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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I love this book. Still very current despite the fact it was published in the nineties. I re-read most of Neal Stephenson's stuff every few years. Just finished Anathem, again ;-).

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I like Stephenson's writing a lot but i don't know if I could re-read his books. The frequent, lengthy digressions put me off of reading them again.

IMO Diamond Age feels way less like a recap of Stephenson's reading list than some of the others. Worth a second look if you're on the fence and looking for a good story.

It's always felt like the most disciplined of his books to me - Snow Crash is almost there, but just a little too formulaic as a story. I enjoy the digressions and length in his other work, but they can get a little dull after the first reading.

I agree as far as the novel/ridiculously-long-essay dichotomy goes. That said Snow Crash is usually called a satire of (post)cyberpunk and as a satire it needs to adhere to the formula more than just another entry in the genre.

That explains a lot about my impressions of Snow Crash specifically. I felt that Stephenson wasn't being serious with his writing (contrast to, say, William Gibson's original treatment of cyberpunk). A bit toward the Terry Pratchett side of the writing spectrum.

I found it to be a slight turn-off, but if what you say is true, I'm more inclined to give Stephenson's other work more attention.

I wonder how that lines up with people who hate the first chapter and think it’s a nonsequitur versus people who enjoy it for its absurdity, versus people who think it is perfectly in keeping with the rest of the book.

Is it Gene Wilder doing a front flip in his first scene in Willie Wonka so you never quite trust him again?

>> Gene Wilder doing a front flip in his first scene in Willie Wonka so you never quite trust him again?

...

Oh SHIT.

You are one of today’s 10,000. Go read up on Gene Wilder and all the feedback he gave for WW. That scene was his idea. He got into that role like Daniel Day Lewis or Viggo Mortensen.

Naming your main character Hiro Protagonist gives the game away somewhat.

Unless you're 12 years old and Snow Crash is your first exposure to the genre.

<.<

>.>

You know, speaking for a friend.

Even so, your ‘friend’ could have chosen worse places to start...

To be perfectly honest, I did (and still do) oscillate on how I see that choice. Is it:

1) A clever if superficial name,

2) A dumb name because it's too obvious,

3) A clever name because it's satirizing the dumb choice of an obvious name,

4) A dumb name because the satire is also transparent...

Basically it only works on odd "Yomi layers" (see http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind).

The rest of the book perfectly straddles the "haha-only-serious" line so I guess it's in keeping.

> usually called a satire

Isn't that a post-rationalisation? Was anyone saying that at the time?

I don't know. I first read it in like '98/'99 ish? and by the time I was reading reviews for it people were calling it satire or at least definitely winking at the audience (as a sibling points out: hiro protagonist) I don't know what the conversation was contemporaneously with release.

Oh yeah. I read it when it came out and it was definitely satire. The genre's tropes were very well set up by then, actually now that I think about it, it was probably the gravestone for the genre.

I think the point of the prologue in Diamond Age is to act as gravestone.

Bud (Nell's father) is the prototypical cyberpunk character. And he's literally killed off by the events of that chapter. He plays no role in Nell's life, he's never brought up again, it's Stephenson saying this novel is literally post-cyberpunk.

What is the relationship of the Young Lady's Primer to Colin, the souped-up, hand-held travel guide used by the Yakuza boss's little girl in Mona Lisa Overdrive? Satire or just hyperbolic derivative?

I actually liked it less than others.

Snow Crash, despite being a train-wreck in terms of narrative cohesion, plotting, and basically every other measure of fiction as a craft, is just about perfect mind-candy. I reread it about two years ago, and it was almost as good as the first time.

Later work like Anathem, I think, starts showing him as a mature author[1], finally paying as much attention to the craft of writing as the ideas.

Diamond Age... I dunno. Certainly had its moments, and the exploration of 90s-era anarcho-capitalist crypto-anarchy themes was solid, but it really didn't grab me that much. The writing was less uneven than Snow Crash, but a lot of the crazy brilliance was missing.

[1] Still flunking Fictional Narrative Endings 101, but apparently that's intentional.

How is that intentional, I’m curious? I love his books but I hate hate hate HATE how he can’t ever finish one properly. I just went through seveneves and decided that maybe I really had enough of his endings.

He used to have a comment on it at one of his websites, but that appears to be gone. This quotes that: http://kaedrin.com/weblog/archive/001495.html

His endings have consistently left me expecting a sequel. Well, not really expecting, any more, because I pretty much know what (not) to expect. But then there was Mongoliad, so ???

One of the reasons I love his books is the lack of "Standard Hollywood / Fictional Ending number 1" that has become so pervasive that it's effectively satire of itself and so unsatisfying.

I've only re-read "snow crash" - but that was actually a listen to audiobook on a roadtrip

If I were to re-read Snow Crash, I would skip all the talk about ancient Sumer and the Sumerians. IMHO, that book would be greatly improved by eliminating all of that.

It serves to build and explain the neo-scientologist motivation of the antagonists. And in my opinion it is somewhat more sane than real scientology mythology.

Those are frequently my favorite parts. When I think of Cryptonomicon, I think about the Cap'N Crunch problem.

I’m currently re-reading Seveneves, and will probably tuck into Cryptonomicon (for the third time) in the next few months. Neal Stephenson’s books are rich enough that I usually get a different vibe from them when I read them again. For instance, on first read I liked the second part of Seveneves better than the first part, and now it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s due to the fact that on first read I get sucked in by the plot twists and on later reads I can enjoy the scenery and pick up different themes.

Seveneves was deeply traumatizing to me; I don't think Stephenson really grasps what 5000 years means to some isolated populations.

I don't think I'm ever going to re-read it.

Yeah, I was/am a huge fan of his books. Anathem is just an incredible work of art and deserves every bit of recognition it got if not more.

But REAMDE and Seveneves were just terribly disappointing and a huge letdown to me. They both seemed shallow and flat compared to the depth of story in his other books.

I don't think I can think of any other author whose books I both adore and loathe.

It's not necessarily that Seveneves felt 'flat' so much as the second half presents people as basically un changed after millennia which in some cases is over-lookable and in other cases deeply deeply lacking in empathy.

But hadn’t the pingers started to develop adaptations to ocean life? And both the diggers and the pingers would have a hard time generating novel adaptations because they were severely population constrained (smaller population = lower total generation of mutations). And anyway, 5000 years is enough time for subpopulations to diverge, but it’s not enough time for subspecies to emerge.

The spacers adherence to the past struck me as un realistic. The Diggers though I can't even think of their millennia, the absolute iron rule they had to maintain to survive... the inescapable fear... well I'm crying as I type this comment.

> The spacers adherence to the past struck me as un realistic.

I don't know. If you are the last remnants of a great civilization, I can see that being elevated to the point of religion or near religion, which can help things persist for quite a long time, since it's longevity is no longer based on logic.

It's not the spacers that make me break into tears a year after I read the book though.

Realistic or not they had thousands of years more freedom than the Diggers.

It's harsh and it's sad, but is it really all that much worse than the many tens of thousands of years where humans lived in small tribes, sometimes in harsh ecosystems, with disease and pain and local conflict?

For the vast majority of our history, humans have lived far worse off than now. Sure, it's easy to tell yourself they were happy living in a simpler time in and some cases a tropical paradise, but losing most your siblings in early childhood and passing away yourself at the old age of 32 because you scraped your leg and tf got infected doesn't sound all that great to me.

That said, people of the past probably were happy. Happiness at your condition and situation seems to be highly relative. To us, it looks like a horrible punishment, but to them, it's just life, and losing your friends and family to illness and accident was likely as accepted as the fact today that you'll at some point die of old age.

Ten thousand years ago they could walk away, they might die but they wouldn't kill everyone that they could conceive of. The resources weren't obviously limited, the idea that everything they could conceive of would be lost wouldn't have occurred. The absolute limitation, the sacrifice, the need to keep sacrificing for un told generations...

THEY HAD NO SKY. They had no future but theory...

I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just saying: it was traumatizing to me.

...and it boils down to a glorified horoscope. Dinans are impulsive Teklans are reliable etc etc. sigh.

I look at it this way, each member of that race grew up in a culture that practically deifies the Eves and the choices they made wrt disposition and traits, given that the traits are partially drilled into each generation as they grow up. Toss a bit of (epi)genetic predetermination and it's pretty easy to see how these groups wind up conforming to stereotypes like that.

Also we're only getting Kathree's view into things too so who's to say how accurate the strict caricatures actually are?

They would have likely (almost definitely since it was a government project) had access to similar gene editing tech to the Ark.

I admit, I also felt the characterization of people in the second half was upsetting, but more upsetting to me was the enormous loss of diversity, and I thought that somewhat explained the relations. These people aren't humans as we know them, they are walking scientific caricatures of them come to life. From that, I didn't really feel it was a statement about "people" per-se, as much as it was a way for him to manipulate the situation in a way where he could make wild predictions about millennia in the future while skirting reality fairly loosely. All quirks and weirdness can basically be explained as "see situation".

As extreme a genetic bottle neck as he invents I still feel like his future is overly distinguished. But as I say in siblings: thats not what wrecks me.

REAMDE, among other problems, was one of those books where all sorts of things had to just click together or there wouldn't be a story.

Seveneves was pretty good for about half the book. Then illogical events happened that culminated in "and then a miracle (really multiple miracles) happened" which really stretched my suspension of disbelief for the last part.

A couple of days ago I've decided to not finish Seveneves after having been disappointed by REAMDE already. Are there any recent book releases anyone can recommend to people who love Cryptonomicon, Anathem and Snow Crash but aren't really into REAMDE and Seveneves?

I don't think I really grasp what 5000 years means either, and to which populations? I liked Seveneves because I'm a big fan of stories set in space, but I'm interested in hearing your take on it if you feel like writing more.

Nothing particularly. The spacers just seemed overly concerned with 5k ago (which for reference is almost pre history for us).

nccebkvzngryl n uhaqerq crbcyr yvivat va n pnir sbe 5000 lrnef gur nofbyhgr veba svfg gb fheivir vg. Gur greebe bs nalguvat snvyvat. Gur furne genhzn bs 200 trarengvbaf tebjvat haqre guvf nofbyhgr hadhrfgvbanoyr yvzvgngvba...

Fgrcurafba unf ab vqrn whfg ubj qrrcyl gung jbhyq qrfgebl hf. Tenagrq gung'f cnegyl sbe gur fnxr bs univat n cybg va gur frpbaq unys, fgvyy... Nggrzcgvat gb rzcunfvmr jvgu gurz qrfgeblf zr.

But we would probably be more concerned with 5k years ago if humanity were highly developed enough to have left us an extensive collection of writing. Heck, Hindus and Jews still care about writings (orally transmitted before the alphabet) that originated 3-4K years ago.

The races and the inter-racial relations in the book's future make zero sense: Why the hell did Moirans and Teklans not intermarry into a single race centuries ago? Why are the docile sexless Camites still around? Why are there not one but TWO races that are mainly characterized as being evil (and the characterization is not even subverted in-story)?

Ooof. Stephenson is among my favorite authors. Before Seveneves that wouldn't have had a qualifier. I re-read Cryptonomicon every year or two, the baroque cycle about half that frequently, and Anathem a couple times now. I own Snow Crash and The Diamond Age in first editions. I cannot imagine re-reading Seveneves; it was both not a totally flawed plot (a quality I can ordinarily forgive in a Stephenson novel -- I love a good yarn) and it killed everyone I know and love, in an immediate near future sense, on the page in front of me.

It was, for lack of a better description, a callous novel.

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