Popco: A Gripping Action Adventure Mystery Where a Code-Breaker Exposes Corporate Crime and Treasure

This is a love it or hate it book. Because of the significant social issues contained in this story, such as the mistreatment of animals, corporate misdeeds, and guerilla marketing, this will appeal more to socially conscious individuals and those whose principles stand in opposition to the current CEO-type establishment. But, even then, counterculture types may still not like it if they don't want to see these issues advanced in a novel. That said, I applaud Scarlett Thomas for weaving these controversies in without sermonizing and laying on dull exposition. Thomas is clearly brainy and imaginative. She is subversive without being cynical, intellectual without condescending. Two storylines alternate throughout the novel, and eventually merge into a complex whole. As a child, Alice Butler was raised primarily by her grandparents, as her mother died when she was very young and her father took off to find a buried treasure. Alice's grandfather is a formidable cryptanalyst, cracking codes and ciphers and teaching Alice the essentials of prime numbers, poly-alphabetic ciphers, Vigenere enciphering, and other forms of codes and ciphers. The reader is exposed to some fundamental lessons that are thrilling and mind-boggling. The author infuses this in the story so naturally that it feels organically part of the storyline. Alice's grandmother has been working on the Riemann Hypothesis for many years but has not solved it. Alice's upbringing has made her hyperaware of the layers of complexity that exist in her surroundings, and she is a lover of paradoxes. She is often alienated from her peers, and develops a tough shell due to the immaturity and abuse she endures from her classmates (as well as some teachers). I have never read a book that illuminates adolescent behaviors so well--such as taunting, striving for popularity, the desire to fit in. Not even Margaret Atwood, known for her stark portrayals of teenage predatory behaviors, has illustrated the harrowing anxieties, shame and adversity so baldly and authentically. As an adult, Alice works for the corporate toy company, PopCo, the third largest toy company in the world. The story opens as Alice is on her way to a "thought camp" retreat. Her job is coming up with marketing strategies aimed at teenage girls. Her team is designated to design a new product, with specific potential to become a craze. Essentially, create a desire where none exists and persuade teenage girls that they have to have it. The ideation seminars at the thought camp instruct PopCo employees to create identity manias, a veritable fever that infects girls and coaxes them to covet a trend and crave a product. In lesser hands, this could easily become an elongated slogan or a sententious rant. However, Thomas is a gifted writer with a blazing, generous spirit. She is out-of the box and brimming with provocative, piercing ideas that are fleshed out and powerful. This imaginative novel is unclassifiable and yet compelling. The author has a keen sense of adventure, keeping the reader in suspense. Alice's narrative voice has a vital, dynamic sensibility that is suffused with compassion and wisdom beyond her years. The prose is eloquent and her characters fully developed. Thomas is an enormous, brilliant think tank of a writer.

So sometimes I find the most amazing books by searching for a book to fit a challenge I am doing on Goodreads. This is such a book... And something about the description was appealing to me; the stuff about the ciphers and codes. Then once I started reading it got even better! The main character, Alice Butler, is an introvert like me. So I could relate to her even though she lives in the UK. Plus how the book is written, the first person writing style, just pulled me right in. I was hooked! And no matter what the book was talking about I was never bored at all - even when it was going on about all of this prime number stuff (I am bad at math) or about very complex codes that I really didn't understand. And that alone is very amazing!! because normally I should get bored or frustrated. But I didn't! Alice had my full attention. And this book is way more than just about a woman (who is 29 years old) going down on a special retreat for the toy company she works for. Its about ideas. Idea generating and lateral thinking. And its also about lies and propaganda; about how ads convince you that yes you really need that new thing when in reality you don't need that thing at all. And mixed into these themes is a historical story about a man who went off to sea; a treasure. And a treasure map! Plus its about Alice when she was a girl and a teenager too. We learn so much about her. And I basically loved all parts of this book - except for one thing. And that is why I am rating this 4 stars and not 5 stars. I got really annoyed at the constant vegan - vegetarian stuff in here. I mean it was practically shoved down my throat. Now I have friends who are vegetarian. It doesn't bother me. But when a book is saying that one should go out and commit crimes (knock over egg displays at store to break the eggs, etc) then it is going way too far. And it was near the end of the book where these "friends" of hers was telling her how to do these things. They also thought it was ok to tear open toy packages in the store so the store could not sell the products. That just really bothered me. And I was think about that last night when I was trying to fall asleep. Its just very disturbing. Do these "friends" want Alice to go to jail? That whole part of the book soured for me and it made me feel that she had not learned anything. Otherwise I would have rated this 5 stars. But this is a very deep book. And I absolutely loved reading all of the adventures Alice had when she was a teenager and even later when she was in college. The historical parts with Francis Stevenson were excellent too! In many ways this book is about peer pressure and standing up for what you believe in. But you need courage to do that. Many of the codes and ciphers were way above my head but that did not stop me from reading this. You don't need to understand it. But this is a very creative character driven story that is very complex and it has very detailed backgrounds too. Even way back to the 1600s. But be aware its more drama than thriller. Its not exciting. But it did totally grip my attention. I even found myself doing lateral thinking! But what the book says in here about ads is correct. Ads often lie. They try to influence you. And if you can understand that then maybe you will enjoy this book.

It is so great to have some math and encrypton be part of a novel! But if you have a math background, you'll probably be disappointed with the level of math covered in the book's 500 pages. If you have any background in business, you'll probably find the conclusion strangely naive. If you think that casual sex, absent conversation, is romantic, you'll be pleased. The book is very original and the writing is great, but it is too long.

I'll say from the get-go that Scarlett Thomas is not a writer for everyone, but she does resonate with me. I enjoyed this book immensely. I love how she incorporates elements of science and weaves it in and out of the story. Her protagonist is unique, odd and (for me, at least), totally and completely intriguing and lovable. I can see how some people might be put off by the end, and there were a couple places where our cultural differences shone through (I'm from the US), such as the mention of genetically modified foods (which are more commonly accepted here than in Europe), however I'd say keep an open mind. It's good to challenge our thinking and our acceptance of reality, and Thomas is the master of getting you to do that.

Although Scarlett Thomas does another bang up job of writing in this one it was not as good as her "Our Tragic Universe" and/or "The End of Mr. Y." That being said it is about a young woman named Alice Butler who is a "creative" at Popco, Britian's third largest toy manufacturer. This corporation is very postmodern in that it has no dress code, no set hours, and virtually no rules. Her days are spent brainstorming ideas for pre-teens to spend their money on. Then the whole company is summoned to a "thought camp" set somewhere in the wilderness of England. It is here that she is chosen to become a member of an elite group which is to come up with a new fad for teenage girls. She and the others live in what would best be described as a dormitory where she receives strange encrypted messages under her door. Then she begins to have her doubts as to the viability of what she is doing. All this is mingled with flashbacks from Alice's past where she was raised by her grandparents who were both mathematicians and her necklace given to her by her grandfather may hold the key to a long lost pirate treasure. Although this is all very exciting at times the book drug as when Thomas goes into detail about homeopathic remedies and conversations between characters about how to retail a product. I couldn't really connect with Alice the way I did with Thomas's other protagonists in "Our Tragic Universe" and "The End of Mr. Y." The other characters of the book are not well fleshed-out and it's hard to tell the members of the "underground network" from the corporate drones. The ending is not a surprise you will see it coming from a mile off but overall still a good book just not one of Thomas's best.

I read Pop Co after it was recommended to me by a friend. It was the first book I read by Scarlet Thomas but now this book is one of my all time favorites and I have ordered "Our Tragic Universe" and The End of My Y." My only regret was that I was not able to read this book in my teens. I think the central character, Alice, makes an intriguing and inspiring female role model for teen girls. She successfully emulates the confusion, awkwardness and mean-ness of teen girls and still manages to evolve into a smart, likeable, independent adult. I liked all of the characters presented and enjoyed their back stories and the blending of math, cryptology and mass market manipulation made me think about what I was reading. A great thought-provoking book!

I first encountered Scarlett Thomas's work three years ago, at a now defunct surplus book store in Reading, Pa. The book as "Our Tragic Universe", and I was attracted by the odd cover. This of curse made me grin quite a bit during the reading of "Popco", but "Universe" reminded me of several hundred discussions I was in back in the 70's and 80's.It invited me to think thoughts and admit to interests long buried. Later I obtained "Mr.Y" and continued to be amused, impressed, strangely inspired and always involved in the story. Scarlett personalizes, fantasizes, and humanizes abstract conceptual issues and modes of thought in a unique way. While not exactly page turners, (although it seems likely she is more than capable of doing that as well)the books absorb you as you also absorb many of their ideas. Both of these are a bit more speculative and slightly science/conceptual/philosophical "fictiony", to coin a term, than "Popco". This is the first of these books that introduce the application of ideas into novel life situations, and is truly a work that presents a highly identifiable situation, and one that can be emphasized with if not outright identified with. I like the characters, understand the plot and between cryptanalysis, ciphers. codes, marketing and maths I was often reminded how much I have forgotten and that there truly IS a way to make these things work within a larger context. I liked it quite a lot.

Scarlett Thomas is the author of "The End of Mr Y", an impressive book which was highly original and quite entertaining. So I had high hopes for "Popco". Unfortunately, this time it seems that Ms Thomas may have bitten off more than she could chew. The discipline that was evident throughout the tightly constructed "The end of Mr Y" is sorely missing here - one senses early on that things are spiralling out of the author's control. This is an ambitious, but also a profoundly irritating, book. The author clearly has a point to make, but does so in a fashion that manages to be both preachy and clumsy. There's a lot of faux-erudition, the parading of little tidbits of knowledge for no particular reason. But the author fails the basic requirements of the writer's trade -- she doesn't tell a credible story, and her habit of breaking off the narrative to include assorted heavy-handed, poorly thought out, mini-lectures on everything from prime factorization to networking is disruptive and pointless. These various digressions do not move the plot forward, and ultimately lead nowhere - the account of how the final code is cracked is presented at such a sketchy level of detail that the reader simply has to take it as a given - so why all the little lessons in codebreaking along the way? Ultimately, the book just collapses under the weight of the various digressions, whose relevance is never really made clear. Better accounts of some of the topics dragged into this book can be found in: Simon Singh's "The Code Book" Naomi Klein's "No Logo" Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" A more successful synthesis of some of the ideas, incorporated in a skillfully told story is in Neal Stevenson's "Cryptonomicon". But give this book a miss. Hopefully Ms. Thomas will regain her earlier form next time out.

The book cover seems old and worn out, but the pages are in a good condition.

I love this book dearly, this is my fourth time reading it. Scarlett Thomas is a genius!

...Scarlett Thomas is a 'What if' writer; at the core of her novels are some really clever concepts and ideas. The plots twist and turn like shapes shimmering at the bottom of a clear pool - sometimes you think you can make them out, only for them to shift slightly, leaving you with the realisation that things aren't quite as they seem. It's so difficult to write reviews for her books, because they rely upon setting the reader challenges of intuition and interpretation along the way; it would be so easy to take away the delicious pleasure of having the story develop as it is read by revealing too much in synopsis. This tale has codes at its heart: those that hide information by encryption; those that we learn as we grow up and use to identify others in our peer groups, and those that corporations use to sell their products. The narrator, Alice Butler, works for such a corporation - PopCo - which is one of the top three toy manufacturers in the world. She has a natural inclination towards ciphers and codes, as she was raised by her grandparents who were both involved with codebreaking during the war. Scarlett Thomas is my favourite writer at the moment. Her characters speak a lot like those in Douglas Coupland's novels (he is a big fan of hers by the way); she disseminates a great deal of incidental facts and statistics through their casual asides in a similar way to him - they tend to inhabit a similar geek-like position in the world, surrounded by high-tech equipment and using a zeigeist-loaded language that makes them sound like voices from the very near future, rather than the present - she shares Coupland's ability to let them discuss concepts between themselves whilst letting the reader in on the subject without it seeming like learning. Where Doug can be almost Chekhovian in the directionlessness of his characters, Scarlett distinguishes by having strong concepts that she wants to illustrate which drive her narrative on - similar to Philip K. Dick, for those of you that know his work - they are rarely allowed the time to reflect too much, as the reader always feels that something unexpected could be just around the corner. Furthermore, she leaves the reader seeing and feeling about the world slightly differently for a long time after the book has been read - I'm seriously considering becoming vegetarian now, for example. I'm convinced that she's going to become big news in 2009 - discover her for yourself before she becomes someone that everyone is reading. Finding her has been a huge pleasure for me, and I can't recommend her highly enough.

Un ami m'avait prêté ce livre, mais je voulais impérativement posséder mon exemplaire. Bien que je juge le livre un peu moins bon que "The End of Mr. Y", il reste néanmoins excellent. Le style de Scarlett Thomas et sa capacité à mêler les mathématiques et les sciences à un scénario parfaitement ficelé font de PopCo un livre à avoir dans sa bibliothèque !

The book arrived in great condition however the quality of the cover is more paper-like and easily damageable