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15
Thoughts on Neal Stephenson?
posted 3 years ago by BrainJuice 3 years ago by BrainJuice +15 / -0

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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– arglide 9 points 3 years ago +9 / -0

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.

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▲ 8 ▼
– ajfofjakf 8 points 3 years ago +8 / -0

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:

"Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel are all fans of his work."

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

"while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.

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.

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▲ 3 ▼
– lgbtqwtfbbq 3 points 3 years ago +3 / -0

some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed.

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.

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▲ 2 ▼
– LauriThorne 2 points 3 years ago +2 / -0

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.

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