[HN Gopher] Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age
___________________________________________________________________
Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age
Author : Rant423
Score : 126 points
Date : 2024-02-07 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| jpm_sd wrote:
| https://archive.is/mBH2q
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was
| intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by
| Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were
| for that.
| histories wrote:
| "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them".
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this!
|
| _The Diamond Age_ was one of my favorite books and Neil 's
| answer distilled and clarified a major theme of the book
| perfectly.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| God dammit I wish I had seen that a few months ago when there
| was a dozens-long HN thread where people were arguing that
| that wasn't what he meant or that it wasn't important to the
| success/failure of the different branches of that project in
| the book.
| Karellen wrote:
| > The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book.
|
| Wait, did you mean _The Diamond Age_ is an excellent book?
| Or... has someone made /written the book-within-the-book into
| an actual (e-?)book?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The full title of the book is _The Diamond Age: Or, A Young
| Lady 's Illustrated Primer_.
| Karellen wrote:
| Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to
| refer to it by its main title, rather than just its
| subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of
| a different book, even if that book is a fictional book
| within the book.
|
| If I started talking about how great _The Modern
| Prometheus_ is, people would generally either a) be very
| confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad
| for not simply calling it _Frankenstein_.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my
| part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A
| Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title
| and an alternate way to refer to it.
| sl-1 wrote:
| I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or,
| A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
| exe34 wrote:
| I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like
| it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even
| closer to reality!
| sigilis wrote:
| I've seriously toyed with the concept. It may be possible
| now to get an application like that on a tablet, offloading
| computation to OpenAI and its ilk, but it wouldn't be
| reliable. We're not good enough at text and image
| generation to do it autonomously yet. We're a little better
| at speech synthesis than Stephenson predicted, but it might
| still be nice to have a ractor too.
| timmg wrote:
| Interestingly, I started reading it over xmas break -- based on
| a recommendation. I got, probably, a quarter of the way through
| it before I went back to work. And I haven't felt the urge to
| pick it up again.
|
| I was reading above comments about how liking NS is a matter of
| taste. So I'm not sure if I just "don't get it" or if maybe
| it's just "not my type of story."
|
| FWIW, so far, I just simply don't care about any of the
| characters. Just curious for those that like the novel: should
| I? Or is it more about the ruminations of technology that is
| important in this book?
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come
| off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle.
| It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a
| lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find
| that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the
| book.
|
| It might help to think of the characters as archetypal
| because he's writing about the future and these archetypes
| will be present in the future - the people who make history
| will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in
| their behaviour.
|
| And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer
| books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable
| there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I've read a couple NS books. I feel like the plots and
| characters are the dues to be paid in order to explore the
| SCI for concepts and worlds. Kind of like the stitching
| between action/chase scenes in a Fast and Furious movie. The
| plot is not the point.
| batch12 wrote:
| I'll probably get roasted for this, but-
|
| After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I
| went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age, etc),
| intending to power through them. I am a pretty avid reader when I
| am in the mood and enjoy fiction including sci-fi, fantasy,
| *punk, etc. I couldn't get through Snow Crash. It didn't feel
| like a finished book to me. If I remember correctly it seemed
| like things like river names had placeholders and even saw some
| errors in the text. What am I missing?
| imp0cat wrote:
| They are not for the faint of heart. :)
|
| But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite
| interesting.
| devilbunny wrote:
| If you don't like Snow Crash, you probably just won't like
| Stephenson. If you don't like Snow Crash _and_ The Diamond Age,
| you definitely shouldn't bother with the rest of his works.
| You've tried him fairly; he's just not for you.
| MarcScott wrote:
| I didn't like either of them very much, but I've really
| enjoyed other books of his.
|
| - The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
|
| - Seveneves
|
| - Cryptonomicon
|
| - Anathem
|
| - Reamde
|
| - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Although the metaworld parts in
| that get a little tiresome)
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Yeah honestly he just keeps getting better IMO. Seveneves
| in particular gives me chills just thinking about -- so
| dark at points.
|
| Likewise, I think the Blue Ant books are Gibson's best
| work, though I have a strong attachment to Mona Lisa
| Overdrive just because of where I was in life when I first
| read it.
| themadturk wrote:
| Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy
| everything Gibson has written, but _Pattern Recognition_
| is by far my favorite.
| tsujamin wrote:
| Loved Seveneves and Fall, in particular the little slice of
| Ameristan in the Fall, but I feel like in both cases they
| are great books with a mediocre book attached to the end.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...
|
| And was probably the most prophetic of all his work, to
| be honest Snowcrash was total satire, and fan-service: it
| was much like the Crypto-anarchist Sloath short-story he
| wrote (THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER) it was meant to appeal
| to a a certain audience and really no one else. It was
| widely distributed (it was in TIME back when that was a
| big deal in the 90s at the peak of Silicon valley's foray
| with Crypto Anarchy) but ultimately targeted content to a
| specific demographic, which would illicit a certain
| response. Few if any every bring this up when discussing
| NS' bibliography.
|
| Its like Solar Opposites is a riff of Rick and Morty
| where the Rick character is put in a different universe
| and rides that story-line as far as it can before it gets
| tiresome but has a b-plot to carry it through for the
| audience to make it an entire season.
|
| And while Snowcrash was... mediocre (in my opinion)
| things like Sushi-K rapping or the hi-jinks of Uncle
| Enzo's Pizza delivery business are exactly the kind of
| hokey material one would expect from such subject matter
| that would land for said demographic. Is it a good
| representation of the Cyberpunk genre, as a fan,
| absolutely not.
|
| Also wasn't Amazon supposed to make a series about
| Snowcrash and has been 'in the works' [0] for like 7
| years now? They canceled The Peripheral which was kind of
| a rip-off Snowcrash and that had good reviews, I can't
| imagine they'd really try to try to flesh-out the
| Metaverse when 85% of Snowcrash is just filler with an
| incredibly bad ending.
|
| Hell, Amazon canceled The Expanse despite having a ton of
| more original content and being quite the cash cow, the
| books still sell incredibly well and the fans are die
| hard, many of them signed up for Amazon specifically for
| the last seasons and canceled when it was over.
|
| Personally, I think with costly shows like GT getting the
| axe and Clacrkson's Farm (something I enjoy more) being
| what is left from the trio it shows that Amazon doesn't
| have the wear-withal to see such immense things through
| in my opinion so we may never see Hiro or YT on screen.
|
| 0: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383994/amazon-
| streaming...
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| And it has the several page digression about the best way
| to eat captain crunch where one of the characters has
| just gotten out of jail and is thinking about inventing a
| spoon to deliver milk perfectly to the cereal!
|
| Good book, but Neal would benefit from a stronger editor.
| arethuza wrote:
| Some people think those are the best bits of his books!
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yeah, agree. If you take away all of his digressions, how
| much would be left.
|
| Everyone hating on the digressions.
|
| But you can't just have a few pages of plot points and
| call it a book.
| jspiral wrote:
| in the future our personal editors will create our own
| editions of these books. mine will have an even longer
| captain crunch section and yours will be abbreviated
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Seveneves is probably my favorite book, ever. I have the
| audio book and I'll probably listen to it for a 3rd time
| here soon.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I stopped reading Seveneves after we zoom forward to the
| future and stuff got weird, a bit too weird for my
| suspension of disbelief. Does it get back to more hard
| sci-fi stuff or remain as something which, to me, felt
| more like a sci-fantasy hybrid?
|
| Oddly enough I love books like Dune, but the dramatic
| change in Seveneves was just too jarring for me to
| continue enjoying it.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| I would argue the sci-fi indeed gets so hard, that it
| becomes soft again by nature. The technology falls away
| from the focus, as it should, but it is still very much
| there.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it's pretty clear from the comments here that
| there are those of us who just can't really buy the jump-
| cut and there are those who can.
| auspiv wrote:
| I was listening to it on audio book and after the "5000
| years later" I paused it and didn't pick it back up for a
| long while. Slogged through the rest. Won't read/listen
| to it again. The ending was ok. This was my first
| Stephenson book. Not going to do more.
| JackFr wrote:
| Loved Seveneves, but it is one of the best examples of
| his not having an ending.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| I love the world building of the 2nd half, and would
| argue it doesn't need a clear ending. Your imagination
| gets to fill in the blanks.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| While some other of his books do not have the most
| satisfying endings, Seveneves was the only one where it
| seemed like he simply gave up trying when writing the
| last 5%. Compared to the previous sections, the end just
| seemed like it had no effort put into it. Everything
| after the death of the doc just seemed abrupt and clumsy.
| It seemed jarring compared to how much care he seemed to
| put into the detail of the earlier passages.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I hear people say that a lot but I don't get it. I
| experienced it as a hopeless, depressing slog, where
| things just got worse and worse. But fortunately I wasn't
| attached to the characters so it wasn't so bad watching
| them all suffer.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| I agree with you, you are not alone. Seveneves had some
| great ideas, but he spent way too much time on the
| science and put almost nothing into character
| development. The characters were so flat, the
| interactions and motivations were lacking, and ultimately
| I just didn't care about any of them. I can't recall a
| single character from Seveneves but while I can't
| remember all their names I very much do remember the
| characters from Snow Crash.
| eigenket wrote:
| I think that is quite innacurate. He wrote Snow Crash in
| 1992, if you compare it to Diamond age in 1995 or later stuff
| like Anathem or Cryptonomicon its pretty obvious his writing
| changed (in my opinion improved) quite a lot over the years.
|
| Snow Crash has similar themes to the other works, but its
| more raw, less polished and kinda less professional than the
| writing he did later on. Its definitely possible for someone
| to not really get on with his early stuff, but really like
| his later stuff (or even vice-versa if you enjoy the less
| polished style).
| busterarm wrote:
| He wrote The Big U in 1984 and that's a super fun,
| approachable, readable book. He also hates it.
|
| I didn't find Snow Crash to be particularly inspiring but
| The Diamond Age is absolutely where he peaked for me. After
| that there's just too much fart-sniffing.
|
| Stephenson's work has a lot of ideas worth wrestling with
| but as far as crafting a narrative he's weak and fans of
| his use the former to cover for the latter.
| eigenket wrote:
| That's interesting. I haven't read The Big U, I should
| pick it up.
|
| For me my enjoyment of his books is pretty close to
| inversely proportional to the amount of weird sex stuff
| he puts in them. Anathem has none, and I think its one of
| his best, Snow Crash goes pretty hard, Diamond Age is
| mostly good but then the end of the book is randomly a
| weird sex-powered computer thing.
| nickhalfasleep wrote:
| The Big U has it's faults; but is still an insightful
| look at the weird people and organizations within any
| large university.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _After that there 's just too much fart-sniffing._
|
| If I'm correctly identifying what you consider "fart-
| sniffing" in his works, then often those farts are my
| most favorite bits. The little digressions, the impromptu
| lessons, the D-plots - love 'em.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I'd rate The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon as his peak --
| the mid-to-late 90s.
| klyrs wrote:
| Does he hate it? The last thing I saw him say about the
| Big U was that he tends to omit it from his bibliography
| because it's not what his readers are looking for.
| Personally, I read him in chronological order and enjoyed
| both the Big U and Zodiac -- if nothing else, it was fun
| to watch him grow (and not) as an author.
| busterarm wrote:
| As he put it: "The Big U is what it is: a first novel
| written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."
|
| It was out of print for a long time and he sort of had to
| be convinced to make the book available to read again
| after large demand.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd also say it's inaccurate, but mainly because of the
| wildly different preferences everyone has about which of
| his books to prefer.
|
| For me, Snow Crash was great fun (though also seemed a bit
| too similar to William Gibson's Neuromancer), Cryptonomicon
| was an excellent historical novel with some weird "present
| day" scenes including an ending that made no sense, I
| couldn't get into Diamond Age, I hated Quicksilver, and
| Seveneves seemed to be two excellent books written in the
| same universe by completely different authors who only
| talked to each about the project for about five minutes.
| flir wrote:
| Snow Crash is parodying cyberpunk (I think). Hence the
| strong Neuromancer vibes, it's intentionally derivative.
|
| Cryptonomicon is my personal high point. The Baroque
| Cycle had set pieces just as good as those in
| Cryptonomicon, but there were too many characters for me
| to hold in my head.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I agree; everything he wrote post _Diamond Age_ and
| everything he wrote pre _Diamond Age_ are very different,
| with _Diamand Age_ and _Cryptonomicon_ being transitional.
| I read _Cryptonomicon_ once with no plans to complete it. I
| didn 't finish _Anathem_ nor _Quicksilver_. _Diamond Age_
| was peak Stephenson for me, and I enjoyed all of his
| previous books (including _The Big U_ ).
|
| [edit]
|
| I didn't read anything Stephenson wrote post _Quicksilver_
| since everybody assured me that they were more of the
| "new" Stephenson than old. However, I see enough people in
| the comment threads panning _README_ that I might give it a
| try.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Anathem has his best ending to date, so it actually pays
| off its early slog.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I thought Snow Crash was OK, Diamond Age was brilliant,
| Cryptonomicon was... holy fuck, did we need 1150 pages to
| tell this story? The subsequent books seemed to be of a
| similar page count, and I decided I had enough of Neal
| Stephenson.
| infthi wrote:
| There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different
| from other works.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| The Baroque Cycle books and Seveneves are my favourite of
| his, after that my enjoyment drops of pretty quick. Anathem
| is good once it finally gets going.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff
| happens I'm less interested
| histories wrote:
| Eh, everyone likes different NS books (just look at all the
| replies).
|
| I like Snow Crash and love Cryptonomicon, and I couldn't go
| past the first volume of the Baroque Cycle.
| touisteur wrote:
| The first volume can be a long slog as it takes a huge
| amount of time to get moving in any plot-like fashion and
| feels very dry until you get to Jack Shaftoe's
| introduction. My opinion at least.
| arethuza wrote:
| I found the audiobook of _Quicksilver_ much easier to
| consume than the paper book - so much so that I 've
| listened to the entire Baroque Cycle a few times now.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| I strongly disagree about Snow Crash. I abandoned it halfway
| through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk.
| Relatively cool plot but the style just wasn't for me.
|
| However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for in a
| sci-fi book, and I Anathem had amazing world building. I
| can't speak for Diamond Age, but based on the four books I've
| read (Termination Shock being the other), I thought Snow
| Crash was wildly different from the rest.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk.
|
| I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.
| tonyg wrote:
| Underlined rather emphatically in The Diamond Age by the
| literal murder of the cliched cyberpunk character right
| out of the gates. Quite an unambiguous statement about
| What Will Not Be Happening In This Book From Now On.
| AlanYx wrote:
| That's probably the key part. If someone goes in
| expecting earnest sci-fi like Neuromancer and the satire
| part doesn't click early on, they're likely to be
| disappointed. (That being said, IMHO there are some
| aspects of Snow Crash that come off as low-effort,
| independent of the satire.)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for
| in a sci-fi book
|
| Serious question: what did you think of the ending and plot
| closure?
| ghaff wrote:
| To me, the first 2/3 of Seveneves was a good thriller,
| followed by and then a miracle happpened, followed by
| probably the book Stephenson wanted to write.
| flybrand wrote:
| This to me feels like most of his plots.
| themadturk wrote:
| For me, the ending was a little rushed, but fine. It tied
| up at least some of the plot elements from the first
| part. Yes, it was like two separate books, as if Niven
| and Pournelle's _Lucifer 's Hammer_ was mashed together
| with the TV version of Asimov's _Foundation_ , but both
| parts were pretty good.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I feel the same way. I've had a few false starts with Snow
| Crash, each time powering through about half despite my
| love of the imagery and the coolness. But have easily read
| Seveneves 2-3 times, with the last time somewhat skimming
| the third part, which isn't as good as the rest.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck
| me as cringily cyberpunk._
|
| I believe that was fully intentional.
| tstrimple wrote:
| The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist. He's
| definitely leaning into it.
| p_l wrote:
| Snow Crash was one of the archetypical cypherpunk stories,
| which was a trend that often mocked if not outright took a
| piss over cyberpunk.
|
| I find it a lot like a variation of "the cyberpunk dystopia
| arrived but not as cool as we imagined", but not as boring
| as what actually happens.
| arethuza wrote:
| I don't agree with that - I pretty much love everything from
| Cryptonomicon onwards (apart from REAMDE) and I'm not keen on
| Snow Crash or The Diamond Age.
|
| Edit: I even really like "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"
| protomolecule wrote:
| I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much,
| found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.
| slothtrop wrote:
| His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's
| among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.
| greedo wrote:
| I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age.
| I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.
| matt_s wrote:
| Novels are art and all art is subjective. Stephenson's
| earlier work I liked but I had to push myself thru
| Cryptonomicon. I don't force myself through something
| anymore, if a few chapters in I'm not compelled naturally to
| pick it up and read it, I move on.
|
| As I've gotten older I just ignore some content based on
| topic, genre, etc. entirely since I'm either tired of it or
| have found I don't enjoy it. Anything super hero related is
| definitely in that bucket, so are all comics/cartoons, just
| don't enjoy them to spend my free time on them.
| abraxas wrote:
| My first and only exposure to Stephenson was Seveneves.
|
| I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a
| derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in
| his novels buries the story and any character development in a
| mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does
| not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend
| disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot
| for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical
| consistency is much higher than for those who are more
| neurotypical.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Man, and I thought 'Seveneves' was a quick one, fast moving.
|
| Should I see a doctor?
|
| I honestly didn't realize others saw it that way. Now I'm
| worried.
|
| Lol, if you like Stephenson, you might need help.
| abraxas wrote:
| Pages and pages treatises about orbital mechanics, PhD
| dissertation on how space station docking works. Seveneves
| fast paced? yeah, no.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| To me, 'Seveneves' took longer than usual to world build
| and get things going. Once it got going after 'the event',
| things moved along as a pretty good clip. Don't know if he
| has any plans to revisit that world but it would be
| interesting to explore things from after the time jump in
| more detail.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| "The event" happens in the first sentence of the book.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| I'm pretty sure OP is referring to either the
| ramifications of that event (the climax of part 1), or
| perhaps the end of part 1 which sets part 2 in motion
| (with a drastic change in focus).
|
| I'm being deliberately vague in order to not reveal
| spoilers.
| exe34 wrote:
| Autism, like most personality traits in the DSM, is only a
| problem if it affects your every day life in three spheres
| (e.g. work/relationships/hobbies). Otherwise you might just
| have the superpowers without the side-effects.
| nottorp wrote:
| I couldn't finish Seveneves :)
|
| In spite of reading and mostly liking everything else by
| Stephenson.
|
| Edit: but then I couldn't enjoy Brandon Sanderson's
| Mistborn series (I did get to the end) too much. Because
| half the book was a RPG system manual describing game
| mechanics.
|
| Think that was my problem with Seveneves as well. It read
| like a 'how to build and run a space station' manual.
| jes5199 wrote:
| for years, every time I tried read Seveneves I got bored
| before I even found out what the plot was. There's
| something about the description of the ISS that I find
| tedious even by Stevenson standards
| gensym wrote:
| LOL. I read REAMDE on Kindle, so I didn't know its length.
| I thought it was a rollicking good time, and I recommended
| it to my wife for her book club. I assumed it was about 300
| pages long. Turns out it's over 1000.
| themadturk wrote:
| But it's a _fast_ thousand pages.
| prawn wrote:
| I've always felt as though he's writing like someone excited
| to have researched something and wanting to tell people. It's
| not highbrow, more rollicking and as though you can imagine
| him grinning "this is so cool (for nerds)" while he's writing
| it out. My last exposure was Seveneves, and Reamde before
| that.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I think it's a lot more charitable to say that it's writing
| for engineers who get excited about ideas. Lots of the ideas
| aren't particularly realistic or plausible. The point of the
| technical sections isn't for suspension of disbelief, it's
| just for the fun of digging into new topics and speculating
| on how you might use it to build something. I'd say it's a
| cousin of Randall Munroe's what if series.
| antihero wrote:
| I read Snow Crash as a young teenager and it inspired me in
| some way.
| keiferski wrote:
| His books have a certain...tone...that you either like or don't
| like. Personally, as much as I enjoy cyberpunk literature, I
| didn't really enjoy Snow Crash. Too much snark and Reddit-style
| humor for me.
| noch wrote:
| > Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me.
|
| Neal Stephenson is decidedly not a good prose stylist. But I
| guess he doesn't aim to be. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and
| "Anathem" are piles of really mediocre, ungainly sentences.
|
| What he has are many interesting ideas and he is a fun
| conveyor of those ideas, for the most part. But he's not a
| Nabokov nor a Cormac McCarthy nor a Samuel Delany.
|
| But we love him for he's "one of us". He wrote that excellent
| essay that placed a geek at the beginning of the Creation
| myth: "In the Beginning was the Command Line"
| https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
|
| Stephenson is also the one said the words of caution that
| inspired many a young nerd to be active in the world and work
| hard and always remember that someone somewhere has to know
| exactly how keep the lights on and the water running:
|
| > Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in
| our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are
| scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and
| young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The
| tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable
| and free are being taken offline to countries where people
| are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some
| foreign exchange left to send their way. _Nothing is more
| seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be
| masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple
| lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our
| copious leisure time vegging out._
| (https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673)
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, I guess I just prefer William Gibson's take when it
| comes to cyberpunk lit. It's just more...serious?
| Plausible? Less of a "nerd inside joke" activity.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I read half of Snow Crash and it felt like there was no plot
| that emerged? I dunno how to explain it. Half the book felt
| like a context-building prologue.
| BirAdam wrote:
| So, I look at the entire genre of cyberpunk as well as related
| genres as pulp sci-fi. It isn't always "good" if we're
| comparing to Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert, but there are often
| some entertaining ideas and interesting themes in them. I love
| Nosferatu, but I can still enjoy Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Neuromancer is genre defining and defying. To categorise it
| as 'just' cyberpunk is a disservice. Pity about the rest of
| the Trilogy; the 'Go Set a Watchman' to Neuromancer's 'To
| Kill a Mockingbird' if you will. Heinlein I love, but to
| pretend he's not serialised pulp-fiction outside of maybe
| 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is fairly disingenuous.
| azangru wrote:
| I hated Snow Crash (it aged poorly), but loved REAMDE.
| Cryptonomicon and Seveneves were decent; Termination Shock got
| fun in the end; whereas The Rise and Fall of DODO was more
| interesting in the beginning. Not sure how I feel about Fall -
| there were certainly some good parts to it, especially in its
| parallels with Milton.
| abakker wrote:
| REAMDE was like reading a movie. Just great stuff. I enjoyed
| Snow Crash, but agree it had some unfinished-ness feelings to
| it. like a stronger editor could have shaped it a bit better.
| alexitorg wrote:
| I love Snow Crash. I was wearing my Black Sun night club (from
| snow crash) t-shirt to work today. That being said, it does
| feel like an early book. It is possibly over packed with ideas
| and possibly so edgy it feels like it is trying too hard.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| I can't find it, but somewhere I read the sentiment that `Snow
| Crash` is best read by young men. I know I read it when I was
| in my early 20's and enjoyed it, have at most skimmed some
| amusing passages (like the bits from the perspective of the
| dog) since.
|
| Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seven-Eves have a bit more staying
| power for me.
|
| slight non-sequitor, but was anybody else disappointed with
| Termination Shock? The daring new social structure needed to
| deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?
| brk wrote:
| FWIW, I really liked Termination Shock. Much more than Fall
| (I read them in that order). I had to kind of force myself to
| finish Fall.
|
| >The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate
| change is... heritable monarchy?
|
| What does it mean if the fate of the world lies in the people
| that may not be arsed to actually give a shit until it's too
| late? I thought it was an interesting take.
| jabl wrote:
| I liked Termination Shock and I don't regret spending the
| time to read it in the slightest.
|
| However, to me, compared to the Baroque Cycle and Anathem, my
| favorite works of his, Termination Shock was, how to describe
| it, non-memorable. Like a half-decent adventure movie, you
| enjoy seeing it but afterwards you go home thinking about
| what to make for dinner, and don't think about that movie
| anymore until someone or something makes you remember it
| again.
|
| In contrast, the Baroque Cycle and Anathem were mindblowing.
| I spent ages thinking and daydreaming about the worlds he
| described in those books.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I wills say this: I enjoyed Termination Shock, but I felt it
| was the second-weakest of his novels after REAMDE (Not
| including co-authored ones like D.O.D.O) I still thought it
| was a great read overall, both for the story, the dive into
| cultures I wasn't familiar with, and the climate change
| story. TS was too... normal? of a novel, without some of the
| points that makes Stephenson's other novels shine in a league
| of their own.
| pavedwalden wrote:
| I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an
| airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but
| Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he
| was taking a second swing.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I described his last books as a love letter to billionaires.
| All that is missing is a long, flowery, baroque dedication in
| the front to a wealthy patron, Bezos or currently more
| topical Marc Andreesen or Musk.
|
| There may be a structural literary need for billionaires - to
| finance and start those big projects. But it's rather sad
| that a guy as creative as Stephenson doesn't seem creative
| enough to find alternatives.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Maybe there isn't an alternative, so he is writing about
| what is more likely.
|
| Not what he might hope for in an ideal world.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate
| change is... heritable monarchy?"
|
| I didn't have that takeaway.
|
| I thought it was more just one group of elites versus other
| groups. And some of them happened to be monarchy.
| pavedwalden wrote:
| I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun
| story and as a metaphor for geopolitics. At the end of the
| book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just
| hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.
| matthiaswh wrote:
| Similarly, I wanted to love Stephenson. I even enjoy the
| intense technical details in a good sci-fi story (I'm talking
| to you Red Mars).
|
| I started with Seveneves and could not finish it. After 20
| pages I wanted to quit, but I stuck it out for another 150
| pages before folding. The premise of the story was fantastic,
| but the writing was not enjoyable to me, and IMO, not very
| good.
|
| Where Robinson and authors like Weir and Clarke weave the
| technical details into the story in a fascinating way and show
| understanding of the topic, I felt Stephenson was copy-pasting
| Wikipedia articles into the middle of a book. Furthermore, he
| treated the reader like an idiot - by the end I couldn't help
| but laugh painfully when he felt the need to explain to us for
| the 30th time that A+0.150 means 0 years and 150 days after the
| agent event.
|
| His characters are vague and annoying. While Robinson's
| characters were similarly lacking in depth in Red Mars, at
| least they represented something bigger, were deliberately
| chosen, and served a storytelling purpose.
|
| Here's an example I pulled out of Seveneves that made me
| cringe.
|
| "In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no
| mass. Once Amalthea (a comet) had been attached, it was like a
| kite with a big rock strapped to it."
|
| Weir would have pulled that line off easily as a slightly
| sarcastic, self-aware remark. I didn't get the impression that
| Stephenson meant it anything other than a serious statement.
| np_tedious wrote:
| Snow Crash is definitely overrated. I loved Cryptpnomicon,
| Baroque cycle, Anathem, REAMDE, Diamond Age
| snapcaster wrote:
| I feel similarly about Dune, not a big fan of the writing style
| but the ideas are so cool that I'm willing to "power through
| it" like you say
| mauvehaus wrote:
| The format of a Neal Stephenson book is:
|
| A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is
| nerding out about at the time he's writing the book that forms
| the world-building (The metaverse in Snow Crash, MMORPGs in
| REAMDE).
|
| There will be random digressions about other things he's
| nerding out about that don't amount to enough to be a major
| feature of the world (volcanic glass knives in Snow Crash,
| tuck-pointing masonry in REAMDE) that he nonetheless works into
| the story.
|
| Some plot happens in this world, followed by an ending of
| highly variable quality. He ties Snow Crash together fairly
| well, as I recall. REAMDE, I was less impressed by.
|
| For context, I've read everything of his except the Baroque
| Cycle up to Seveneves. He's pretty consistent in sticking to
| this format.
|
| In my opinion his best writing is In The Beginning Was The
| Command Line[0]. I particularly like the quote "I use eMacs,
| which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor."
| It makes me smile despite the fact that I'm a vi person. It's
| also uncharacteristicly short for his work.
|
| [0]
| https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sh...
| ghaff wrote:
| I found REAMDE maybe his worst book that I've read. For one
| thing, it was one of those books where, if a lot of things
| don't line up just perfectly again and again, there's really
| no story.
|
| I mostly liked Cryptonomicon and Anathem--but I probably
| wouldn't push a reader into the latter as an introduction.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Yeah, REAMDE was a weird mashing together of what if things
| were happening in WoW and IRL and it all was somehow about
| the global war on terror?
|
| I concur that it's probably his worst novel that I've read.
| _And_ that Anathem probably shouldn 't be anyone's
| introduction to his work.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Anathem was my introduction and I feel that it has
| spoiled his other works for me.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Cryptonomicon was my introduction and none of his other
| works really compare, for me.. at least, it's the only
| one I've felt the desire to read again.
| usrusr wrote:
| REAMDE's ending with those gun-preppers orgasming over the
| idea of _finally_ getting an excuse for hunting human did
| it for me. Stephenson nerding out about _that_ subculture
| is a thing I can 't unsee, now it colors my perception of
| even his most liberal-leaning writings.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| In a good or bad way? Like now you notice it more in
| other writings of his? There was a few pages like this in
| Snow Crash, and I remember breezing past it, but then re-
| reading it years later, could see the common thread.
|
| But all in all. His take on that culture seems accurate.
| Not exaggerated that much for satire.
| usrusr wrote:
| In a very bad way. I suspect that I'm really not doing
| him justice because he's probably not all too fond of
| _any_ of the subcultures be portraits, but I can 't
| completely shake off that change in perception.
| eitally wrote:
| Cryptonomicon and Anathem were what got me into Stephenson,
| and I loved both of those. Then I read Quicksilver and it
| held my attention, but I had a really hard time slogging
| through The Confusion and never made it to System of a
| World. On the other hand, Reamde was a fun story along the
| lines of something a popular spy fic author my write. Not
| high art, but easy and entertaining and something that
| could be easily adapted for the screen (like Snow Crash).
| In the Beginning... is, I believe, his best and most pure
| writing from a tech POV, but he's always been sort of the
| information technology version of what Michael Crichton is
| to biotech.
| chr wrote:
| @mauvehaus, with your idiosyncratic spelling of emacs as
| "eMacs", you put Stephenson in a bad light. He knows how to
| spell. And edit.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| As a vi guy, I trusted whatever my iPhone said was the
| canonical capitalization of emacs when it autocorrected it
| :-)
|
| EDITED TO ADD: I just figured it out. My iPhone presumably
| thinks I'm taking about an obsolete Apple product. Doh.
| I'll let my error stand as a monument to not trusting
| everything a computer says.
|
| I would also note that most of what we seem to be
| discussing is whether his writing is good or not. Spelling,
| I'll give him. The opinions on editing seem to be a little
| more divided.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Baroque Cycle is my favourite, worth giving it a shot. Dodo
| is such a strange book because the beginning and middle are
| amazing and the ending is terrible
| shermantanktop wrote:
| All his endings are weak. He builds momentum and reaches a
| climactic moment, and then...fizzle.
| jdeisenberg wrote:
| I think the ending of Anathem is possibly one of his
| best; it's an acknowledgment that it _is_ the ending,
| it's rather tender and sweet, and it fits the mood
| perfectly.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, I think of Anathem as so far the only Reverse
| Stephenson book. Most of his books have killer starts and
| then end in a didactic "meh". Anathem starts with an
| incredibly didactic "meh" but then delivers a killer end.
| FredPret wrote:
| You should read the Baroque Cycle, then Cryptonomicon, then
| REAMDE, then Fall, Or Dodge in Hell. You can think of it as
| all one storyline, so the ending of each book is less
| critical.
| arethuza wrote:
| I'd actually go with publication order myself...
| FredPret wrote:
| Nice username!
| arethuza wrote:
| It's what happens when you sign up for Slashdot while
| reading Cryptonomicon without doing any checks as to
| where the name actually comes from!
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I tried reading the first of the Baroque Cycle like 5
| times. Could never make it more than 1/4 through it before
| losing steam. Anathem was the worst for me though.
| FredPret wrote:
| The Baroque Cycle made double-entry bookkeeping click for
| me, bizarre as that sounds. The whole cycle is a long,
| long read. But there are nuggets that make it well worth
| it.
| endtime wrote:
| Anathem really picks up after the first 400-500 pages.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I laughed. It's both true, and very not helpful. It's the
| equivalent of a fairly long not-so-great book before a
| pretty good book. Hard agree.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Also agreed, although I enjoyed some of the philosophical
| debate in the early portions of the book so I would put
| Anathem higher in books I enjoyed from Neal Stephenson
| philipkglass wrote:
| I am the rare Anathem reader who enjoyed the slow first
| part more than the active later parts. The initial world
| immersion was fascinating. The Big Event and subsequent
| faster paced developments were a lot less memorable. But
| I also enjoyed the instructional sections about whaling
| in Moby Dick.
| jes5199 wrote:
| personally, I found Anathem to be fun the whole way
| through, but Baroque Cycle has like only one enjoyable
| part at the end of book two
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The first part of the book is super slow and boring, but
| it does get much better later on and what they setup is
| necessary for the story.
| rsync wrote:
| You Should not read fall under any circumstances.
|
| Seriously: life is too short.
|
| (I say this as a huge NS fan)
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| Cannot possibly agree more. It's an absolutely terrible
| book.
|
| REAMDE was ok, except the sections about the MMO which
| frequently left me catatonic with cringe. In Fall, _the
| whole book is that cringe_.
| FredPret wrote:
| If you like mythology and scifi, then you should
| absolutely read it
| prepend wrote:
| I really liked Fall, even before the Cryptonomicon tie-
| in.
|
| It's not high art, but I probably enjoyed it in my top 5
| books of the year.
|
| Different people have different tastes, I just find it
| funny when people make generalized statements like "this
| book is so bad, no one should ever read it."
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I read Cryptonomicon, then the Baroque Cycle, then
| Cryptonomicon (or a long period of years) which has nice
| tie-ins to each other.
|
| However I disliked Reamde enough that I didn't start Fall.
| Is it better?
| themadturk wrote:
| Fall is, IMHO, nowhere near as good as Reamde. But I've
| always been a technothriller fan, and Reamde is pretty
| high on my enjoyment list.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| > A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is
| nerding out about at the time
|
| This was so true in SEVENEVES. There's a whole section about
| debris avoidance by a constellation of orbiting spacecraft
| and it was so tedious. I felt like I was reading someone
| describing an academic paper they'd recently read.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| It's a progression. Story, style, characterization, and
| science in equal measure at first. Then more and more of
| the latter and less of the first three. Perhaps he did peak
| in Diamond Age, then it's basically Asimov after - pretty
| hard sci-fi with no story / characters (or at least no
| characters / story anyone cares about).
|
| Snow Crash - most story / style / MEMORABLE characters
|
| Diamond Age - same but with a very dramatic evolution from
| traditional Cyberpunk
|
| Anathem / Seven Eves - virtually no memorable characters,
| interesting concepts and science though
|
| Cryptonomicon - I couldn't.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I think I've read every one of his books. My favourite is
| _The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O._.
| themadturk wrote:
| And D.O.D.O was one of only three Stephenson books I
| started and could not finish.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| There's also usually "protagonist or major character has a
| weird method of travel", "protagonist or major character goes
| through a period of loneliness as part of their heroes
| journey", and a few other bits that are common across most of
| his fiction work.
|
| He's also largely absolutely shit at writing female
| characters.
|
| Still enjoy his work, but it's fun to find the common
| threads.
| glitchc wrote:
| I thought Cryptonomicon was his best book. It's okay not to
| like Stephenson.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I don't think you're missing anything, really. Unlike his non-
| fiction essays and articles [1], which are mostly excellent,
| his fiction just isn't all that good. Typically the concept and
| ideas are interesting, but the story/characterisation/ending is
| poor and the digressions aren't able to hide this for very
| long.
|
| I read Snow Crash and it was fun, but I had to skip over huge
| banks of filler. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves and REAMDE were
| tedious and ultimately unrewarding slogs that persuaded me not
| to touch his work again. I'm just glad I never attempted the
| Baroque Cycle.
|
| I never understood HN's enthusiasm for Stephenson's fiction, so
| I suspect I'll get roasted too. But bring it on I guess.
|
| [1] _In the Beginning was the Command-Line_ , _Mother Earth
| Mother Board_ , etc.
| adolph wrote:
| Mother Earth Mother Board was my introduction to Stephenson.
| Glad to see a mention of it here. I reread many of
| Stephenson's words periodically because I enjoy it, but I can
| appreciate how the characters are perhaps lacking. Its hard
| for me to put my finger on why, but the Judge in Blood
| Meridian seems more like a live person than Shaftoe in
| Cryptonomicon.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| piltdownman wrote:
| Stephenson as a Sci-Fi Author always struck me as Kurt Vonnegut
| for remedial readers, or as part of the Cory Doctorow league of
| Cyberpunk Authorship compared to the peaks of the genre like
| William Gibson.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line
| to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you
| have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do
| you mean) for us lay people?
| piltdownman wrote:
| Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the
| intersection between technology and religion, between
| science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to
| the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon,
| Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential
| narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental
| issues associated with Young Adult fiction without
| representing any of the strengths of the genre.
|
| This is fairly understandable when you look at their
| respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry
| veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was
| interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing
| of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he
| was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not
| unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous
| 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its
| name.
|
| His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was
| rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science
| Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try
| and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and
| society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity.
|
| You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when
| utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological
| timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical
| paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own
| brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the
| Korean War.
|
| Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential
| and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture
| - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book
| 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation
| of the American University system as it geared towards
| research over pure academia.
|
| The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many
| ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the
| title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his
| computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked
| vaguely like static on a broken television set--a 'snow
| crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of
| Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of
| television, tuned to a dead channel.".
|
| The plotting characterisation and story beats when not
| directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks
| of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three
| Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little
| innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a
| comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of
| Neuromancer.
|
| Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson
| is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre.
| Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic
| choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory
| passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing
| a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is
| indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory
| Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA
| audience.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| While I generally agree with this well written criticism
| (ChatGPT?), you ignore Snowcrash's most interesting (to
| me) idea: the Sumerian "Nam Shub" (mind virus) and its
| intersection with the metaverse, which I found to be an
| all too plausible prediction.
|
| One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's
| Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given
| my username)
|
| Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will
| be trounced...
| piltdownman wrote:
| I'm not sure whether to be appalled or flattered by the
| ChatGPT comparison at this stage of Language Model
| maturity, but I'm sure there's some hiberno-english
| artefacts in my breakdown that will advocate for my
| analog autonomy!
|
| The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson
| was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer
| with things like Space-Station Babylon:
|
| "We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a
| voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It
| played us a mighty dub."
|
| or even the post-coital after-images of VR
|
| "His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent
| lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral
| backdrop of the bunker wall."
|
| My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much
| lauded world-building often represents a feeble
| distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see
| the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references
| to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian
| Scientists' or the wonderful description of the
| subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima
| sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic
| abuse as a fashion statement.
|
| Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-
| Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on
| the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly
| character was unforgiveable, and the only properly
| developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in
| Count Zero.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are GPT.
|
| But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding
| and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly.
|
| (it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)
| piltdownman wrote:
| You'll turn my head sir. I'm privileged enough to have an
| English Degree, a passion for Science Fiction, and a
| debating background. I'm also composed almost entirely of
| strongly held, and often contrary, convictions, so revel
| in the thrust and parry of online debate. Particularly
| during office hours.
|
| Re: ChatGPT - I'm guessing it would be more easily
| detected than you think. It's a paradigm leap from Markov
| chains and the like, but I'd imagine it would still
| hallucinate a quote or reference some non-existent book
| in making a comparison at some point.
|
| If it ever gets adept at literary criticism or critical
| theory as opposed to just cargo-culting its way past the
| lower threshold of readers I'll probably be in despair.
| Let's keep it trained on JIRA rather than JSTOR just to
| be safe, lest something like Roald Dahl's 'The Great
| Automatic Grammatizator' come to fruition.
| shwaj wrote:
| Haha, you can sure pen a phrase. I'd be shocked if you're
| a circa 2024 GPT.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| You're killing me.
|
| I like the cut of your jib, good sir.
|
| Kudos. I would read more of this.
| svnt wrote:
| I've seen few more ready and thorough responses in my
| time here, but despite the perfunctory acknowledgement
| that you might have, I can't help but feel you still
| missed the point.
|
| Comparing Stephenson to Vonnegut feels like comparing an
| inside joke to an epitaph.
| piltdownman wrote:
| The comparison was more to dissuade people from grouping
| them together in the Canon. If I was to be trite I might
| say that the likes of Slaughter House 5 and Neuromancer
| are _Graphic_ Novels, whereas Snow Crash is a _Graphic
| Novel_.
|
| When I learnt that Snow Crash was actually originally
| conceived as a Graphic Novel, it was like a large puzzle
| piece finally clicked into place. I would have preferred
| to judge it on its merits in that medium to be frank, as
| Stephenson is very passionate and has some interesting
| takes and somewhat Randian fascinations tertiary to his
| plotting, but ultimately I feel that his narrative reach
| always exceeded his grasp.
|
| As for missing the point, I can only point to my
| acknowledgement of the existence of Snow Crash's TvTropes
| page, and my countless hours arguing the point online on
| this and other fora!
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I liked the review comment he used to feature on his own
| website: "Umberto Eco without the charm".
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've
| only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It
| felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel
| without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-
| induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's not really that bad of a description of Gibson in
| any of his eras, but also that's what a lot of readers
| want, PKD without most of the madness.
|
| "The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's
| most mad/trippy setting so far.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Interesting. I will give it a look.
|
| I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual
| media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The
| Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often
| the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are
| devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter
| more.
| notahacker wrote:
| yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was
| inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other
| writers could _imply_ an entire world with a few well
| chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi
| tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and
| at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In
| that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash
| which is basically _caricaturing_ cyberpunk, he feels the
| need to explain how everything works. Which doesn 't
| necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth
| to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate.
|
| Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters
| themadturk wrote:
| Part of your complaint is probably related to his style.
| Neuromancer was his first novel, and his style, while
| remaining distinctive, has improved substantially over the
| years. You may like it better in the The Bigend Trilogy:
| Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: all
| vintage, recognizable Gibson, but not actually science
| fiction, and very much in tune with the world post-9/11. As
| much as I love all of Gibson, those three are my favorites,
| especially the first.
|
| Dividing his books into "trilogies" is a little misleading;
| they all happen in the same shared universe and some common
| characters, but don't have deeply connected stories. Give
| Pattern Recognition a try, and see if 20 years makes a
| difference to you. (If you like audiobooks, Pattern
| Recognition is a gem, with almost the perfect fusion
| between story and narrator.)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| In some of his books, he is supposed to engage with veves
| from voodoo as similar to electronic circuit diagrams,
| according to a long ago Guardian comment [1], and I've
| never been able to track it down in "the sequels to
| Pattern Recognition" (as opposed to Count Zero) to my
| satisfaction.
|
| [1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/nov/21/wil
| liam-gi...
| k2enemy wrote:
| That's a terrific way of putting into words my thoughts about
| Stephenson, except I've thought of him as Thomas Pynchon for
| remedial readers rather than Vonnegut.
| piltdownman wrote:
| If I'd ever successfully made it through Gravity's Rainbow,
| I might have contended so as well!
| k2enemy wrote:
| I'd recommend _Against the Day_ , then if you enjoy that,
| try _Gravity 's Rainbow_ again. It continues some of the
| timeline of _Against the Day_. GR is super tough for the
| first third but gets easier and more enjoyable.
| slothtrop wrote:
| AtD gets sidetracked with long stretches of s&m-laden
| filth. GR reads like a fever dream but it's interesting
| both thematically and in prose (it's also dirty, but
| doesn't linger as much).
| shwaj wrote:
| Username checks out. Funny, I remember GR as being
| filthier, such parts don't jump to mind regarding AtD.
| AtD is one of my all-time favorite books.
| k2enemy wrote:
| Love the username.
|
| I don't remember AtD as being particularly filthy, but it
| has been a long time. It remains one of my all-time
| favorites. If nothing else, I'm indebted to the book for
| encouraging me to seek out literary westerns such as
| _Warlock_ by Oakley Hall and _Butcher 's Crossing_ by
| John Williams.
| southwesterly wrote:
| Crying of Lot 49 is short and sweet.
| notahacker wrote:
| _Gravity 's Rainbow_ and _The Diamond Age_ certainly both
| feel like they 'd have been better books if the author
| could keep his fetishes to himself...
| the__alchemist wrote:
| This checks out. NS is my favorite fiction author, but I am
| not intelligent enough, at least in the required way, to
| understand Gravity's Rainbow.
| k2enemy wrote:
| I'm sure there are numerous things that I didn't
| understand but could have if I were more intelligent or
| better read.
|
| It became a lot more enjoyable for me on my second
| attempt when I gave up on the idea of understanding
| everything. Sometimes things get explained later in the
| book. Sometimes not.
| alienicecream wrote:
| It was poorly written and the story was something a teenager
| would dream up, but your complaint is that the editing wasn't
| finished? Is that how you judge a story?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Cryptonomicon is one of my all time favorite books. Diamond Age
| and Snowcrash were only ok.
| LegitShady wrote:
| you are not alone. I think he has interesting ideas he
| incorporates into his books/stories but I don't think he's a
| very good writer. Personally I need someone to be a good writer
| for me to enjoy reading their books - otherwise the experience
| is draining instead of uplifting.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Snow Crash was supposed to be a graphic novel, and then the
| illustrator quit. It's not at all like any of the other
| Stephenson novels.
|
| On the other hand, I find your fixation on errors odd -- sounds
| like your complaint is with the editor, not the author.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I choose to accept Snowcrash as a clever satire on how vapid
| and empty cyberpunk is as a genre.
| bigie35 wrote:
| I have read three of his books so far - Snow crash,
| Cryptonomincon, and Seveneves.
|
| By far his most fully formed and epic book for me has been
| Seveneves. It is hardcore Sci-Fi at an epic scale both in world
| building and time.
|
| I got 700 pages in when I had to return it to the library or be
| sent to collections.
| AsthmaBoy wrote:
| One or two decades ago I read on some newsgroup on the internet
| (and having experienced it myself), that Neal Stephensons
| storylines never actually
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yes, that pretty much sums him
| slothtrop wrote:
| He's written far better, both on the sci-fi side and otherwise.
|
| imo, it goes Anathem > Cryptonomicon > The Diamond Age >
| Seveneves > Termination Shock > Snow Crash. The Baroque Cycle
| is historical fiction, but I didn't get into it. REAMDE is a
| techno-thriller, and a divisive one, where it lands depends on
| whether you enjoy that style.
| arethuza wrote:
| "The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction"
|
| Apart from the suspiciously well informed immortal character
| and the magical gold? I wonder what could explain those...
| slothtrop wrote:
| Ok, pedant.
| ttepasse wrote:
| > The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction
|
| ... written in a SciFi mindset, I would say.
| packetlost wrote:
| I personally can't stand his style of writing. Tried to power
| through Snow Crash but couldn't do it.
|
| Just not my cup of tea.
| jackgavigan wrote:
| Try _Zodiac_ and _Interface_ (authored under the co-pseudonym
| Stephen Bury).
| batch12 wrote:
| I will give it a shot, thank you.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Came here to say this. Both of those books are underrated.
| _Interface_ is a particular favorite of mine and it has help
| up fairly well.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Yeah I'm in the same camp. Tried to read Cryptonomicon and
| immediately felt lost.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Stephenson is an ideas guy. The books are just loose vehicles
| for all his ideas and things like plot, characters and (gasp)
| endings are not center stage.
|
| There are so many ideas in his books, mountain upon mountain
| that it's no wonder some of them ended up being real products
| in following decades. They are great fuel for the technical
| imagination.
| readingnews wrote:
| I have only ever read Snow Crash. I enjoyed it. However, I read
| it in 1992. When I think about it now, I bet reading it today
| would seem odd... like watching old 1950s shows that make
| predictions about the world of tomorrow.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk like Gibson.
|
| You're missing that the low effort and placeholder names are
| part of the joke, making fun of how cyberpunk tries to seem
| cool by trying to be raw, gritty, and low effort... like rock
| stars that try too hard at pretending to care about nothing.
| Stephenson does it to a comical extreme, e.g. naming his main
| character Hiro Protagonist. His other books are not in that
| style.
| batch12 wrote:
| I have heard this, but it seems more like laziness to me.
| Thanks for the perspective.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The density of creative jokes about being gritty and low
| effort in Snow Crash isn't possible without substantially
| more thought and effort than writing normal fiction.
| Laziness won't produce a book that has people laughing out
| loud as they read it 32 years later. If anything, I think
| the problem with Snow Crash is it has become so popular and
| lasted so long, people get less of the jokes now, because
| nobody remembers what he was satirizing anymore.
| busfahrer wrote:
| Low-effort and high-tech, to paraphrase Gibson's M.O.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Snow Crash must feel really dated in 2024 so I don't recommend
| starting with that book. Diamond Age is a fairly accurate
| description of the present and a possible near future, but
| somehow written in the 90s. We aren't choking on nanite dust
| and still haven't quite gotten 3d printers to the level
| described in the book but the Neo-Victorian social
| stratification is on track and machine learning is transforming
| education in ways hinted at in the book.
|
| What are you missing? His books that take place in the present
| or the future are thought experiments focused around the ways
| technology can transform society. He is pretty good at
| grounding his characters in fairly complex social landscapes
| and then describing the ways technology (real or imagined)
| interacts with and influences that landscape. You might also be
| missing his surreal sense of humor if you thought names like
| Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash were placeholders.
|
| As a new reader you might be more I'd start with his newer
| books and work backwards. I haven't read "Termination Shock"
| yet but I would recommend both "Fall" and "Seveneves".
| themadturk wrote:
| _Termination Shock_ was pretty good, but seemed kind of low-
| effort, not a typical Stephenson blockbuster.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Neal Stephenson doesn't write novels. He writes novel-length
| entries in an encyclopedia.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Each of the novels is the size of an encyclopedia, which is
| why I gave up after Cryptonomicon.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| TBH I had to start Snow Crash multiple times until it 'clicked'
| (e.g. "what's with the bizarre writing style..."). It's more of
| a "super hero comic" than a "science fiction novel". I still
| like to read it about once a year if I want a quick fix.
|
| I haven't noticed any of the errors in the text you describe
| though.
|
| The thing with the classics is that three decades later the
| topics that where novel back then are science fiction tropes
| today, because everybody copied them over and over again. Same
| with Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, etc...
|
| FWIW though, I'm not a big fan of Neal Stephenson's more recent
| books. The last one I really enjoyed was Anathem, and the last
| one I attempted but didn't finish was REAMDE. Now for something
| where I _really_ don 't understand the hype: Ready Player One.
| What a drivel ;)
| Krasnol wrote:
| I feel you.
|
| I felt for the hype on Reddit around this author and read two
| books. Snow Crash felt like he wanted to jump on Gibson's train
| and save the world building altogether because people are
| supposed to know Gibsons Cyberpunk already.
|
| Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to
| provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a
| Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending.
|
| Stephenson is not for me I guess.
| vonjuice wrote:
| I got through it, but I see more value in it for the ideas than
| how they're executed and how it's written.
| hiidrew wrote:
| I agree. I usually finish most books I start but Snow Crash was
| an exception. I can't quite articulate my distaste. Looking
| back, one of the small things that ticked me off was Hiro
| Protagonist - I couldn't take the book seriously at all. Felt
| almost overly cheesy and clichey.
|
| I'd like to give him another shot with Cryptonomicon or The
| Diamond Age. I've appreciated him elsewhere, like as a podcast
| guest. He definitely has an interesting mind, just didn't enjoy
| Snow Crash.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| gargoyles -- never, ever, ever gonna be cool. Trust me.
| ooterness wrote:
| But the Apple Gargoyle Pro is cool, right? It has an outward-
| facing display that shows your eyes.
| asah wrote:
| Given the topic, I would disappointed if this article were
| written entirely by a human.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Its paywalled, so it right there with the topic and classism.
| thunderbong wrote:
| https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/techno...
| eigenket wrote:
| I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this
| from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will
| become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to
| use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense,
| before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum
| means internet, syndevs means computers.
|
| > "Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost
| useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or
| downright misleading information," Sammann said.
|
| > "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.
|
| > "Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important.
| Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up
| with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well.
| They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing
| people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They
| created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the
| Reticulum. But it had to be good crap."
|
| > "What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous
| tone.
|
| > "Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of
| random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-
| written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable
| sentences and one that was subtly false. It's a lot harder to
| generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it
| out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and
| inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it
| didn't really take off until the military got interested."
|
| > "As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's
| reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are
| referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First
| Millennium A.R."
|
| > "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of
| enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the
| purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis
| leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan
| Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort
| of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners
| were able to bring matters in hand."
| BirAdam wrote:
| Anathem is my personal favorite of his for precisely this
| vision of near future history, and what the world does about
| it.
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| Thanks for this quote. "Artificial Inanity" seems about as
| useful of a concept as "negative information" (from
| Foundation?) has been.
| gattr wrote:
| > The concrete prediction is that the internet will become
| filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it
| will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense,
| before they reach any useful information.
|
| The same point is made in _Fall; or, Dodge in Hell_.
| canistel wrote:
| Cryptocurrency too - in Cryptonomicon. Not exactly as it is used
| today, but along similar lines...
| p_l wrote:
| Cryptocurrency was a hotly, if niche, debated topic in 1990s,
| which formed the backbone for Stephenson writing Cryptonomicon.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I haven't finished the article yet and am currently reading it.
| But FWIW I'll just park this howler from the first paragraph
| here:
|
| > "prophesying what innovations are to come"
|
| No. Prophesy is the ability to see or correctly guess the future
| - a future that would have happened without the prophecy.
|
| Christopher Hitchens nailed it absolutely when he noted that
| science fiction is rarely prophetic, rather it's taken as a
| blueprint for post-facto design. It is self-fulfilling,
| influential fiction.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| It seems unlikely that there has ever been someone making a
| prediction, never telling anyone about the prediction and then
| living his life as if he never made the prediction.
|
| I predict that Donald Trump will claim election fraud in states
| he loses in 2024. Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I
| said it publicly?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| There's some difference between an author like George Orwell
| writing a detailed novel which enters popular culture and
| sells millions of copies - and two blokes at the pub saying
| the royal family are lizards controlled by the saucer-people.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it
| publicly?
|
| No. It would be self-fulfilling if Donald Trump claimed
| election fraud specifically (as in, he's explicitly
| announcing it!) because gitfan86 said it would happen.
|
| If you look at something like the metaverse, a lot of the
| people trying to build a metaverse are explicitly citing
| stuff like Snow Crash as the motivation for what they're
| trying to build. That's what makes it self-fulfilling--the
| people trying to build the thing in the real world are using
| the fiction as a blueprint.
| imgabe wrote:
| It's worth noting that in the book the "AI" is partly a live
| connection to a human being.
| tempaway74641 wrote:
| I dont get whats supposed to be prescient about writing a book
| with an AI in it, in 1995.
|
| _And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he
| presaged the current AI revolution._
|
| This claim seems to hinge on on the Primer in the Diamond Age
| which uses an actor to read out its text, which is taken as a
| metaphor for ChatGPT being built on human output.
|
| I mean, the Primer/Ractor combo seems like a cool thing to have
| in a book, but I don't see why this is a 'most stunning
| prediction'
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| https://archive.is/mBH2q
| gilbetron wrote:
| I've been a fan of his since Snowcrash came out, and was hoping
| the article would be interesting, but instead it reads like
| someone that has consumed too many of his own press releases.
| Starting off with, "It's a statistics engine that creates
| sentences that sound accurate," was really disappointing.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Gibson > Stephenson
|
| Whenever I think I am remembering Snow Crash, I'm actually
| thinking of characters and plot lines from Neuromancer!
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| That is because Stephenson is intentionally parodying Gibson.
| Krasnol wrote:
| ...and didn't bother much describing the world his story
| takes place in because he expected you to know Gibson's
| Cyberpunk already.
| koryk wrote:
| Gen AI and its potential impact has been covered by Stephenson
| multiple times.
|
| I wrote a short post on some of the references in Anathem.
|
| It's also a large plot point in Fall or Dodge in Hell. One of the
| characters open sources some generative ai to fill the internet
| with slightly untrue spam.
|
| https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I would argue an equally prescient prediction of his is from
| Snowcrash, the use of sophisticated disinformation and psyops to
| mass-reprogram the human race, and the innate immunity or
| resistance to it that some people have. That vision of the future
| is now playing out in realtime.
| queuebert wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, do pieces like these get written because a
| journalist is randomly interested in the idea, or does the
| author's publisher reach out to the magazine and suggest a puff
| piece topic?
| simonw wrote:
| Very much both. Plenty of pieces like this are PR-driven, but
| quality publications are always looking to write interesting
| pieces independently of PR pitches.
|
| Many pieces come about because an individual journalist pitches
| an idea to their editor.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| From my perspective, Stephenson appears to have been engineered
| to meet my optimal reading specification. This improbability
| makes it among the best evidence I have that I am living in a
| simulation, along with the sound of Wayne Rogers (guitarist, not
| actor), the flavor of fresh doogh, the A944 west of Alford,
| several others.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several
| topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his
| endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at
| Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepositioned to the relevant bit
| @10:54). One of his editor's at Wired magazine also made a
| comment about editing his work in his book talk about Fall or
| Dodge in Hell at the Interval [2].
|
| This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for
| Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54): _[10:54] Q: How do
| you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut
| from some where the action just ends, and others where there 's
| the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in
| it. [11:11] A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings,
| but I know that some people feel differently. [11:21] But as
| you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same
| thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways,
| and different people have different tastes in what they want to
| see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with
| the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one
| of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive
| the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for
| example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can
| remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of
| mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick.
| There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a
| private jet that blows up, some people die, there's
| confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems
| like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that
| once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that
| meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets
| slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the
| ending is. [12:59] For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of
| NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete,
| you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely
| covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that
| I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end.
| [13:27] I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be
| hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people,
| but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one._
|
| This is a transcript of an unknown (to me) Wired editor talking
| about Stephenson's copy: _I will tell you I was working under
| Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiberoptic
| cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word
| piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not
| improve it as an editor. It was the cleanest copy I 'd ever
| worked with ever with any other writer and I actually worked with
| a lot of writers so I will say you have something going on there
| about your first drafts that are uneditable._ [2]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| That quote on _Anathem_ is interesting because it 's the one
| book I've read by him that felt the most "...and that's the
| ending, you can figure out what happened afterwards" of his
| books. I wouldn't say it's a particularly satisfying ending
| _while you 're reading the book_, because the logic of the
| climactic scene and ending is hidden, but afterwards it does
| leave you going "huh, it actually kind of works." _Seveneves_
| had a much more conventional ending and, in the narrative logic
| of the book, was quite satisfying to read even though I wouldn
| 't say that book is his strongest book overall.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| "Mother Earth, Mother Board" is one of my favourite pieces of
| non-fiction writing.
| whoswho wrote:
| Does Neal Stephenson have an orb of seeing? I haven't read any of
| his works or predictions but if he can tell the future then
| that's worthy of a scientific study, I would posit. Wouldn't be
| called predictions then, I suppose.
|
| Not sure if he's the only one who wrote about possible future
| outcomes with the tropes listed in the article. But then they
| wouldn't be called tropes either, I suppose.
| samsartor wrote:
| I think the framing around these sorts of discussions always
| annoys me because few sci-fi books (and certainly no Neil
| Stephenson books) are primarily written as predictions. They are
| written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all
| else.
|
| Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse
| to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes.
| Fantastically fun in my opinion! But that motivates all kinds of
| choices (making the Internet a literal place with a street grid
| and real estate, where people can get chopped up by swords) that
| real XR tech has no particular technical use for. And I would
| implore any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration to
| consider how absurd it would be to take all the world's most
| sophisticated technology and dedicate it to gratifying personal
| power fantasies. It starts with the almost pornographic display
| of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza,
| and just gets more gloriously ridiculous from there. The main
| character is named "Hero Protagonist". The main antagonist has a
| nuke strapped to his motorcycle. Take a hint!
|
| Anyway, I am happy Diamond Age gets a call-out because it is by
| far my favorite of Stephenson's novels. And I think the Young
| Ladies Illustrated Primer is one of the all-time most interesting
| technological plot contrivances (the Imago machine,
| game/civilization of Azad, and Shrike all providing strong
| competition). But the technical constraints/capabilities of the
| Primer have almost nothing to do with realistic
| limitations/advantages of AI technology, and everything to do
| with getting the right characters into the right places at the
| right times. We need a Miranda to provide the Primer's voice so
| that Nell can have some kind of human connection in the end, and
| we need Miranda to be paid anonymously so that Nell won't get
| that human connection too soon. The Primer is a language model
| not a robot so that Nell will have to solve problems on her own.
| Yet she can learn Kung Fu from a language model because we need a
| few action scenes. I think really the interesting question posed
| is "Can a person grow up to be influential given no resources
| except a perfect education?" not so much "Can a language model
| provide a perfect education?". Many characters in Diamond Age
| seem to agree with the former notion, but in the end it (SPOILER)
| gets shot down when Nell needs control of an literal army to come
| out on top.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm annoyed by writers equating "any computer that speaks
| like a real person" to "predicting ChatGPT". My four year old
| wanted a robot to clean up her LEGOs. Did she predict
| iRobot/Roomba?
|
| I would be more impressed by a scenario where, e.g., a writer
| predicts email, and then the side effects that (1) you _have_
| to have an email to create accounts for things, and (2) mail is
| constantly clogged by junk mail.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Reminds me of the joke: "I invented the laptop when I opened
| a book turned 90deg at the age of four."
| ghaff wrote:
| Written end-to-end electronic communications was obvious
| going back to at least the 70s (and arguably much longer).
| What was aruably a lot less obvious that email/chat would
| become almost ubiquitous and increasingly a prerequisite for
| fully participating in society. (Including on the go.)
| notahacker wrote:
| Particularly when talking computers are an extremely common
| trope in scifi, and had been for at least three decades
| before Stephenson wrote _The Diamond Age_ , as for that
| matter had primitive chatbots.
|
| The aspects of the setup for the Primer I remember
| (handcrafted by an individual for a specific end, reliant on
| human voices for narration, far-future advanced technology
| all around) don't feel at all like "predicting ChatGPT"
| either.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an
| excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase
| scenes.
|
| I don't think that's "most" of the usage of the metaverse in
| Snow Crash. The entire point of the metaverse in Snow Crash is
| to deal with the hubris of thinking that one protocol standard
| to rule them all could last and provide for the opportunity for
| a Tower of Babel-like fall of civilization as protocol wars
| break down an overly centralized metaverse. All of the cool
| stuff is just to show how high the Tower got built before it
| crumbled and fell.
|
| I think any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration are
| probably missing the "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" message of
| the direct ending of the book.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an
| excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase
| scenes.
|
| That's an interesting take. Personally, I thought those parts
| were the least interesting, and the larger social commentary
| was the most. As always, everyone takes something different
| from compelling fiction.
|
| I've never viewed Snow Crash (or The Diamond Age) as
| predictions of the future though. They both seem to be
| commentary squarely about the present to me.
| samsartor wrote:
| Yah "mostly" might have been a bit strong on my part. I think
| Neil Stevenson is capable of both expressing interesting
| ideas and shoehorning in great excuses for action set pieces
| at the same time. Certainly any good science fiction can
| inspire different interpretations by different people!
| bsenftner wrote:
| The ideas in both Snow Crash and Diamond Age are wonderful,
| worthy of considerable investment, but Stephenson's writing is
| harmed by his inclusion of pandering to a lowest common
| denominator of reader: already mentioned is the character's
| name being "Hero Protagonist", in addition he goes into a bit
| too much lurid detail during a main character rape with pretty
| demeaning sexual name, and the climax of Snow Crash is
| literally a description of the abstract visual effects one
| would see if Snow Crash were a VFX heavy feature film. Diamond
| Age is more mature, but the Primer has 'super book'
| capabilities closer to the Matrix Download of Knowledge to
| enable more excitement in his narrative. Great ideas, but a bit
| too comic book in execution.
| bashinator wrote:
| I always thought both of those books would make excellent
| graphic novel or anime adaptations.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Beyond what you have pointed out, this list of tropes helps
| remind us of how weak some of the characters were as well as
| details that seemed unnecessary or out-of-placec.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/SnowCrash
| firebat45 wrote:
| Just a nitpick - The main character in Snow Crash is named
| Hiro, not Hero.
| thwarted wrote:
| _It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced
| weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza_
|
| The opening chapter takes on a whole different meaning when you
| consider it as a heavily embellished self-narrative by a guy
| who lives in a storage unit and doesn't really have a career
| and doesn't have any prospects, delivering pizzas for a massive
| chain in difficult to navigate suburban sprawl and how he fucks
| up his job while sticking his neck out for his employer. He's
| driving a noisy, used and abused, yet tricked out, vehicle in
| risky situations, and they give him the cheapest, lamest weapon
| they can to defend himself, seemingly some kind of taser that
| charges in the cigarette lighter. So he feels more comfortable
| and empowered carrying swords. He calls himself The
| Deliverator, a member of an elite order; this is him telling
| himself "I am somebody".
|
| The opening chapter isn't necessarily about all the high tech
| things of this dystopian future. It's the grandiose story a
| normal, struggling guy tells himself to feel more important and
| cooler than he actually is. Everyone considers themselves to be
| the hero protagonist of their own story, and Hiro (assuming
| that's his real name and not the name he's given his persona he
| created to deal with his station in life) is no exception.
|
| There's definitely some near-future sci-fi
| technology/situations in the story such as Reason, the
| ratthings, Ng's deal, most of YT's accoutrements, the nuclear
| warhead sidecar. But even today, things like the metaverse, the
| Librarian and Earth, are increasingly becoming more mundane
| than futuristic. But they'll get described with more flourish
| and flowery language than is actually warranted.
| samsartor wrote:
| I haven't thought too much about Hiro potentially being an
| unreliable narrator, and it definitely puts a different spin
| on things! In that case I certainly think the specific design
| of the technologies in Snow Crash is motivated by that
| narrative need to make Hiro's mundane life into something
| exciting, rather than the literally mundane motivations
| behind technology in the real world. Assuming anyway that we
| aren't careening into a future were all technology is driven
| primarily by hype... that's a scary thought.
| swimwiththebeat wrote:
| I agree, I don't think the purpose of sci-fi is to predict the
| future. The future is just impossible to predict due to the
| myriad factors, variables, unknown unknowns, and second-order+
| degree effects an action can have.
|
| The purpose of sci-fi IMO is moreso to:
|
| 1. Provide an entertaining story/narrative with technology as
| the main focus of the world and characters' actions
|
| 2. Define a set of concepts to help you think about technology
| and its possible effects on humans and the world
|
| 3. Nudge people to think about what kind of future they would
| want or not want and how they can use or control technology to
| achieve that
|
| Here's Ken Liu talking about the purpose of sci-fi:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5knkpmxXu-k
| samsartor wrote:
| I do think predictions are an unavoidable side-effect of
| writing science fiction, but those predictions are almost
| always in service to those purposes you listed. Stephenson
| must think nanotech book AI is more plausible as a form
| idealized childhood education than say, magic fairies. But in
| the end he relies on our suspension of disbelief to get on
| past that to the big questions of nurture vs nature and the
| quality of human intelligence.
| flir wrote:
| This article's wrong. It's not the Illustrated Primer that
| presages the chatbots, it's the Librarian in Snow Crash. His
| "intelligence without consciousness" take is spookily accurate, I
| think.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| The Diamond age was my favorite Stephenson novel, but I'd like to
| highlight a personal favorite Neal Stephenson premonition, the
| extent of which is not fully realized, but seems likely. This one
| (circa 2019) is less ambitious, and less well-known: There are
| parts of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_ that describe a phenomenon
| called apes. These are bots, generally chatbots and similar.
| Commanded by state and non-state actor, they dominate the
| internet, and can be used to manipulate public opinion, or what
| people think they _know_ in general.
|
| More generally, he discusses the creation of a _post truth world_
| , describing a brief period in history between the scientific
| revolution, and now, where people could agree on a cohesive world
| view. In the novel, the internet has now ended this; everyone is
| siloed into their own information bubbles, and can't agree on a
| common reality. Look up "MOAB" or "apes" in conjunction with this
| book for more information. I should note that these are some of
| the _smaller_ ideas in that book...
| jpm_sd wrote:
| The real-world parts of Fall were great, but the tedious
| simulation stuff ruined the book for me.
|
| As with all science fiction, his "predictions of the future"
| are actually sharp observations of current reality. He's not
| gazing into a crystal ball, he's just seeing the present from a
| different angle.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Agree. I enjoyed it significantly less than his other works
| for the same reason.
|
| It was an interesting exploration of some ideas, but the "in
| simulation" arcs tended to have an absurdly slow pace, which
| may have been deliberate attempt to help show the passage of
| time between the "real world" parts.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| I found the real-world parts a bore, and his re-creation of
| existence quite diverting. When I recommend the book, it's
| always with admonition to "skip the tedium, it goes on
| forever".
|
| Well, I did like "real world" parts that describe the
| practical basis for how the fantasy realm was manifest, but
| the life and times the present day characters was of no use
| to me. I didn't care a whit about the conspiracy theories,
| the post-US factions, any of that stuff.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| After reading Fall, playing Minecraft Skyblock or Luckyblock
| feels kind of amazing...
| jjk7 wrote:
| I think the internet will eventually die for this reason...
|
| Am I reading an honest comment from a stranger or from a Neal
| Stephenson advertising bot?
|
| Eventually it will be just all bots, and very little desire for
| real humans to interact.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but
| isolated - online communities, like back in the BBS days,
| which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's mainly social media
| which will be (or rather: already is) overrun by bots, but
| social media (or even the web) isn't "the internet".
| drakenot wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's Anathem (2008):
|
| > "Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became
| almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty,
| obsolete, or downright misleading information," Sammann
| said.
|
| > "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.
|
| > "Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became
| important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those
| businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money:
| they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the
| Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their
| products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs
| whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But
| it had to be good crap."
|
| > "What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely
| incredulous tone.
|
| > "Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document
| consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a
| beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a
| hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was
| subtly false. It's a lot harder to generate good crap. At
| first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly
| did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-
| swapping one name for another, say. But it didn't really
| take off until the military got interested."
|
| > "As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's
| reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are
| referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-
| First Millennium A.R."
|
| > "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of
| enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly
| the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the
| praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the
| Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is
| that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that
| lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters
| in hand."
| pierrebai wrote:
| So, the fantastical plot argument is that one can insert
| a singular hard-to-verify subtle error among a see of
| factually correct statements? That's not novel, it is a
| fact on about any decently sized compendium, \that there
| will be a typo, an out of date fact or error. That's
| supposed to be scary?
|
| One of the underlying assumption behind these sci-fi
| ideas is that people believe weird things because of
| carefully constructed misleading chain of reasoning, when
| in fact they simply believe in things that are convenient
| to support their general world view. Climate denial, for
| example, is not about carefully planted false evidences,
| it is about adhering to a view point that avoids forcing
| you to reconsider your lifestyle.
| drakenot wrote:
| Have you been paying attention to the proliferation of AI
| / LLM generated content on the web?
|
| Things are about to get dark unless we have new methods
| for combating it. It has seemed like Google has been on a
| slow and steady decline, losing this battle with
| spammers. This takes it to a whole new level.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but
| isolated
|
| Until some member gets pissed and DDOSes you off the net
| and you can no longer afford the operational costs and/or
| the costs of keeping your platform up to date and secure
| are prohibitive.
|
| The internet is going to turn into its own dark forest. IF
| your 'social' group wants to stay alive it will have to
| hide from the mega predators and the second you attract
| attention expect to be prey.
| vonjuice wrote:
| I think the responses that something either will die or
| revert back to some simile of the good old days is a very
| human response that stems from the fact that in reality, it
| will mutate in forms that we can't really predict.
|
| Or perhaps some visionaries can predict somewhat, but we
| can't really parse which of these predictions will be the
| one to pan out.
| JohnFen wrote:
| My social group has already done this to a fair -- and
| growing -- extent. There appears to be no other real
| alternative.
| lxgr wrote:
| Why would I not want to communicate with people I personally
| know over the Internet anymore, or with people they can
| introduce me to?
|
| It's "just" going to require better digital identities and
| authentication, whether for real names (for interacting with
| banks and governments) or context-dependent pseudonyms.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Just"
|
| So, you'll only talk to people you know, probably in your
| country, facilitated by a government ID. How long before
| that turns into "you can only communicate using your
| government ID over the internet".
|
| Who manages these context-dependent pseudonyms and what
| motivations do they have. Pretty much in any commercially
| operated publicly traded company this seems to turn into
| "allow spammers on the network in some forms to increase
| engagement".
| kristjansson wrote:
| For an earlier iteration of the same concept, see 'bogons' in
| Anathem (2008 (!))
| paulpauper wrote:
| I dunno. His books are so long that anyone can find something
| to infer as predictive or prescient. It's like confirmation
| bias. Does any sci fi writer who incorporates human-like
| intelligence robots into their novels predict GPT? I say not
| rtkwe wrote:
| They're long but it's not like they're not just spewing
| random ideas out the whole length like a Nostradamus where
| you shoot enough shots you'll eventually get something that
| can be interpreted to be prescient.
| throwuwu wrote:
| I take issue with the assertion that there was a period where
| all people could agree on a world view. Most of the 20th
| century was defined by sharp disagreement between world views
| and all of their constituent parts. Perhaps if you limit the
| scope to all citizens of a nation then the statement would be
| more truthful but there are large disagreements there as well.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| One thing I liked about reading "The Three Body Problem" was
| the unique (to Westerners) worldview it portrayed, and the
| difficulties of academic science in China under the Mao
| regime - very different from the worldview in post WWII
| America.
| rsync wrote:
| The "ameristan" portion of Fall is one of my favorite William
| Gibson novels.
| anticodon wrote:
| > everyone is siloed into their own information bubbles, and
| can't agree on a common reality
|
| It has already happened. I was born in USSR and live in Russia,
| and when I hear or read anything about USSR or Russia in
| Western media, it makes my hair stand on end.
|
| But if I try to explain what it was really like or what it is
| like now, I only get insults in response: "Putin bot", "Kremlin
| shill", "as dumb as Trump's followers", etc. So I gave up and
| stop trying.
|
| But it's clear that there're several "versions" of the reality,
| some of them are very far from "real" reality. And the divide
| will become only deeper. I also notice that comments on social
| networks and youtube became so weaponized that I simply cannot
| read them and stopped trying. I actively avoid reading any
| comments on any website with only 3 or 4 exceptions (like HN).
| ukuina wrote:
| Would like to hear your take on the discrepancies in
| perception, if you are willing to put yourself out there
| again.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| When it comes to hair standing on end, you are contributing
| to the problem.
|
| Looking at your history, I found your claim from three months
| ago, that the Baltic States, cite:
|
| _Since becoming "independent" they're only degrading with
| ever-increasing speed._
|
| First, they are really independent countries. No need for
| scare quotes. Of course that small countries in general can't
| act with the same sort of impunity like big countries, but
| compared to their previous subordinated status as parts of
| the USSR, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now independent
| countries with their own power structure and laws.
|
| Seconds, the "degradation" claim is bullshit. I have visited
| all those countries several times since the 1990s and the
| general improvement of living standards from the depressing
| Soviet shabbiness to where they are today is nothing short of
| miraculous. The Baltics, together with Poland, belong to a
| set of countries that took to modern social market economy
| like ducklings to water.
|
| The only thing that doesn't go up in the Baltics is
| demography, but, literally, all the nearby regions of Russia
| (Kaliningrad, Pskov, StPetersburg, Karelia) are much worse
| off when it comes to fertility. Doctor, heal thyself.
| k8svet wrote:
| I read this book about 5 years ago. I remember thinking, just
| like with global warming, "wow this is terrifying, glad I'll be
| dead by then". Oh if only.
|
| I think about MOAB nearly every single day. And I cherish
| every, single, day. Because horrors await us, very soon.
|
| Not sure how long ago you read it, but I'm just now remembering
| the interludes where they start to contrast society that has
| split around MOAB belief. Prescient indeed.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The way things have gone so far really does make it hard to
| be optimistic about the future, particularly when it comes to
| the internet.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I mean, yeah, but the "post truth world" was a thing sometime
| within the G.W. Bush administration, and Stephen Colbert coined
| the word "truthiness" in 2005, so calling it a "premonition" by
| Stephenson is a bit of a stretch.
|
| Not to mention social media manipulation by bots in the 2016 US
| presidential race...
| karaterobot wrote:
| What's the stunning prediction talked about in the title? Because
| it sounds like he doesn't think he predicted today's AI, or that
| he thought about AI much in that story.
|
| > The technology that drives the book wasn't really AI as we
| think of it now--I was talking to people who were working on some
| of the underlying technologies that would be needed to
| communicate on the internet in a secure, anonymous manner. I
| guess it's implicit that there's an AI in there that's generating
| the story and increasing the degree of sophistication in response
| to the learning curve of the child, but I didn't really go into
| that very much; I just kind of assumed it would be there.
| paulpauper wrote:
| His books are so long he has written so many of them that the
| odds will approach 100% he coins some neologism
| denton-scratch wrote:
| https://archive.ph/u75bw
| davedunkin wrote:
| Who's writing sci-fi today that we will look back on as
| predictive?
| jes5199 wrote:
| no one. can't see past the event horizon.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm curious how his prediction about generative AI in Fall will
| play out. Mild spoilers ahead (not really plot relevant):
|
| He basically predicts that any form of leak intended to harm the
| subject depicted will become ineffective, since nobody will
| accept text, voice and video recordings as authentic anymore and
| people will actually perform "preemptive strikes" on the search
| space themselves, which will in turn be plausibly deniable for
| the same reason.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I find "Stephenson predicted ChatGPT!!" to be an incredibly
| stupid hot take, and I'm a fan of Stephenson.
| nameless912 wrote:
| I honestly think the Hyperion series does a better job predicting
| the enshittification of everything at the hands of AI than
| anything Stephenson wrote. And as an added bonus, it throws in
| some really interesting thought experiments about what a sentient
| AI would logically conclude the "right thing" to do with humanity
| was.
| danans wrote:
| How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on
| how things have turned out?
|
| After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those
| in the CS/AI/ML world for a long time. Furthermore,
| "conversations" with machines have been a model for human-AI
| interaction for a very long time. Stephenson didn't invent that
| idea.
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