in Library High Tech News, Vol. 29, Issue 9, Dec. 2012

The Theory of Information, a novel by Aurelien Bellanger, Paris, Gallimard, 2012

Aurelien Bellanger, 32 years old, has written here his first book, with 500 tightened pages which aim to embrace the history of the past 30 years and all the changes that occurred. He wishes his readers to enter into a new era not only technological but also, according to him, religious. To reach this goal, Bellanger builds a character, Pascal Erlanger, who is the twin of Xavier Neel, well-known in France as the founder of “Free” (an internet and TV provider).

Pascal Ertanger, the “hero”, is a stranger to the universe that surrounds him; he is “indifferent” to life since he nearly lost it when he was 12. Thinking that “the outside world is moving better without him”, he creates his own […] from the Basic programming language. Coming from wealthy suburbs of Paris, he leaves the university and built “a pink empire” on the internet (so to say based on real sex). A millionaire at the age of 20, he developed Demon, the first internet service provider, at a time when no one yet believed in this market. Then there will be the creation of a single box proposing to bring together “all the techniques of communication of the past century: telephone, radio, television, and digital networks”. Designated as the “baron of the Web”, his ascension is permanent, but this genius of innovation is more and more isolated at each step of his own development, looking like the billionaire Howard Hughes (1905-1976). This story shows one more time that human beings never remember the story of Icarus, and that this will kill him.

More than the portrait of a man, more than a warning against geeks and the web, the Theory of Information is an epic novel. The story is at the same time technological, economic, philosophical, metaphysical, and sociological. To Erlanger, “information theory” serves as a new “religious theory”, not to mention interludes on the philosophy of Leibniz or the post-humanity […].

If you are not used to the digital world, this novel is sometimes difficult to follow even if the author shows sometimes a very good sense of cold humor: we meet, on some pages, some real characters as Nicolas Sarkozy (previous French President) for example, and it is very colourful […]. Thus, it took until 2012 to publish the first French novel authentically geek.

Jean-Philippe Accart