Title: Geek Nation
Author: Angela Saini
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 280
Rating: 3.5/5
Geek Nation is Angela Saini’s first book, and I’ll admit that you can tell. I’m a big Saini fan, but this is the book in which she first honed her style and approach and there are a few bits where it’s rough around the edges.
It’s also a good few years old by now, and so some of its predictions about what the tech world would look like in 2020 feel dated. In particular, the assertion that we’ll see a ton of technological innovations from India didn’t take into account the rise of China.
The core of this book is Saini’s investigation into why India is such a “geeky” nation, with a ton of awesome stuff about Indian science and some first-hand accounts about everything from Indian space technology to genetic modification and software development.
Saini is one of those authors who’s so good at what she does that I’d read her shopping lists if she published them, and this book is a good reminder of that. I’m not as interested in the subject matter as I am with some of her other books, which is why I read it last. But it was still fascinating to learn more about the state of tech in India.
At the same time, I can’t help feeling as though India has dropped the ball. Saini makes it seem as though the country had a ton of potential to take over the tech landscape in the 2010s and 2020s, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Something must have gone wrong somewhere, I guess.