h/t Today in
Tabs, “Spoiler: like everything Stephenson has written since
“Anathem,” it sucks.”
u/AndrewSshi51 pointsat 1647605342.000000
Someone who is better at sneers than I once characterized
Cryptonomicon as taking a thousand pages to say that 1990s
California tech guys are the pinnacle of humanity.
The bit where they say the main customers for it are criminals and scum is pretty on the nose though. And where the technologists just press on without regard for the unsavoury wider social impacts.
I've heard it asserted that this was Stephenson's veiled rebuttal to the famous ["The California Ideology"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) essay from 1995.
Yeah this book has poisoned the minds of a lot of tech people, all because it has actual advanced math in it (I'm not kidding here btw, this is why it was recommended to in university).
I also own a copy, and liked it a lot.
Speaking as an SF writer, in my experience 25% of readers will miss the moral or thematic intent of any book (if there was any to be missed in the first place), and another 25% will read it ass-backwards.
Which leads to:
SF author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last we have succeeded in creating the Torment Nexus from classic SF novel, *Don't create the Torment Nexus*
I have certainly been part of those 25%, I used to think starship troopers was intended to mock the society they created (and show off cool weapons). In my defense, I was young.
I don't necessarily have a good perspective on what "advanced math" is because of my background, but the math actually described in the book isn't particularly advanced. Stephenson gives a nice description of modular arithmetic, but I wouldn't call that "advanced math". I guess it *is* covered in the last math course most CS majors take, which explains why techies would call it "advanced".
He mentions zeta functions (which are definitely advanced) but not in any detail.
Come on, no gatekeeping STEM elitism here.
Most books don't suddenly show the sigma symbol in the text. They show their elitism via *random quotes in french*.
It isn't particularly gatekeep-y to say that modular arithmetic isn't advanced. You can teach it to grade school children who know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It is the *start* of more advanced ideas (finite fields and field theory), but it doesn't rub against any of the core ideas there.
I tried reading it while unemployed after the 2000 dot com crash, on a cross-country trip.
I bounced off it hard, almost no pages in. I guess I wasn't in the mood for talk of data haven type bullshit.
I left it on a bench in front of a hotel in Great Falls, Montana. Like right outside the entrance, possibly under an awning or the structure you can park under while checking in.
Perhaps someone else picked it up and read it, if it wasn't found by a religious nut and thrown away for looking dark sided.
Not saying it was bad or good, just that's what happened. I later bought a kindle copy but still haven't gotten around to reading it.
I tried to slog thorough Quicksilver because it felt like it should
be “right up my alley” and then I read a New Republic review from back
in 2003 that struck me as perfectly encapsulating his kind of
fiction:
“His book is nothing but research in search of a narrative, a
gigantic collection of index cards.”
And it struck me that he’s not really a fiction author. He’s
a nerdy researcher who offloads, into fiction, all his recent notes
about some niche topic he was interested in the year prior.
To be fair, most fiction authors do research for their books. But the
important part is actually turning those notes into something
literary and not just research-dumping. 🙃
Not for nothing that the real threat to the Foundation is not random psychics or societal collapse but the arrogance of office inherited by people told they're saving humanity.
Yeah! I was a huge fan of Asimov growing up. He was the first real science-fiction author I read, so the nostalgia factor is strong. The older I get — and the more I read *actually good* literature — the more I realize a lot of these “highly intellectual/rational” authors are really just exploiting the medium to masturbate over their pet ideologies.
The world-building can be cool, and I respect that, but like you said: Paper-thin literature. 😞
Yup when I was a kid I loved Heinlein. Now I can only tolerate his early stuff up to and including Stranger in a Strange Land. Everything after that is embarrassing
Niven is even more obvious about that. Even as a kid I was able to figure out that Ringworld was an essay about a cool idea he had which he added just enough of a framing device to to be able to call it a story.
I’m sad I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of Stephenson’s “Fall; or
Dodge in Hell”.
The first two thirds of the book are his good-ole Silicon Valley
sci-fi. I actually really enjoyed his artistic interpretation of what it
would be like to have your brain uploaded to some system and then turned
back on.
The last third goes full on cyber-fantasy. And while I don’t think he
did a great job with this, his ideas were so vivid and have so much
potential. I was tempted to write a bit of fan fiction for the book to
maybe flesh out some of the more gripping ideas and to give more
satisfying character arc conclusions for most characters.
>And while I don’t think he did a great job with this, his ideas were so vivid and have so much potential.
I actually used the cyber setting as a basis for a tabletop RPG one-shot. Rather than having players make up a backstory, I had them pick or roll traits randomly. The PCs then had to figure out how to fit into the society with no memory of who they were, or even that there was a before. They had some adventures, and the finale was them discovering the 'real' world, and who they were before.
The players really liked the starting premise and the finish. Definitely wish I could have had them world build a little, but we only had time for a few sessions.
Stephenson certainly has the massive wordcounts in common with the
Rationalists.
zing
the Queen of the Netherlands (who prefers to be called “Saskia”)
Wtf. What happend to Lex, or Amalia for that matter.
E: and yeah, lot of things in Stephensons books really age badly when
you reread them. The techno celebrities who have special rights in the
metaverse, the people lusting after the 14 year old, and the
irresponsible disposure of nuclear powered reactors and toxic heavy
metals in Snowcrash for example. (E: He did fail in predicting the
bodyhorror scanning technology of the TSA however, major plothole in
snowcrash (those knives will show up for the TSA mr ‘bad impulse
control’)
>the irresponsible disposure of nuclear powered reactors and toxic heavy metals in Snowcrash for example
I mean, part of that is probably the hyper-ancap culture of the book's setting. *Zodiac* showed that he was acutely aware of the environmental effects of dumping any old toxic waste into the ocean.
Zodiac still has the "radical rebel contrarian hero strikes out on his own" Rationalist-friendly worldview, though. He's too scientific for the hippies he works with, but he's still the guy taking on what the government's too corrupt to deal with.
> The techno celebrities who have special rights in the metaverse
Didn't Facebook do exactly this?
>A Facebook program known as XCheck gives millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment. The program reportedly shields millions of VIP users from Facebook's normal enforcement process, according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
Depiction of something in a book doesn't necessarily mean it's meant to be good. Celebs getting special privileges or treatment was a pretty good prediction, if actually pretty obvious.
> and the irresponsible disposure of nuclear powered reactors and toxic heavy metals in Snowcrash for example
The Soviets/Russia dropped old reactors in the ocean, so it's not like it hasn't been done.
And look at the mess we've made with plastics in the environment and microplastics in our bodies. Doesn't quite have the flash of nuclear pollution but it's pretty bad.
Again, depicting something in a story doesn't imply it's good, even if the story doesn't come right out and say "that's bad, yo".
Tech celebs != celebs. It is literally this time we (the coders) will be celebs because we have literal backdoors, which isnt even really sanctioned or given by the danceclub, no he has and abuses root rights basically. Which is a bit different from the regular celeb imagine if steve jobs after he was fired from apple, could and would shut down your mac because he didnt like your alt.whatever post.
Same with the dumping, it isnt that it hasnt been done before, it is that the 'tech good guys' esp when they have the power dont bat an eye continueing the same rotten system.
Around the point where i noticed that there were, like, three books in a row with teenagers fucking much older dudes (and one rape of a teenager), i decided Stephenson didn't need any more of my attention ever.
Me and some friends have been reading a lot of various books in a bookclub amd it is scary how often 'older dude fucks a kid and nobody bats an eye' comes up. So it isnt just Stephenson. (At least with Lolita we knew that coming in, and it is scary to know how many people take away from that story that it is a love story, and not a manipulative unreliable rapist narrator who is trying to justify himself)
It was less cringe in the 80s-90s when it was a *thing* for media to have an ironic, 'wink-wink nudge-nudge' tone to it while ultimately backing it up with substance and genuine heart. Then we've become steadily irony poisoned over the following decades, and gave birth to entire communities practically devoted to it.
>Climate realism is a crock of shit
It's exactly the same thing as before but instead of "just let private industry do whatever, there will be no consequences" it's "just let private industry do whatever, only they can save us"
“People have talked for decades about doing this,” explains a
Scottish risk analyst to the hog hunter Rufus, referring to the idea of
shooting sulfur into the stratosphere to stop global warming. “And
almost from the moment it was first mentioned, the idea was loathed by
Greens. Just anathematized. To the point where you couldn’t even really
talk about it in public or you’d get canceled.”
This is maybe the most telling thing anyone could write.
Someone who is better at sneers than I once characterized Cryptonomicon as taking a thousand pages to say that 1990s California tech guys are the pinnacle of humanity.
I guess they didn’t pay attention to the majority of Seveneves, huh?
And - not directly related, but I still regularly think about the time I saw Charles Stross in this sub. I bought more books of his off that.
E: oh he’s literally back in this thread right now. Nice.
“Everything I like is apolitical”
I tried to slog thorough Quicksilver because it felt like it should be “right up my alley” and then I read a New Republic review from back in 2003 that struck me as perfectly encapsulating his kind of fiction:
And it struck me that he’s not really a fiction author. He’s a nerdy researcher who offloads, into fiction, all his recent notes about some niche topic he was interested in the year prior.
To be fair, most fiction authors do research for their books. But the important part is actually turning those notes into something literary and not just research-dumping. 🙃
I’m sad I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of Stephenson’s “Fall; or Dodge in Hell”.
The first two thirds of the book are his good-ole Silicon Valley sci-fi. I actually really enjoyed his artistic interpretation of what it would be like to have your brain uploaded to some system and then turned back on.
The last third goes full on cyber-fantasy. And while I don’t think he did a great job with this, his ideas were so vivid and have so much potential. I was tempted to write a bit of fan fiction for the book to maybe flesh out some of the more gripping ideas and to give more satisfying character arc conclusions for most characters.
Stephenson certainly has the massive wordcounts in common with the Rationalists.
zing
Wtf. What happend to Lex, or Amalia for that matter.
E: and yeah, lot of things in Stephensons books really age badly when you reread them. The techno celebrities who have special rights in the metaverse, the people lusting after the 14 year old, and the irresponsible disposure of nuclear powered reactors and toxic heavy metals in Snowcrash for example. (E: He did fail in predicting the bodyhorror scanning technology of the TSA however, major plothole in snowcrash (those knives will show up for the TSA mr ‘bad impulse control’)
Wow. That review was a clobbering.
I’m not shocked to find out Stphenson is a dumb libertarian.
“the main character of Snow Crash is a pizza deliveryman named Hiro Protagonist”
I’m not sure I can think of a more “rationalist fan-fic” character name.
fuck ive been waiting for something like this
[deleted]
This is maybe the most telling thing anyone could write.
I’ve never managed to finish a Stephenson book.
Neal Stephenson = Dan Brown without the catholicism
Wait a second… Is “Grey Tribe” also a reference to grey matter?