I've been recommended "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and was looking for some thoughts on Neal Stephenson, the author. You guys seem to be pretty on point with these things, so I figured this was a good place to ask.
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I think he tends to fall in love with ideas then refuses to let them go, even if he can't figure out a way to make them make sense. Like a civilization that lives in underwater tunnels and has orgies because they're all infected with nanocomputers and their orgies are a way for their nanomachines to perform a calculation with each other. Or a guy locked in a cell being forced to decrypt a message, only he deliberately has it output the wrong answer, and signal the right answer to him via one of the laptop's LEDs in morse code. This is a cryptography expert and can't think of a better way of receiving a message secretly than morse code through a LED? And the people who are watching everything he's doing think all the lines of code about manipulating the capslock light are totally normal? Or an electronic book which trains a bunch of young girls to become a fighting force more effective than the actual army. Or an MMO where you can watch people going into valhalla and you get points for stopping trolls from entering, only the people entering correspond to actual people going through airport security in real life, which a computer is representing as fantasy characters, and the trolls are the people you're supposed to stop, to help provide actual airport security... only for any of this to work, the computer can obviously detect the terrorists without the player's intervention, if it's representing them as trolls in the first place. Congrats on reading about "gamification" somewhere, but your idea is dumb. He obviously reads a lot about technological advances and interesting ideas people are coming up with, but his fictional execution of them is often just not plausible, either because the ideas themselves are more interesting than realistic, or because he doesn't really fully understand what he's writing about, or because they're just hugely more complicated than a much more mundane solution which would be less interesting to write about. This problem is probably amplified by a writing style where he deliberately dwells on the details, so you can't help but think about them yourself.
As far as wokeness goes, at a bare minimum, he is very fond of female characters who are outrageously competent and generally perfect, particularly given that he tends to write about things that are almost exclusively dominated by men. To be fair, several of his men are also outrageously competent, but I'm fairly exhausted of reading or watching fiction featuring huge numbers of perfect women excelling in fields which, in real life, they barely enter at all. I believe the author himself is also fairly woke, but I can't remember what gave me that impression. Checking what he said about sad puppies would probably be a place to start.
This is a pretty on point description of him. He goes to great lengths to describe things and hash out ideas. In an autistic sort of way it's interesting but certainly not for everyone. It makes a lot of sense when you consider he was a PNW early internet tech dude. Quoting from wikipedia:
As for the outrageously competent female characters, yeah, they are there but written in a different cultural climate than today. It wasn't done out of wokeness. A fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy writers around his age love to make characters like that. My guess is they all grew up reading Robert Heinlein, who had many "strong woman characters." That, and Heavy Metal magazine.
In the same story involving underwater orgies (The Diamond Age), he writes
And that idea is a central theme of the book. Something you "can't" really say today.
In Cryptonomicon, published in 1999, one of the main characters has a professional academic girlfriend who writes a paper about "bearded white men" being horrible people and the root of all evil. Just seeing the term "white men" in the title tells the character that it's mostly bullshit.
I have no idea what he's up to today, and he could be some woke jackass now, but many of thoughts from then weren't woke at the time. They were what passed for progressive.
Did his, and other digital libertarians' like himself, thoughts pave the road to the shit going on today? Probably.
This is 90% of Jared Taylor's argument. The other 10% is genetic, but he wouldn't be any more popular if he just focused on culture. I'd wager Neal Stephenson doesn't like Jared Taylor.
People like to think they believe "some cultures are simply better" right up to the point where you start talking how you might preserve that "superior" culture from the negative influences of "inferior" cultures. Then the accusations of being the Mustache Man start to fly.
The only reason to make a gamified version of airport security like the only you described would be if you had to comply with the 14th amendment and require a human to do the actual accusing and you don't want the operators to get bored.
The gamified version would have a tough time holding up in court though.
Everyone here is wrong. Snowcrash is an abomination so horrible, I didn't bother reading anything else by him. It was ten years late to the cyberpunk party. It brought nothing new and shit all over ideas and scenarios done better by other authors. It had a couple potentially neat ideas, but the man can't write well enough to do them justice.
Here's Snowcrash in a sentence: the main character is named Hiro Protagonist, but he doesn't advance the plot or solve the mystery in any way. A girl does offscreen. Get it?!?
Neuromancer is superior in every way and is one of the tightest novels ever written. Read that instead. Or pick up Gibson's short story collection and read Johnny Nmemonic for the ten page version.
The most interesting part of snowcrash was essentially the college lecture on Sumerian language embedded in the book. Everything else was reddit-tier cyberpunk aesthetic with no substance
I loved Cryptonomicon. Excellent book, although I first read it in 2001, so it is now dated. If you can get yourself into a 1990s mindset it can work for sure.
Anathem was decent. This one took a TON of setup and world building (and language!) but the payoff was worth it.
Snow Crash. I read late, and did not find it to be particularly memorable. I don't intend to ever read this again.
I also read most of the Baroque Cycle, but man, I can take some setup for payoffs (I mean I read all of ASOIAF) and there were indeed some brilliant moments in there, but I ended up giving up. I might try again, but it's a slog and could use some editing to get to the point faster.
Haven't read "Fall".
So really, I'd love to read some more of his work, but when I read general summaries of stuff I haven't read I get put off for one reason or another.
If you want something having to do with mind uploading you might try The Reality Dysfunction by Peter Hamilton (First book in Knight's Dawn trilogy). Not without its faults, but good overall in my opinion.
Aged about as well as The Matrix. A product of its time. Worth reading but go into it with that mentality
I've read two of his books: Snow Crash and Seveneves.
They were alright. The most interesting part of Snow Crash was the exposition around Sumerian culture; the main plot was just too weird and a little boring for my tastes.
Seveneves was more on-the-nose, politically. There's some pretty obvious stand-ins for modern figures, including Hillary Clinton and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Characters take turns holding the "idiot baton" as necessary to move the plot forward. Contrary to many reviews that dumped on it, I actually liked "Part 3" but hated "Part 2".
As others have said, politically he's not as Left as most but it's still there.
I like him, but if you want to like him then I hope you enjoy:
(a) Long divergences from plot as he goes into great detail about a particular thing or idea (b) Endings that come out of nowhere and are basically just when he decided that the book needed to end
Snowcrash was fun but it's definitely dated. I read it about ten years ago now so not sure how I'd enjoy it today. I read Anathem about 7 or 8 years ago? That one's an awesome read (and a lot more recent than Snowcrash). I don't really recall his stuff being particularly "woke" and I couldn't tell you what his politics are, so there is that.
I have Snowcrash but haven’t read it yet. I’ve heard good things
The Diamond Age is very good. I saw him in an interview and I did not like the guy.