I'm sure it won't give away any great secret to point out that Stephen Bury is himself a composite. Half is better known as Neal Stephenson, while the remainder is a previously unpublished author. Aside from the name, neither Bury nor Interface show any obvious join, no unsightly patchwork of scars and stitches, or bolts through the neck attaching its science fictional and cyberpunk head to the body politic. For a book just shy of 600 pages, it's a dream to read. It's tightly plotted and fast paced, with vivid and engaging characters, even if few of them spring into full three-dimensionality. It's also very funny; Stephenson has been described as 'Gibson with laughs' (slightly unfair on Gibson), and a late (if not post) cyberpunk author.

Written between Stephenson's highly acclaimed Snow Crash and The Diamond Age and published in the U.S. in 1994, Interface sets itself among the corporate and political power stakes of a Presidential election campaign. William A Cozzano is Senator of Illinois. Head of a third generation, self-made family, rich, honest and with strong family values, he would be an immensely popular President. There's one problem: watching a broadcast of the current President renege on a U.S. international debt of ten trillion dollars, he suffers a paralysing stroke. But ten trillion dollars is an almost unimaginable amount of money, except to the international financial interests who stand to lose it and want a President they can rely on. An immense contingency plan swings into action, spending money like it was going out of fashion. Cozzano is offered a radical new treatment, where a carefully designed biochip can replace the damaged part of his brain; previous patients show astounding recovery from horrific brain injuries.

Meanwhile, Aaron Green is trying to hawk IMIPREM, a state of the art physiological monitor, when he encounters Cy Ogle, of Ogle Data Research. Green finds himself developing a version of IMIPREM, now renamed PIPER, Poll Instantaneous Processing Evaluation and Response, the size of a chunky wristwatch. A hundred of them. They will be Argus, Ogle's eyes on a demographically selected cross-section of voters. As Cozzano recovers and finds himself in the middle of a campaign, he is offered a tempting and barely plausible 'what if'. What if he could use the biochip to see what the voters were thinking? And, although it might not be wise to let Cozzano know this, if you could send data, you might just as easily send instructions. The shadowy political conspiracies behind Interface merely close the final gap on the way political campaigns are run as media puppetry with an eye on the polls. It's just that with PIPER wired into the Presidential candidate's head, and under the gaze of Argus, you can now do it, and react to it, in real time.

Apart from the principals, most of the characters are essentially caricatures, flagged as such by the market researchers' descriptions of their place in American society: Economic Roadkill, Confederate Gravy Eater, Suburban Mall Queen. But in a pointed comment on this reductionist view, a couple of them take off in unexpected directions, as when a 'white trash' unemployed mechanic develops a worryingly perceptive interest in Cozzano's odd behaviour. It's those twists that place Interface above mere comedy or thriller; a hugely enjoyable read, and sometimes worryingly close to reality.