I remember when a character started rambling paragraphs about Van Eck Phreaking in Cryptonomicon, it was immediately obvious that this would become a plot device later in the book.
Cryptonomicon did such a wonderful job of capturing a certain something from the 1990ies. I haven't enjoyed his more recent books as much. Seveneves was depressing. Dodge had really bad reviews and I haven't bothered with it.
(if you're familiar at all with TVTropes, the latter is the difference between the concept of a Trope Maker and a Trope Codifier)
I guess it's possible? I certainly hadn't heard of Habitat in 01992, or indeed until after I met Chip, and the correspondence with the Hindu concept is quite arresting. But then again, I never had a Commodore 64, and Neal Stephenson always loves to be plugged into everything that's trendy. Farmer and Morningstar gave a paper http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html at The First International Conference on Cyberspace in 01990, which seems like the kind of thing you would maybe go to if you were writing a novel like Snow Crash in 01990. But they say Habitat (or rather Club Caribe) only had 15000 users at the time.
> (if you're familiar at all with TVTropes,
I love TVTropes! If we're talking about the cyberspace avatar trope rather than the use of the word "avatar" for it, you could maybe trace that back to Vinge's 01981 True Names, as mentioned in the talk I linked above.
I wasn’t a fan of Quicksilver, but as that was the first historical novel I’ve listened to, and as it was award winning, I assume it must be more about my tastes than the quality of the writing?
I liked Quicksilver, but could easily see how it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Why do they need to generate artificial Y chromosomes when there is a whole bunch of perfectly good ones in the last man alive who just died with them; and thousands upon thousands in the scattered genetic material in the frozen tin cans floating about in various orbits between earth and the shattered moon? And why does that have to lead to essentially speciation of the survivors?
Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I didn’t perceive the description as true speciation, more like socially defined racial groups.
I almost dropped Dodge 1/4 of the way in due to it being to dull. I thought Stephenson had lost his edge. Stuck through it, and loved it! It tackles a collection of related issues that are relevant today, and I think will continue to become more so in the near future, especially for the HN crowd. Ie his concepts of a post-truth-future, cultures emerging and isolating using controlled access to information etc. Speculative neuroscience too, ie how the brain constructs a cohesive model of the world.
Dodge seems to be the most polarizing Stephenson book.
Dodge in hell was more micro level depressing, he starts of by killing one of the main characters from a previous book after all. But I found it enjoyable over all. I think he managed to convey what he wanted with the book, and unlike Seveneves it was a quite fun read.
I don't recall it actually being a plot device though. It effectively just served to drive Waterhouse's panic that someone was watching him, but then it sort of fizzles out. Unless I missed some implied detail, nobody actually ever used it to spy on him.
IIRC the protagonists actually do use Van Eck phreaking later in the novel to read out what's on their adversary's laptop screen from the next hotel room over.
IIRC it's not an adversary but their fiend with whom they have a bet about whether Van Eck Phreaking works or not ;)
Also, Van Eck Phreaking's use by their adversaries is implied when Randy's in jail and working on his laptop decrypting the coordinates of the gold stash, again IIRC.
Yes, Randy avoids reading out the coordinates by monitor to keep them safe from Van Eck phreaking.
VVEP ur chgf snxr pbbeqvangrf ba uvf fperra naq trgf vzzrqvngryl eryrnfrq, naq gur fhfcrpgrq bccbarag tbrf gb gur snxr pbbeqvangrf
https://lost-contact.mit.edu/afs/adrake.org/usr/rkh/Books/bo...
It actually drives the climatic finale where Waterhouse performs an "epic hack" while in jail, modifying the linux kernel on his laptop to output the results of his cracking the encryption on the location of a cave full of gold as morse code in the form of his caps lock light going on and off. He also makes sure to write the code that will make these changes via hitting his space bar, which is translated to characters based on the amount of times he hits it, so that again the code to do the calculations is never exposed on screen. The only reason he is so careful about never exposing both the changes he is making to his laptop's code as well as the results of the calculations it runs is because Enoch Root visits him while he is in jail and basically warns him that people will be using Van Eck Phreaking to spy on the contents of his display.
So really, it is actually one of the most crucially import bits of technology in the whole book.