The Bactra Review Between the
Rivers
In his first novel, the now-unavailable The Big U (NY: Vintage,
1984), the eponymous university is entirely contained in a single mad-house of
a building, and the stress of living in there somehow stimulates the students
to become bicameral, hallucinating the gods out of neon signs and fans with the
university logo. In his best novel, Snow Crash (NY: Bantam,
1993), the eponymous virus causes those infected to become bicameral, and a
nefarious conspiracy is intent on spreading it across the planet.