Neal Stephenson on AI and What Comes Next [video]
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I have this vague feeling that I bumped into him in a provincial high street in England once. I've no way of actually verifying it was him but if we ever meet again next time I'll be prepared to give him better directions. :P
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
Diamond Age you can tell why he is very popular with silicon valley executives (and honestly is showing its age nowadays -- Japan is oddly relevant and the description of future China would read comical for someone in the 2020s). Anathem you can tell why he is popular with nerds like me.
It was published in 1992, but it was likely written in large part during the 80's ... and back then the world thought Japan was the future because of the popularity and success of Japanese tech corporations.
Their failures a few years later would dispell that myth ... but for awhile it really seemed plausible, and you'll see a similar fixation on Japan in lots of sci-fi from the 80's.
Yep. Sorry, thought I made it clear in my comment that this was a reference to the book showing its age.
The comment about popularity with executives was related to this romanticization of Victorian-era social structure that I see as a prominent undercurrent of Bay Area-coded literature, more recent iterations include Too Like the Lightning.
> as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
You might want to give his later stuff a try. I think he's really improved his ability to wrap a story up, without compromising on the grand ideas.
Makes me wonder what Anathem looks like in other translations and whether... Mathic was it(?), was as much an issue in translation. Maybe I'll take another go at it. It's been years, and people that I respect greatly have told me it's one of their favorites.
I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.
But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.
I also really enjoyed this conversation including him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7FN53FqB1U