. But the real questions will be raised by biotechnology and genetic engineering. We really are becoming “post-human,” and I can’t see how we can face the extraordinary turbulence and terror of this moment without asking fundamental questions about what the hell we are here for in the first place. Hardheaded humanists want those questions answered in utterly utilitarian and scientific terms; my book suggests that this rationalist fantasy may be the biggest myth of all.

Do you have a personal technospiritual practice?

Well, as I explain in my book, I think one modern idea of spiritual practice — techniques as opposed to beliefs or religious dogma — emerges partly from our experience as people deeply influenced by the pragmatic and do-it-yourself spirit of technology. We are bricoleurs of the spirit. Even the Buddha talked about his path as a kind of raft provisionally lashed together from flotsam and weeds, only to be abandoned on the other side. I just think we never get to the other side, and that our raft is constantly leaking. And so I’m interested in studying anything that helps me understand how “I” come to be: neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, cultural history, even advertising.

I think we’re only just beginning to explore the kinds of technologies — like groupware, VR and advanced biofeedback — that will really build interesting “platforms” for consciousness. Personally I’m no longer quite as interested in brain machines … or even neurotropics.

Say it ain’t so! (laughter)

Well, who knows what tomorrow will bring? I certainly haven’t hung up the sword of psychedelia. But right now I’m really into more basic techniques that awaken and alter our immediate experience: meditation, breathwork and mindfulness of the feedback loops between body and mind. That kind of moment-to-moment attention to perception and experience applies to every aspect of life, including our deeply strange relationships with technology and media. I see the Web as a Rorschach blot, automobiles as surrogate selves. E-mail lists are amazing places to watch yourself: Why do you post? Who do you think you’re responding to? Why is bug-eyed anger so close to the surface of digital disputes? Everything is grist for the mill. Even “South Park.” Ummm … scratch that. Especially “South Park.”

Erik Davis’ new book, “TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information,” is a history of this second cave, where communication technologies appear in the light of our dreams. It is a hugely ambitious undertaking, beginning with alphabetic writing and ending in the outer reaches of cyberspace. Plato’s own cave is neatly folded in: The belief in a world of unchanging reality where only the ideal forms of everything are found was, Davis argues, partly a consequence of the use of writing. For writing preserves spoken language, one of the most ephemeral and shapeless of all the ways we think, and this deeply transforms the way users think about it. A writer must believe that there is a single perfect timeless form for every sentence — that’s the one we’re trying to chip away to, and that we never quite reach or hear for very long. So why shouldn’t everything in the world have this same quality of indwelling, occluded perfection?

This is not to say that Plato’s cave is just an elaborate metaphor about writing. The relationships between technologies and ideas of technology are more complex. And the real interest of “TechGnosis” lies in the connections it explores between technology and religion. This is a tiny subject when “religion” is understood by most atheists and agnostics to mean a particularly narrow-minded and lowbrow form of Protestant Christianity. On that definition there are no interesting connections. Today’s fundamentalists are adept at using technology: The last time I asked a search engine, there were far more people on the Web being “sanctified by” someone than being “fucked by” anyone. But there is no real interconnection between these two worlds.

The fun comes when you define religion more loosely, to include all the forms of shifty but warming illumination from the fire in the center of the cave. Chief among these, says Davis, is Gnosticism — originally a set of early Christian heresies that held that the world we live in is the illusory creation of an evil demigod, and that true knowledge will release us into the true, good, higher world made by the real God.

As a theory to build a book on, this has the advantage that we don’t really know what the Gnostics believed, back when they really flourished in the first centuries of the Christian era; quite possibly they didn’t know, either. Heresy, like tax evasion, is an invention of bureaucracies: Without large sets of written rules about what you may or may not believe (or withhold from the government), things proceed in a less organized fashion. Since Gnosticism never became a state religion, there can have been no central authoritative canon of gnostic beliefs. This disorganized quality makes Gnosticism a natural source for postmodern eclectics, like the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose novels posit a vast gnostic universe in which the hero stumbles around looking for the secret illumination that will release him.

Nonetheless, we can extract some genuine Gnostic themes from the documents we have (most written by their enemies). In fact this vagueness makes it easier for us to be genuine Gnostics than it is to follow any more well-specified religion. We know too much about the peculiar beliefs of most early Christians to be able to share them; Gnosticism is a more open standard, capable of many implementations. One of the few things on which it insists is that we are spirits, trapped in a dark universe of matter, from which only knowledge can free us.

This is a deeply elitist vision, but that is not the only reason it appeals to geeks. The work is long and arduous — as anyone knows who has wrestled with Unix. But the liberation at the end is worth everything. There are some marvelous quotes in this book from the moments when it seemed that technology would bring the light to everyone it blessed, and allow us all to assume our true, angelic natures. “All the inhabitants of the earth [will be] brought into one intellectual neighborhood, and be at the same time perfectly freed from those contaminations which might under other circumstances be received.” That was the impact that Samuel Morse’s telegraph was meant to have in 1846, not the Internet 150 years later. Or there is Scientific American’s enthusiasm for the telephone, which, it was clear in 1880, would bring about “nothing less than a new organization of society — a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community.”

Gnosticism, says Davis, is a deeply American religion, because “the American self is a Gnostic self: it believes on a deep and abiding level, that authenticity arises from independence, an independence that is at once natural, sovereign and solitary.”

The passage is illuminating not just for what it says, but how it says it. “TechGnosis” is a book that is constantly dazzling, pummeling and thundering at the reader, as if the rush of argument were sweeping us down rapids, twirling madly in the froth, banging on rocks with every paragraph. I wish I’d written it myself. But I also wish it had been aggressively edited. Most books that need editing do so because they are too long and say too little; this one is too short and says too much. The experience of reading it is curiously like spending hours online: If you don’t make constant notes, all you’re left with at the end is the knowledge that you have had an experience, without more than the vaguest notion of what this experience actually was. One might say of Davis’ own argument what he says of the marriage of Buddhism and cyberspace — that “the path is a net,” without beginning or end.

There is so much to make notes about! The edges of my copy of “TechGnosis” are almost completely buried in a neon fur of Post-its, each stuck on a notable quote or idea. Davis gives us wonderful early chapters on the understanding of electricity as the fluid of life or the soul-stuff of the universe. The ways in which this understanding is expressed change, but the “metaphysics of information culture,” as the author calls them, remain remarkably constant over the centuries — and the more powerful for being largely invisible.

The really difficult trick that Davis pulls off is to take technology and culture equally seriously and to write about them in an equally knowledgeable way. He has read everyone — and though from time to time I wish he could forget that, his unwillingness to impose a unifying vision on his material is really a strength. He doesn’t talk as if technology could ever be freed from culture, or seen without it, and this is tremendously important. He is particularly fine on the ambiguities of science fiction, which is at least as much about transcendence as it is about gadgetry; and on the way in which the more gadget-laden, masculine and shallow the genre becomes, the more it displays a raw aching for transcendence — as if we could get to heaven if only we built a large enough rocket.

In one spectacular piece of cultural deconstruction, Davis examines the curiously pedestrian beliefs of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, which were almost entirely a translation into technology of the mythologies of the first century A.D. Their central belief, after all, was that if we learn the hidden knowledge, we can go home to the stars. This would involve leaving the husk of the body behind — but that is what almost all religions except Christianity have taught about enlightenment. And almost everyone nowadays accepts the idea of passing into a higher, or spiritual, state, in which disembodied spirits talk to each other like the soundless angels made of light in C. S. Lewis’ science fiction. That’s what we go online for — even onto AOL.

The identification between souls and software, which is profoundly gnostic, seems also completely scientific. Software is the completely immaterial animating stuff that makes hardware live. It is made out of something called “information,” which is as mystical as the knowledge that Gnostics sought. Of course, in 100 years’ time our children, or theirs, ought to be able to look back on such ideas with the patronizing incomprehension that we now feel for the Victorian crazes of spiritualism and Christian Science. Their mistakes will be quite different. But they, too, will see the technology around them largely by the shadows their imagination makes it cast on the walls of the cave that surrounds us all.

Led by the right hands, this literary dance can be beautiful to behold. The variations on the theme, the subtle patterns within the overall structure, give the sterile model a unique life of its own.

Flint, a former technology journalist for Wired UK, mute and a handful of British newspapers, once traded a dissertation on chaos and complexity theory for an M.A. in philosophy and literature, so it’s hardly a surprise that he’s chosen a relatively abstract and obscure model for his story — a Habitus. The concept is “explained” in an opening quotation from Gilles Deleuze, a name that raises another flag: The universe you are about to enter is not going to behave in an orderly or predictable fashion.

“The eye binds light, is itself a bound light,” writes Deleuze. “This binding is a reproductive synthesis, a Habitus.” Got that? Fortunately, Flint’s epic casting of the idea is much more entertaining. He begins with a bit of blatant semaphore, introducing three main characters — all of whose names, like his own, begin with the letter J.

Joel Kluge is a Hasidic Jew and a mathematics prodigy (klug, by the way, means “clever” in German); for his family, however, he’s a problem. Flint’s setup for Joel is a classic heart-tugger. He knows the reader will pull for Joel as he devises his escape from his father’s Brooklyn bakery to Cambridge, where the equations of Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Whitehead and Wittgenstein once cross-fertilized, spurred and inspired each other. But Flint pulls off an emotional double whammy once Joel’s explorations in abstract mathematical theory lead him back to the roots of the kabbalistic tradition. Even geniuses get homesick.

Judd Axelrod, son of an English actress and an outrageously successful American computer salesman, is yanked from his beloved Los Angeles and plopped down in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his mother has nailed a gig with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As lonely boys are wont to do, he falls in with the wrong crowd, gets into trouble and is yanked right back to L.A. There, he’s sentenced to spend his after-school hours with Dr. Schemata, a veritable caricature of all that’s rotten about psychoanalysis. Judd is a victim of parental neglect, a strange condition called picnolepsy and the evil doctor — so it isn’t difficult at all for Flint to secure a bit of emotional investment in poor Judd from the reader.

Jennifer Several is the product of a gangbang in a mental hospital. Not long after Jennifer is born, her mother undergoes Britain’s last prefrontal lobotomy, so Jennifer never meets her. But she has her mother’s husband to care for her — until he begins to disintegrate into drink. Again, sympathy for Jennifer is all too easy to conjure up.

With all this emotional attachment taking place, some readers may become frustrated or even angry when the narrative and the very laws of nature slowly unravel — and the fates met by our three protagonists turn out to be neither tragic nor comic but just plain bizarre. But it wouldn’t be as if these readers hadn’t been warned.

Orbiting the terrestrial goings-on is Laika — the legendary, historic, first dog in space, blasted out there by the Soviets and abandoned. She was expected to live seven days at the most, but many artists can’t forget her. Songs have been written for her, and just last month, a performance in Munich sent messages floating skyward in the hopes that she’d receive them.

Flint, too, takes liberties with her story: He stuffs her with media. Like Carl Sagan, Flint seems embarrassed for our species’ habit of airing our dirty laundry to the rest of the universe by hanging it out on infinite broadcast waves. Laika is tuned in to it all. She feeds on it, and it bloats her body until she fills every nook and cranny of her tiny capsule — eventually, she becomes a sort of orbiting cyborg potato.

By the time Joel, Judd and Jennifer collectively conceive a single child, all bets are off. Up to this point, several turns in the story have been preceded by concise two- or three-page lessons taken from the histories of space flight and computers. Sputnik and John Glenn, Alan Turing and Charles Babbage — they’re all here, distantly related to our cast of characters yet grounding the fiction in verifiable fact.

But then these lessons begin to describe the development of a telepathic embryo with two hearts throughout a pregnancy that lasts two full years; the expression of a lizard that appears in the pattern of the throws of the dice; and the reasoning behind Joel’s conviction that, given enough data, he could eventually explain the Holocaust.

Can Flint pull it all together again? Here’s where another Deleuzian concept comes in handy: the rhizome, essentially an organic system of roots with a French philosophical twist. Jennifer’s mother is committed to the mental hospital in the first place because she’s become convinced she’s a tree. There’s a tree at the end of Flint’s tale, too, the only image that could be said to come around full circle. On the whole, however, the book matches its description of the impossible child:

“The girl turned towards her and for a second Jennifer was shocked by the face. She had never known it, except in fragments, and here it was complete and flooded with light. It was a face of exquisite ugliness, a face which broke every rule of proportion but so subtly that the effect was quite disarming. It lacked symmetry …”

And so does a tree. Without being too reductive, the story pulls Joel, Judd and Jennifer from their disparate roots toward a center — where they never quite align as expected — just before they’re flung away from each other again. As the title of one of the briefest sections has it, “The world has ideas of its own.”

All this would be mere fodder for yet another dissertation if Flint weren’t such a damn fine writer. His relentlessly dark humor and startling juxtapositions; the occasional sweeping passages that read more like prose poems than establishing shots or descriptions of the scenery; and the near overabundance of wild, wild ideas — all of these make “Habitus” a marvelously provocative read.