Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age | Hacker News Reader

Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age

theatlantic.com

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The Diamond age was my favorite Stephenson novel, but I'd like to highlight a personal favorite Neal Stephenson premonition, the extent of which is not fully realized, but seems likely. This one (circa 2019) is less ambitious, and less well-known: There are parts of Fall, or Dodge in Hell that describe a phenomenon called apes. These are bots, generally chatbots and similar. Commanded by state and non-state actor, they dominate the internet, and can be used to manipulate public opinion, or what people think they know in general.

More generally, he discusses the creation of a post truth world, describing a brief period in history between the scientific revolution, and now, where people could agree on a cohesive world view. In the novel, the internet has now ended this; everyone is siloed into their own information bubbles, and can't agree on a common reality. Look up "MOAB" or "apes" in conjunction with this book for more information. I should note that these are some of the smaller ideas in that book...

The real-world parts of Fall were great, but the tedious simulation stuff ruined the book for me.

As with all science fiction, his "predictions of the future" are actually sharp observations of current reality. He's not gazing into a crystal ball, he's just seeing the present from a different angle.

Agree. I enjoyed it significantly less than his other works for the same reason.

It was an interesting exploration of some ideas, but the “in simulation” arcs tended to have an absurdly slow pace, which may have been deliberate attempt to help show the passage of time between the “real world” parts.

I found the real-world parts a bore, and his re-creation of existence quite diverting. When I recommend the book, it's always with admonition to "skip the tedium, it goes on forever".

Well, I did like "real world" parts that describe the practical basis for how the fantasy realm was manifest, but the life and times the present day characters was of no use to me. I didn't care a whit about the conspiracy theories, the post-US factions, any of that stuff.

After reading Fall, playing Minecraft Skyblock or Luckyblock feels kind of amazing...

Exactly. It's like how younger people read Snow Crash and think it was prophetic, but that's because they don't know that multiplayer RPGs called MUDs existed when he wrote it in 1992.

I think the internet will eventually die for this reason...

Am I reading an honest comment from a stranger or from a Neal Stephenson advertising bot?

Eventually it will be just all bots, and very little desire for real humans to interact.

I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but isolated - online communities, like back in the BBS days, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's mainly social media which will be (or rather: already is) overrun by bots, but social media (or even the web) isn't "the internet".

Neal Stephenson's Anathem (2008):

> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”

> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

So, the fantastical plot argument is that one can insert a singular hard-to-verify subtle error among a see of factually correct statements? That's not novel, it is a fact on about any decently sized compendium, \that there will be a typo, an out of date fact or error. That's supposed to be scary?

One of the underlying assumption behind these sci-fi ideas is that people believe weird things because of carefully constructed misleading chain of reasoning, when in fact they simply believe in things that are convenient to support their general world view. Climate denial, for example, is not about carefully planted false evidences, it is about adhering to a view point that avoids forcing you to reconsider your lifestyle.

Have you been paying attention to the proliferation of AI / LLM generated content on the web?

Things are about to get dark unless we have new methods for combating it. It has seemed like Google has been on a slow and steady decline, losing this battle with spammers. This takes it to a whole new level.

they're not losing the battle, theyre increasing the stock price.

ultimately that number has to go up, and inevitably it will lead to bad behavior w/r/t SEO

They are creating a context for why, (in a fututistic society with computers) that access to the internet and digital archives is largely only done by one group of people (Ita) because no one else has the experience or tool to sift through 100's of years of algorithmically produced junk.

> Climate denial, for example, is not about carefully planted false evidences

The mountain of carefully planted false evidence sure ain't helping things though.

>I guess we'll just move back into small, trusted - but isolated

Until some member gets pissed and DDOSes you off the net and you can no longer afford the operational costs and/or the costs of keeping your platform up to date and secure are prohibitive.

The internet is going to turn into its own dark forest. IF your 'social' group wants to stay alive it will have to hide from the mega predators and the second you attract attention expect to be prey.

I think the responses that something either will die or revert back to some simile of the good old days is a very human response that stems from the fact that in reality, it will mutate in forms that we can't really predict.

Or perhaps some visionaries can predict somewhat, but we can't really parse which of these predictions will be the one to pan out.

My social group has already done this to a fair -- and growing -- extent. There appears to be no other real alternative.

Why would I not want to communicate with people I personally know over the Internet anymore, or with people they can introduce me to?

It's "just" going to require better digital identities and authentication, whether for real names (for interacting with banks and governments) or context-dependent pseudonyms.

"Just"

So, you'll only talk to people you know, probably in your country, facilitated by a government ID. How long before that turns into "you can only communicate using your government ID over the internet".

Who manages these context-dependent pseudonyms and what motivations do they have. Pretty much in any commercially operated publicly traded company this seems to turn into "allow spammers on the network in some forms to increase engagement".

This is known as the Dead Internet Theory -- that it's mostly bots talking to bots, as online ad revenue is ultimately driven by views and clicks, and there is a strong incentive to "shape consensus" via marketing and propaganda bot accounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

As bots start to proliferate, people will engage less, or take up digital residence in spheres that seem (emphasis on 'seem') less impacted by these trends.

Example: I stopped looking for things on Amazon, and look on other sites first, then check if Amazon has the identical item -- too many "sponsored ads" and marketplace garbage. And I am weary if it's not "sold by Amazon". If I could I'd stop using Amazon entirely, but for now it's still adequate. Similar idea with a lot of Reddit communities -- at this point I've shaved down all of the front page ones and mostly stick to niche subs.

For an earlier iteration of the same concept, see 'bogons' in Anathem (2008 (!))

I dunno. His books are so long that anyone can find something to infer as predictive or prescient. It's like confirmation bias. Does any sci fi writer who incorporates human-like intelligence robots into their novels predict GPT? I say not

They're long but it's not like they're not just spewing random ideas out the whole length like a Nostradamus where you shoot enough shots you'll eventually get something that can be interpreted to be prescient.

I take issue with the assertion that there was a period where all people could agree on a world view. Most of the 20th century was defined by sharp disagreement between world views and all of their constituent parts. Perhaps if you limit the scope to all citizens of a nation then the statement would be more truthful but there are large disagreements there as well.

One thing I liked about reading "The Three Body Problem" was the unique (to Westerners) worldview it portrayed, and the difficulties of academic science in China under the Mao regime - very different from the worldview in post WWII America.

The “ameristan” portion of Fall is one of my favorite William Gibson novels.

> everyone is siloed into their own information bubbles, and can't agree on a common reality

It has already happened. I was born in USSR and live in Russia, and when I hear or read anything about USSR or Russia in Western media, it makes my hair stand on end.

But if I try to explain what it was really like or what it is like now, I only get insults in response: "Putin bot", "Kremlin shill", "as dumb as Trump's followers", etc. So I gave up and stop trying.

But it's clear that there're several "versions" of the reality, some of them are very far from "real" reality. And the divide will become only deeper. I also notice that comments on social networks and youtube became so weaponized that I simply cannot read them and stopped trying. I actively avoid reading any comments on any website with only 3 or 4 exceptions (like HN).

Would like to hear your take on the discrepancies in perception, if you are willing to put yourself out there again.

I no longer see the point. It is difficult to explain. After many internet and real life discussions I made a single conclusion: intensive propaganda creates an impenetrable partition in minds. And we live in times of the most intensive propaganda ever. You can't hide from it anywhere. If you open video about cats on YouTube, open comments section, you'll read something like: "Cute cats, but did you know that every morning Putin eats kitten for breakfast?" (I exaggerate, but only a little). Even when I read contemporary science fiction, there's always some piece of current propaganda like if it is obligatory in order to be published.

It is difficult to gather and analyze facts and present them in easy to understand fashion. Some things are really difficult to explain, especially historical and cultural things. You waste lots of time and energy to research and to present facts in support of your point of view. But time is not limitless, I have work to do and life to live. Also, amount of facts is limitless. You can always fight one set of facts against another, with carefully constructed set of arguments you can prove almost anything. It's not math, where it's kind of possible to prove or debunk any theory without a doubt. Real life if more complex, and real life is not entirely rational or logical.

Also, it's like fighting with windmills in Don Quixote. I know, we all know, that all governments finance paid commenters. E.g. several months ago there was a leak that Washington finance troll factories managed by Russian "opposition". First they tried to deny it, but then had to admit that it is true.

And it was only one leak about one trolls factory. So here I am trying to write a few comments for free in my precious free time, while there're powerful organizations employing hundreds of paid commenters with salaries and KPI and clear guidelines on what to write. How can I fight alone against huge and well paid apparatus of propaganda and commenters employing millions of people to put everywhere version of truth contradicting to mine and to put me and my country in extremely bad light? It's a futile battle, and I give up on it.

When it comes to hair standing on end, you are contributing to the problem.

Looking at your history, I found your claim from three months ago, that the Baltic States, cite:

Since becoming "independent" they're only degrading with ever-increasing speed.

First, they are really independent countries. No need for scare quotes. Of course that small countries in general can't act with the same sort of impunity like big countries, but compared to their previous subordinated status as parts of the USSR, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now independent countries with their own power structure and laws.

Seconds, the "degradation" claim is bullshit. I have visited all those countries several times since the 1990s and the general improvement of living standards from the depressing Soviet shabbiness to where they are today is nothing short of miraculous. The Baltics, together with Poland, belong to a set of countries that took to modern social market economy like ducklings to water.

The only thing that doesn't go up in the Baltics is demography, but, literally, all the nearby regions of Russia (Kaliningrad, Pskov, StPetersburg, Karelia) are much worse off when it comes to fertility. Doctor, heal thyself.

> I actively avoid reading any comments on any website with only 3 or 4 exceptions (like HN).

Son if you don't think HN isn't full of shill-bots then I've got a bridge to sell you. Hell, that's half the point: y-combinator isn't paying for this because they love discussion.

The problem with posts like the one above is that these exact "i'm exhausted" posts are known to bots, too, and could be manufactured with reasonably good verisimilitude; easily done pre-GPT-3. So are you just exhausted by the spam, or is this just another facet of the Russian Propaganda Firehose?

Scroll through this account's history. It is clearly posting Russian propaganda interspersed with just enough "curious conversation" to pass dang's surface-level scans.

Once again, proof that you can post literally anything you like on HN as long as it appears to fit the zeitgeist. HN is all about performative adherence to the image that HN staff want to cultivate.

I read this book about 5 years ago. I remember thinking, just like with global warming, "wow this is terrifying, glad I'll be dead by then". Oh if only.

I think about MOAB nearly every single day. And I cherish every, single, day. Because horrors await us, very soon.

Not sure how long ago you read it, but I'm just now remembering the interludes where they start to contrast society that has split around MOAB belief. Prescient indeed.

The way things have gone so far really does make it hard to be optimistic about the future, particularly when it comes to the internet.

I mean, yeah, but the "post truth world" was a thing sometime within the G.W. Bush administration, and Stephen Colbert coined the word "truthiness" in 2005, so calling it a "premonition" by Stephenson is a bit of a stretch.

Not to mention social media manipulation by bots in the 2016 US presidential race...

Stephenson covered similar ideas as far back as Snow Crash, in 1992. The "burb-claves" and how everyone ultimately paid to live in their own socio-economic bubble, complete with ethics and housing. literal walled gardens and group-think bubbles.

Stephenson expanded on that in Diamond Age in '96

I think the framing around these sorts of discussions always annoys me because few sci-fi books (and certainly no Neil Stephenson books) are primarily written as predictions. They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else.

Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes. Fantastically fun in my opinion! But that motivates all kinds of choices (making the Internet a literal place with a street grid and real estate, where people can get chopped up by swords) that real XR tech has no particular technical use for. And I would implore any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration to consider how absurd it would be to take all the world's most sophisticated technology and dedicate it to gratifying personal power fantasies. It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza, and just gets more gloriously ridiculous from there. The main character is named "Hero Protagonist". The main antagonist has a nuke strapped to his motorcycle. Take a hint!

Anyway, I am happy Diamond Age gets a call-out because it is by far my favorite of Stephenson's novels. And I think the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer is one of the all-time most interesting technological plot contrivances (the Imago machine, game/civilization of Azad, and Shrike all providing strong competition). But the technical constraints/capabilities of the Primer have almost nothing to do with realistic limitations/advantages of AI technology, and everything to do with getting the right characters into the right places at the right times. We need a Miranda to provide the Primer's voice so that Nell can have some kind of human connection in the end, and we need Miranda to be paid anonymously so that Nell won't get that human connection too soon. The Primer is a language model not a robot so that Nell will have to solve problems on her own. Yet she can learn Kung Fu from a language model because we need a few action scenes. I think really the interesting question posed is "Can a person grow up to be influential given no resources except a perfect education?" not so much "Can a language model provide a perfect education?". Many characters in Diamond Age seem to agree with the former notion, but in the end it (SPOILER) gets shot down when Nell needs control of an literal army to come out on top.

Yeah, I'm annoyed by writers equating "any computer that speaks like a real person" to "predicting ChatGPT". My four year old wanted a robot to clean up her LEGOs. Did she predict iRobot/Roomba?

I would be more impressed by a scenario where, e.g., a writer predicts email, and then the side effects that (1) you have to have an email to create accounts for things, and (2) mail is constantly clogged by junk mail.

Reminds me of the joke: "I invented the laptop when I opened a book turned 90° at the age of four."

Written end-to-end electronic communications was obvious going back to at least the 70s (and arguably much longer). What was aruably a lot less obvious that email/chat would become almost ubiquitous and increasingly a prerequisite for fully participating in society. (Including on the go.)

Particularly when talking computers are an extremely common trope in scifi, and had been for at least three decades before Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age, as for that matter had primitive chatbots.

The aspects of the setup for the Primer I remember (handcrafted by an individual for a specific end, reliant on human voices for narration, far-future advanced technology all around) don't feel at all like "predicting ChatGPT" either.

> Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes.

I don't think that's "most" of the usage of the metaverse in Snow Crash. The entire point of the metaverse in Snow Crash is to deal with the hubris of thinking that one protocol standard to rule them all could last and provide for the opportunity for a Tower of Babel-like fall of civilization as protocol wars break down an overly centralized metaverse. All of the cool stuff is just to show how high the Tower got built before it crumbled and fell.

I think any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration are probably missing the "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" message of the direct ending of the book.

> Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes.

That's an interesting take. Personally, I thought those parts were the least interesting, and the larger social commentary was the most. As always, everyone takes something different from compelling fiction.

I've never viewed Snow Crash (or The Diamond Age) as predictions of the future though. They both seem to be commentary squarely about the present to me.

Yah "mostly" might have been a bit strong on my part. I think Neil Stevenson is capable of both expressing interesting ideas and shoehorning in great excuses for action set pieces at the same time. Certainly any good science fiction can inspire different interpretations by different people!

The ideas in both Snow Crash and Diamond Age are wonderful, worthy of considerable investment, but Stephenson's writing is harmed by his inclusion of pandering to a lowest common denominator of reader: already mentioned is the character's name being "Hero Protagonist", in addition he goes into a bit too much lurid detail during a main character rape with pretty demeaning sexual name, and the climax of Snow Crash is literally a description of the abstract visual effects one would see if Snow Crash were a VFX heavy feature film. Diamond Age is more mature, but the Primer has 'super book' capabilities closer to the Matrix Download of Knowledge to enable more excitement in his narrative. Great ideas, but a bit too comic book in execution.

I always thought both of those books would make excellent graphic novel or anime adaptations.

Beyond what you have pointed out, this list of tropes helps remind us of how weak some of the characters were as well as details that seemed unnecessary or out-of-placec.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/SnowCrash

Just a nitpick - The main character in Snow Crash is named Hiro, not Hero.

It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza

The opening chapter takes on a whole different meaning when you consider it as a heavily embellished self-narrative by a guy who lives in a storage unit and doesn't really have a career and doesn't have any prospects, delivering pizzas for a massive chain in difficult to navigate suburban sprawl and how he fucks up his job while sticking his neck out for his employer. He's driving a noisy, used and abused, yet tricked out, vehicle in risky situations, and they give him the cheapest, lamest weapon they can to defend himself, seemingly some kind of taser that charges in the cigarette lighter. So he feels more comfortable and empowered carrying swords. He calls himself The Deliverator, a member of an elite order; this is him telling himself "I am somebody".

The opening chapter isn't necessarily about all the high tech things of this dystopian future. It's the grandiose story a normal, struggling guy tells himself to feel more important and cooler than he actually is. Everyone considers themselves to be the hero protagonist of their own story, and Hiro (assuming that's his real name and not the name he's given his persona he created to deal with his station in life) is no exception.

There's definitely some near-future sci-fi technology/situations in the story such as Reason, the ratthings, Ng's deal, most of YT's accoutrements, the nuclear warhead sidecar. But even today, things like the metaverse, the Librarian and Earth, are increasingly becoming more mundane than futuristic. But they'll get described with more flourish and flowery language than is actually warranted.

I haven't thought too much about Hiro potentially being an unreliable narrator, and it definitely puts a different spin on things! In that case I certainly think the specific design of the technologies in Snow Crash is motivated by that narrative need to make Hiro's mundane life into something exciting, rather than the literally mundane motivations behind technology in the real world. Assuming anyway that we aren't careening into a future were all technology is driven primarily by hype... that's a scary thought.

I agree, I don't think the purpose of sci-fi is to predict the future. The future is just impossible to predict due to the myriad factors, variables, unknown unknowns, and second-order+ degree effects an action can have.

The purpose of sci-fi IMO is moreso to:

1. Provide an entertaining story/narrative with technology as the main focus of the world and characters' actions

2. Define a set of concepts to help you think about technology and its possible effects on humans and the world

3. Nudge people to think about what kind of future they would want or not want and how they can use or control technology to achieve that

Here's Ken Liu talking about the purpose of sci-fi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5knkpmxXu-k

I do think predictions are an unavoidable side-effect of writing science fiction, but those predictions are almost always in service to those purposes you listed. Stephenson must think nanotech book AI is more plausible as a form idealized childhood education than say, magic fairies. But in the end he relies on our suspension of disbelief to get on past that to the big questions of nurture vs nature and the quality of human intelligence.

> They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else.

Greg Egan’s stories are almost completely the opposite, with characters and plot only there to explore the science and technology.

Yah I was thinking of Diaspora a bit when I included the word "few" lol. Although even in that case Egan is willing to hand-wave away technology in one place if it is the most narratively convenient way to move the story around to some other technological or philisophical conundrum he's after in particular (like how the computer technology of a Polis is basically just magic) or if it makes the story more accessible to a human audience (like how the "gestalt" sense is usually written as straightforward human-style vision even if it is ostensibly some distant derivative there of). If we do start uploading our brains into computers I don't think I'm going to give Greg Egan credit for "predicting" it, but he did take good advantage of that trope to explore some really cool ideas.

IML the point of sci-fi is to ask interesting questions. Very rarely is that question "what is the absolutly most plausible thing that could happen next century?”.

Diaspora was a bit of a grab bag, he re-used elements from some of his short stories including basically the whole of “The Planck Dive” and “Wang’s Carpets”. But the main theme, as far as I can tell, was how far can you change a persons mind and still have them be the ‘same’ person.

I have yet to come across an SF novel that is as fun as the first 2/3 of Snow Crash. Recommendations?

In terms of well-written fun I would rank "Murderbot Diaries" very highly, alongside any of the John Scalzi books I've read. For similar levels of ridiculous (and trying-not-to-be-but-kinda-still sexist) look no further than "Off to Be the Wizard". That one is best if you recruit a few programmer buddies to also read it, so you can all compare each other's resulting self-insert fan fiction. I'll also occasionally reread the "Synchronicity Wars" series if I'm feeling ill and want something sorta kooky.

I'll probably get roasted for this, but-

After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age, etc), intending to power through them. I am a pretty avid reader when I am in the mood and enjoy fiction including sci-fi, fantasy, *punk, etc. I couldn't get through Snow Crash. It didn't feel like a finished book to me. If I remember correctly it seemed like things like river names had placeholders and even saw some errors in the text. What am I missing?

They are not for the faint of heart. :)

But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.

If you don’t like Snow Crash, you probably just won’t like Stephenson. If you don’t like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, you definitely shouldn’t bother with the rest of his works. You’ve tried him fairly; he’s just not for you.

I didn't like either of them very much, but I've really enjoyed other books of his.

- The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

- Seveneves

- Cryptonomicon

- Anathem

- Reamde

- Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Although the metaworld parts in that get a little tiresome)

Yeah honestly he just keeps getting better IMO. Seveneves in particular gives me chills just thinking about -- so dark at points.

Likewise, I think the Blue Ant books are Gibson's best work, though I have a strong attachment to Mona Lisa Overdrive just because of where I was in life when I first read it.

Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy everything Gibson has written, but Pattern Recognition is by far my favorite.

It's wonderful! He gets the timbre of early 2000s forum culture exactly right.

Loved Seveneves and Fall, in particular the little slice of Ameristan in the Fall, but I feel like in both cases they are great books with a mediocre book attached to the end.

Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...

> Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...

And was probably the most prophetic of all his work, to be honest Snowcrash was total satire, and fan-service: it was much like the Crypto-anarchist Sloath short-story he wrote (THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER) it was meant to appeal to a a certain audience and really no one else. It was widely distributed (it was in TIME back when that was a big deal in the 90s at the peak of Silicon valley's foray with Crypto Anarchy) but ultimately targeted content to a specific demographic, which would illicit a certain response. Few if any every bring this up when discussing NS' bibliography.

Its like Solar Opposites is a riff of Rick and Morty where the Rick character is put in a different universe and rides that story-line as far as it can before it gets tiresome but has a b-plot to carry it through for the audience to make it an entire season.

And while Snowcrash was... mediocre (in my opinion) things like Sushi-K rapping or the hi-jinks of Uncle Enzo's Pizza delivery business are exactly the kind of hokey material one would expect from such subject matter that would land for said demographic. Is it a good representation of the Cyberpunk genre, as a fan, absolutely not.

Also wasn't Amazon supposed to make a series about Snowcrash and has been 'in the works' [0] for like 7 years now? They canceled The Peripheral which was kind of a rip-off Snowcrash and that had good reviews, I can't imagine they'd really try to try to flesh-out the Metaverse when 85% of Snowcrash is just filler with an incredibly bad ending.

Hell, Amazon canceled The Expanse despite having a ton of more original content and being quite the cash cow, the books still sell incredibly well and the fans are die hard, many of them signed up for Amazon specifically for the last seasons and canceled when it was over.

Personally, I think with costly shows like GT getting the axe and Clacrkson's Farm (something I enjoy more) being what is left from the trio it shows that Amazon doesn't have the wear-withal to see such immense things through in my opinion so we may never see Hiro or YT on screen.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383994/amazon-streaming...

And it has the several page digression about the best way to eat captain crunch where one of the characters has just gotten out of jail and is thinking about inventing a spoon to deliver milk perfectly to the cereal!

Good book, but Neal would benefit from a stronger editor.

Some people think those are the best bits of his books!

Yeah, agree. If you take away all of his digressions, how much would be left.

Everyone hating on the digressions.

But you can't just have a few pages of plot points and call it a book.

in the future our personal editors will create our own editions of these books. mine will have an even longer captain crunch section and yours will be abbreviated

Seveneves is probably my favorite book, ever. I have the audio book and I'll probably listen to it for a 3rd time here soon.

I stopped reading Seveneves after we zoom forward to the future and stuff got weird, a bit too weird for my suspension of disbelief. Does it get back to more hard sci-fi stuff or remain as something which, to me, felt more like a sci-fantasy hybrid?

Oddly enough I love books like Dune, but the dramatic change in Seveneves was just too jarring for me to continue enjoying it.

I would argue the sci-fi indeed gets so hard, that it becomes soft again by nature. The technology falls away from the focus, as it should, but it is still very much there.

I think it's pretty clear from the comments here that there are those of us who just can't really buy the jump-cut and there are those who can.

I was listening to it on audio book and after the "5000 years later" I paused it and didn't pick it back up for a long while. Slogged through the rest. Won't read/listen to it again. The ending was ok. This was my first Stephenson book. Not going to do more.

I think Seveneves would have worked better for me had the jump cut been a significantly shorter period of time, had there been a shorter more hand-wavy epilogue that didn't get into all the detail, and (frankly) had it thrown out a lot of the last part of the novel. But I'm not Neal Stephenson either.

Loved Seveneves, but it is one of the best examples of his not having an ending.

I love the world building of the 2nd half, and would argue it doesn't need a clear ending. Your imagination gets to fill in the blanks.

While some other of his books do not have the most satisfying endings, Seveneves was the only one where it seemed like he simply gave up trying when writing the last 5%. Compared to the previous sections, the end just seemed like it had no effort put into it. Everything after the death of the doc just seemed abrupt and clumsy. It seemed jarring compared to how much care he seemed to put into the detail of the earlier passages.

I hear people say that a lot but I don't get it. I experienced it as a hopeless, depressing slog, where things just got worse and worse. But fortunately I wasn't attached to the characters so it wasn't so bad watching them all suffer.

I agree with you, you are not alone. Seveneves had some great ideas, but he spent way too much time on the science and put almost nothing into character development. The characters were so flat, the interactions and motivations were lacking, and ultimately I just didn't care about any of them. I can't recall a single character from Seveneves but while I can't remember all their names I very much do remember the characters from Snow Crash.

I think that is quite innacurate. He wrote Snow Crash in 1992, if you compare it to Diamond age in 1995 or later stuff like Anathem or Cryptonomicon its pretty obvious his writing changed (in my opinion improved) quite a lot over the years.

Snow Crash has similar themes to the other works, but its more raw, less polished and kinda less professional than the writing he did later on. Its definitely possible for someone to not really get on with his early stuff, but really like his later stuff (or even vice-versa if you enjoy the less polished style).

He wrote The Big U in 1984 and that's a super fun, approachable, readable book. He also hates it.

I didn't find Snow Crash to be particularly inspiring but The Diamond Age is absolutely where he peaked for me. After that there's just too much fart-sniffing.

Stephenson's work has a lot of ideas worth wrestling with but as far as crafting a narrative he's weak and fans of his use the former to cover for the latter.

That's interesting. I haven't read The Big U, I should pick it up.

For me my enjoyment of his books is pretty close to inversely proportional to the amount of weird sex stuff he puts in them. Anathem has none, and I think its one of his best, Snow Crash goes pretty hard, Diamond Age is mostly good but then the end of the book is randomly a weird sex-powered computer thing.

The Big U has it’s faults; but is still an insightful look at the weird people and organizations within any large university.

> After that there's just too much fart-sniffing.

If I'm correctly identifying what you consider "fart-sniffing" in his works, then often those farts are my most favorite bits. The little digressions, the impromptu lessons, the D-plots - love 'em.

I'd rate The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon as his peak -- the mid-to-late 90s.

Does he hate it? The last thing I saw him say about the Big U was that he tends to omit it from his bibliography because it's not what his readers are looking for. Personally, I read him in chronological order and enjoyed both the Big U and Zodiac -- if nothing else, it was fun to watch him grow (and not) as an author.

As he put it: "The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."

It was out of print for a long time and he sort of had to be convinced to make the book available to read again after large demand.

I'd also say it's inaccurate, but mainly because of the wildly different preferences everyone has about which of his books to prefer.

For me, Snow Crash was great fun (though also seemed a bit too similar to William Gibson's Neuromancer), Cryptonomicon was an excellent historical novel with some weird "present day" scenes including an ending that made no sense, I couldn't get into Diamond Age, I hated Quicksilver, and Seveneves seemed to be two excellent books written in the same universe by completely different authors who only talked to each about the project for about five minutes.

Snow Crash is parodying cyberpunk (I think). Hence the strong Neuromancer vibes, it's intentionally derivative.

Cryptonomicon is my personal high point. The Baroque Cycle had set pieces just as good as those in Cryptonomicon, but there were too many characters for me to hold in my head.

I agree; everything he wrote post Diamond Age and everything he wrote pre Diamond Age are very different, with Diamand Age and Cryptonomicon being transitional. I read Cryptonomicon once with no plans to complete it. I didn't finish Anathem nor Quicksilver. Diamond Age was peak Stephenson for me, and I enjoyed all of his previous books (including The Big U).

[edit]

I didn't read anything Stephenson wrote post Quicksilver since everybody assured me that they were more of the "new" Stephenson than old. However, I see enough people in the comment threads panning README that I might give it a try.

Anathem has his best ending to date, so it actually pays off its early slog.

I thought Snow Crash was OK, Diamond Age was brilliant, Cryptonomicon was... holy fuck, did we need 1150 pages to tell this story? The subsequent books seemed to be of a similar page count, and I decided I had enough of Neal Stephenson.

It's all about the reader's preference, but if you don't enjoy either of those books, I'd argue (as I did) that you've given the man a fair chance. Likewise, if you don't like Small Gods, you probably won't like Terry Pratchett. I love Sir Terry, we were graced to have him while we did, but I'll stand by that.

There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different from other works.

The Baroque Cycle books and Seveneves are my favourite of his, after that my enjoyment drops of pretty quick. Anathem is good once it finally gets going.

I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff happens I'm less interested

Eh, everyone likes different NS books (just look at all the replies).

I like Snow Crash and love Cryptonomicon, and I couldn't go past the first volume of the Baroque Cycle.

The first volume can be a long slog as it takes a huge amount of time to get moving in any plot-like fashion and feels very dry until you get to Jack Shaftoe's introduction. My opinion at least.

I found the audiobook of Quicksilver much easier to consume than the paper book - so much so that I've listened to the entire Baroque Cycle a few times now.

I strongly disagree about Snow Crash. I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk. Relatively cool plot but the style just wasn't for me.

However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for in a sci-fi book, and I Anathem had amazing world building. I can't speak for Diamond Age, but based on the four books I've read (Termination Shock being the other), I thought Snow Crash was wildly different from the rest.

I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk.

I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.

Underlined rather emphatically in The Diamond Age by the literal murder of the clichéd cyberpunk character right out of the gates. Quite an unambiguous statement about What Will Not Be Happening In This Book From Now On.

That's probably the key part. If someone goes in expecting earnest sci-fi like Neuromancer and the satire part doesn't click early on, they're likely to be disappointed. (That being said, IMHO there are some aspects of Snow Crash that come off as low-effort, independent of the satire.)

> However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for in a sci-fi book

Serious question: what did you think of the ending and plot closure?

To me, the first 2/3 of Seveneves was a good thriller, followed by and then a miracle happpened, followed by probably the book Stephenson wanted to write.

This to me feels like most of his plots.

For me, the ending was a little rushed, but fine. It tied up at least some of the plot elements from the first part. Yes, it was like two separate books, as if Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer was mashed together with the TV version of Asimov's Foundation, but both parts were pretty good.

I feel the same way. I’ve had a few false starts with Snow Crash, each time powering through about half despite my love of the imagery and the coolness. But have easily read Seveneves 2-3 times, with the last time somewhat skimming the third part, which isn’t as good as the rest.

> I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk.

I believe that was fully intentional.

The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist. He's definitely leaning into it.

Yeah totally! Just not my preference.

Snow Crash was one of the archetypical cypherpunk stories, which was a trend that often mocked if not outright took a piss over cyberpunk.

I find it a lot like a variation of "the cyberpunk dystopia arrived but not as cool as we imagined", but not as boring as what actually happens.

I don't agree with that - I pretty much love everything from Cryptonomicon onwards (apart from REAMDE) and I'm not keen on Snow Crash or The Diamond Age.

Edit: I even really like "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"

I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much, found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.

His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.

I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age. I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.

Novels are art and all art is subjective. Stephenson's earlier work I liked but I had to push myself thru Cryptonomicon. I don't force myself through something anymore, if a few chapters in I'm not compelled naturally to pick it up and read it, I move on.

As I've gotten older I just ignore some content based on topic, genre, etc. entirely since I'm either tired of it or have found I don't enjoy it. Anything super hero related is definitely in that bucket, so are all comics/cartoons, just don't enjoy them to spend my free time on them.

My first and only exposure to Stephenson was Seveneves.

I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in his novels buries the story and any character development in a mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical consistency is much higher than for those who are more neurotypical.

Man, and I thought 'Seveneves' was a quick one, fast moving.

Should I see a doctor?

I honestly didn't realize others saw it that way. Now I'm worried.

Lol, if you like Stephenson, you might need help.

Pages and pages treatises about orbital mechanics, PhD dissertation on how space station docking works. Seveneves fast paced? yeah, no.

To me, 'Seveneves' took longer than usual to world build and get things going. Once it got going after 'the event', things moved along as a pretty good clip. Don't know if he has any plans to revisit that world but it would be interesting to explore things from after the time jump in more detail.

"The event" happens in the first sentence of the book.

I'm pretty sure OP is referring to either the ramifications of that event (the climax of part 1), or perhaps the end of part 1 which sets part 2 in motion (with a drastic change in focus).

I'm being deliberately vague in order to not reveal spoilers.

Autism, like most personality traits in the DSM, is only a problem if it affects your every day life in three spheres (e.g. work/relationships/hobbies). Otherwise you might just have the superpowers without the side-effects.

I couldn't finish Seveneves :)

In spite of reading and mostly liking everything else by Stephenson.

Edit: but then I couldn't enjoy Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series (I did get to the end) too much. Because half the book was a RPG system manual describing game mechanics.

Think that was my problem with Seveneves as well. It read like a 'how to build and run a space station' manual.

for years, every time I tried read Seveneves I got bored before I even found out what the plot was. There's something about the description of the ISS that I find tedious even by Stevenson standards

LOL. I read REAMDE on Kindle, so I didn't know its length. I thought it was a rollicking good time, and I recommended it to my wife for her book club. I assumed it was about 300 pages long. Turns out it's over 1000.

But it's a fast thousand pages.

I've always felt as though he's writing like someone excited to have researched something and wanting to tell people. It's not highbrow, more rollicking and as though you can imagine him grinning "this is so cool (for nerds)" while he's writing it out. My last exposure was Seveneves, and Reamde before that.

I think it’s a lot more charitable to say that it’s writing for engineers who get excited about ideas. Lots of the ideas aren’t particularly realistic or plausible. The point of the technical sections isn’t for suspension of disbelief, it’s just for the fun of digging into new topics and speculating on how you might use it to build something. I’d say it’s a cousin of Randall Munroe’s what if series.

I read Snow Crash as a young teenager and it inspired me in some way.

His books have a certain…tone…that you either like or don’t like. Personally, as much as I enjoy cyberpunk literature, I didn’t really enjoy Snow Crash. Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me.

> Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me.

Neal Stephenson is decidedly not a good prose stylist. But I guess he doesn't aim to be. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and "Anathem" are piles of really mediocre, ungainly sentences.

What he has are many interesting ideas and he is a fun conveyor of those ideas, for the most part. But he's not a Nabokov nor a Cormac McCarthy nor a Samuel Delany.

But we love him for he's "one of us". He wrote that excellent essay that placed a geek at the beginning of the Creation myth: "In the Beginning was the Command Line" https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

Stephenson is also the one said the words of caution that inspired many a young nerd to be active in the world and work hard and always remember that someone somewhere has to know exactly how keep the lights on and the water running:

> Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. _Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out._ (https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673)

Yeah, I guess I just prefer William Gibson's take when it comes to cyberpunk lit. It's just more...serious? Plausible? Less of a "nerd inside joke" activity.

I read half of Snow Crash and it felt like there was no plot that emerged? I dunno how to explain it. Half the book felt like a context-building prologue.

So, I look at the entire genre of cyberpunk as well as related genres as pulp sci-fi. It isn’t always “good” if we’re comparing to Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert, but there are often some entertaining ideas and interesting themes in them. I love Nosferatu, but I can still enjoy Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

Neuromancer is genre defining and defying. To categorise it as 'just' cyberpunk is a disservice. Pity about the rest of the Trilogy; the 'Go Set a Watchman' to Neuromancer's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' if you will. Heinlein I love, but to pretend he's not serialised pulp-fiction outside of maybe 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is fairly disingenuous.

I hated Snow Crash (it aged poorly), but loved REAMDE. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves were decent; Termination Shock got fun in the end; whereas The Rise and Fall of DODO was more interesting in the beginning. Not sure how I feel about Fall - there were certainly some good parts to it, especially in its parallels with Milton.

REAMDE was like reading a movie. Just great stuff. I enjoyed Snow Crash, but agree it had some unfinished-ness feelings to it. like a stronger editor could have shaped it a bit better.

I love Snow Crash. I was wearing my Black Sun night club (from snow crash) t-shirt to work today. That being said, it does feel like an early book. It is possibly over packed with ideas and possibly so edgy it feels like it is trying too hard.

What does a "Black Sun night club" t-shirt look like? I've had people (claiming to be US police) joke online about shooting anyone wearing a plate carrier with a black sun patch on it on sight.

I can't find it, but somewhere I read the sentiment that `Snow Crash` is best read by young men. I know I read it when I was in my early 20's and enjoyed it, have at most skimmed some amusing passages (like the bits from the perspective of the dog) since.

Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seven-Eves have a bit more staying power for me.

slight non-sequitor, but was anybody else disappointed with Termination Shock? The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?

FWIW, I really liked Termination Shock. Much more than Fall (I read them in that order). I had to kind of force myself to finish Fall.

>The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?

What does it mean if the fate of the world lies in the people that may not be arsed to actually give a shit until it's too late? I thought it was an interesting take.

I liked Termination Shock and I don't regret spending the time to read it in the slightest.

However, to me, compared to the Baroque Cycle and Anathem, my favorite works of his, Termination Shock was, how to describe it, non-memorable. Like a half-decent adventure movie, you enjoy seeing it but afterwards you go home thinking about what to make for dinner, and don't think about that movie anymore until someone or something makes you remember it again.

In contrast, the Baroque Cycle and Anathem were mindblowing. I spent ages thinking and daydreaming about the worlds he described in those books.

I wills say this: I enjoyed Termination Shock, but I felt it was the second-weakest of his novels after REAMDE (Not including co-authored ones like D.O.D.O) I still thought it was a great read overall, both for the story, the dive into cultures I wasn't familiar with, and the climate change story. TS was too... normal? of a novel, without some of the points that makes Stephenson's other novels shine in a league of their own.

I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.

I described his last books as a love letter to billionaires. All that is missing is a long, flowery, baroque dedication in the front to a wealthy patron, Bezos or currently more topical Marc Andreesen or Musk.

There may be a structural literary need for billionaires - to finance and start those big projects. But it's rather sad that a guy as creative as Stephenson doesn't seem creative enough to find alternatives.

Maybe there isn't an alternative, so he is writing about what is more likely.

Not what he might hope for in an ideal world.

"The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?"

I didn't have that takeaway.

I thought it was more just one group of elites versus other groups. And some of them happened to be monarchy.

I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics. At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.

Similarly, I wanted to love Stephenson. I even enjoy the intense technical details in a good sci-fi story (I'm talking to you Red Mars).

I started with Seveneves and could not finish it. After 20 pages I wanted to quit, but I stuck it out for another 150 pages before folding. The premise of the story was fantastic, but the writing was not enjoyable to me, and IMO, not very good.

Where Robinson and authors like Weir and Clarke weave the technical details into the story in a fascinating way and show understanding of the topic, I felt Stephenson was copy-pasting Wikipedia articles into the middle of a book. Furthermore, he treated the reader like an idiot - by the end I couldn't help but laugh painfully when he felt the need to explain to us for the 30th time that A+0.150 means 0 years and 150 days after the agent event.

His characters are vague and annoying. While Robinson's characters were similarly lacking in depth in Red Mars, at least they represented something bigger, were deliberately chosen, and served a storytelling purpose.

Here's an example I pulled out of Seveneves that made me cringe.

"In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no mass. Once Amalthea (a comet) had been attached, it was like a kite with a big rock strapped to it."

Weir would have pulled that line off easily as a slightly sarcastic, self-aware remark. I didn't get the impression that Stephenson meant it anything other than a serious statement.

Snow Crash is definitely overrated. I loved Cryptpnomicon, Baroque cycle, Anathem, REAMDE, Diamond Age

I feel similarly about Dune, not a big fan of the writing style but the ideas are so cool that I'm willing to "power through it" like you say

The format of a Neal Stephenson book is:

A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is nerding out about at the time he's writing the book that forms the world-building (The metaverse in Snow Crash, MMORPGs in REAMDE).

There will be random digressions about other things he's nerding out about that don't amount to enough to be a major feature of the world (volcanic glass knives in Snow Crash, tuck-pointing masonry in REAMDE) that he nonetheless works into the story.

Some plot happens in this world, followed by an ending of highly variable quality. He ties Snow Crash together fairly well, as I recall. REAMDE, I was less impressed by.

For context, I've read everything of his except the Baroque Cycle up to Seveneves. He's pretty consistent in sticking to this format.

In my opinion his best writing is In The Beginning Was The Command Line[0]. I particularly like the quote "I use eMacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor." It makes me smile despite the fact that I'm a vi person. It's also uncharacteristicly short for his work.

[0] https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sh...

I found REAMDE maybe his worst book that I've read. For one thing, it was one of those books where, if a lot of things don't line up just perfectly again and again, there's really no story.

I mostly liked Cryptonomicon and Anathem--but I probably wouldn't push a reader into the latter as an introduction.

Yeah, REAMDE was a weird mashing together of what if things were happening in WoW and IRL and it all was somehow about the global war on terror?

I concur that it's probably his worst novel that I've read. And that Anathem probably shouldn't be anyone's introduction to his work.

Anathem was my introduction and I feel that it has spoiled his other works for me.

Cryptonomicon was my introduction and none of his other works really compare, for me.. at least, it's the only one I've felt the desire to read again.

REAMDE's ending with those gun-preppers orgasming over the idea of finally getting an excuse for hunting human did it for me. Stephenson nerding out about that subculture is a thing I can't unsee, now it colors my perception of even his most liberal-leaning writings.

In a good or bad way? Like now you notice it more in other writings of his? There was a few pages like this in Snow Crash, and I remember breezing past it, but then re-reading it years later, could see the common thread.

But all in all. His take on that culture seems accurate. Not exaggerated that much for satire.

In a very bad way. I suspect that I'm really not doing him justice because he's probably not all too fond of any of the subcultures be portraits, but I can't completely shake off that change in perception.

Cryptonomicon and Anathem were what got me into Stephenson, and I loved both of those. Then I read Quicksilver and it held my attention, but I had a really hard time slogging through The Confusion and never made it to System of a World. On the other hand, Reamde was a fun story along the lines of something a popular spy fic author my write. Not high art, but easy and entertaining and something that could be easily adapted for the screen (like Snow Crash). In the Beginning... is, I believe, his best and most pure writing from a tech POV, but he's always been sort of the information technology version of what Michael Crichton is to biotech.

@mauvehaus, with your idiosyncratic spelling of emacs as "eMacs", you put Stephenson in a bad light. He knows how to spell. And edit.

As a vi guy, I trusted whatever my iPhone said was the canonical capitalization of emacs when it autocorrected it :-)

EDITED TO ADD: I just figured it out. My iPhone presumably thinks I'm taking about an obsolete Apple product. Doh. I'll let my error stand as a monument to not trusting everything a computer says.

I would also note that most of what we seem to be discussing is whether his writing is good or not. Spelling, I'll give him. The opinions on editing seem to be a little more divided.

Baroque Cycle is my favourite, worth giving it a shot. Dodo is such a strange book because the beginning and middle are amazing and the ending is terrible

All his endings are weak. He builds momentum and reaches a climactic moment, and then…fizzle.

I think the ending of Anathem is possibly one of his best; it’s an acknowledgment that it is the ending, it’s rather tender and sweet, and it fits the mood perfectly.

Yeah, I think of Anathem as so far the only Reverse Stephenson book. Most of his books have killer starts and then end in a didactic "meh". Anathem starts with an incredibly didactic "meh" but then delivers a killer end.

You should read the Baroque Cycle, then Cryptonomicon, then REAMDE, then Fall, Or Dodge in Hell. You can think of it as all one storyline, so the ending of each book is less critical.

I'd actually go with publication order myself...

Nice username!

It's what happens when you sign up for Slashdot while reading Cryptonomicon without doing any checks as to where the name actually comes from!

I tried reading the first of the Baroque Cycle like 5 times. Could never make it more than 1/4 through it before losing steam. Anathem was the worst for me though.

The Baroque Cycle made double-entry bookkeeping click for me, bizarre as that sounds. The whole cycle is a long, long read. But there are nuggets that make it well worth it.

Anathem really picks up after the first 400-500 pages.

I laughed. It's both true, and very not helpful. It's the equivalent of a fairly long not-so-great book before a pretty good book. Hard agree.

Also agreed, although I enjoyed some of the philosophical debate in the early portions of the book so I would put Anathem higher in books I enjoyed from Neal Stephenson

I am the rare Anathem reader who enjoyed the slow first part more than the active later parts. The initial world immersion was fascinating. The Big Event and subsequent faster paced developments were a lot less memorable. But I also enjoyed the instructional sections about whaling in Moby Dick.

personally, I found Anathem to be fun the whole way through, but Baroque Cycle has like only one enjoyable part at the end of book two

The first part of the book is super slow and boring, but it does get much better later on and what they setup is necessary for the story.

You Should not read fall under any circumstances.

Seriously: life is too short.

(I say this as a huge NS fan)

Cannot possibly agree more. It's an absolutely terrible book.

REAMDE was ok, except the sections about the MMO which frequently left me catatonic with cringe. In Fall, the whole book is that cringe.

If you like mythology and scifi, then you should absolutely read it

I really liked Fall, even before the Cryptonomicon tie-in.

It’s not high art, but I probably enjoyed it in my top 5 books of the year.

Different people have different tastes, I just find it funny when people make generalized statements like “this book is so bad, no one should ever read it.”

I read Cryptonomicon, then the Baroque Cycle, then Cryptonomicon (or a long period of years) which has nice tie-ins to each other.

However I disliked Reamde enough that I didn't start Fall. Is it better?

Fall is, IMHO, nowhere near as good as Reamde. But I've always been a technothriller fan, and Reamde is pretty high on my enjoyment list.

I loved both in totally different ways.

But I would read the phone book if NS wrote it.

> A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is nerding out about at the time

This was so true in SEVENEVES. There's a whole section about debris avoidance by a constellation of orbiting spacecraft and it was so tedious. I felt like I was reading someone describing an academic paper they'd recently read.

It's a progression. Story, style, characterization, and science in equal measure at first. Then more and more of the latter and less of the first three. Perhaps he did peak in Diamond Age, then it's basically Asimov after - pretty hard sci-fi with no story / characters (or at least no characters / story anyone cares about).

Snow Crash - most story / style / MEMORABLE characters

Diamond Age - same but with a very dramatic evolution from traditional Cyberpunk

Anathem / Seven Eves - virtually no memorable characters, interesting concepts and science though

Cryptonomicon - I couldn't.

I think I've read every one of his books. My favourite is The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O..

And D.O.D.O was one of only three Stephenson books I started and could not finish.

There’s also usually “protagonist or major character has a weird method of travel”, “protagonist or major character goes through a period of loneliness as part of their heroes journey”, and a few other bits that are common across most of his fiction work.

He’s also largely absolutely shit at writing female characters.

Still enjoy his work, but it’s fun to find the common threads.

I have found that folks who don’t like Snow Crash will enjoy Seveneves.

I thought Cryptonomicon was his best book. It's okay not to like Stephenson.

I don't think you're missing anything, really. Unlike his non-fiction essays and articles [1], which are mostly excellent, his fiction just isn't all that good. Typically the concept and ideas are interesting, but the story/characterisation/ending is poor and the digressions aren't able to hide this for very long.

I read Snow Crash and it was fun, but I had to skip over huge banks of filler. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves and REAMDE were tedious and ultimately unrewarding slogs that persuaded me not to touch his work again. I'm just glad I never attempted the Baroque Cycle.

I never understood HN's enthusiasm for Stephenson's fiction, so I suspect I'll get roasted too. But bring it on I guess.

[1] In the Beginning was the Command-Line, Mother Earth Mother Board, etc.

Mother Earth Mother Board was my introduction to Stephenson. Glad to see a mention of it here. I reread many of Stephenson's words periodically because I enjoy it, but I can appreciate how the characters are perhaps lacking. Its hard for me to put my finger on why, but the Judge in Blood Meridian seems more like a live person than Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Stephenson as a Sci-Fi Author always struck me as Kurt Vonnegut for remedial readers, or as part of the Cory Doctorow league of Cyberpunk Authorship compared to the peaks of the genre like William Gibson.

That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do you mean) for us lay people?

Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre.

This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its name.

His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity.

You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the Korean War.

Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation of the American University system as it geared towards research over pure academia.

The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.".

The plotting characterisation and story beats when not directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of Neuromancer.

Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre. Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA audience.

While I generally agree with this well written criticism (ChatGPT?), you ignore Snowcrash's most interesting (to me) idea: the Sumerian "Nam Shub" (mind virus) and its intersection with the metaverse, which I found to be an all too plausible prediction.

One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given my username)

Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will be trounced...

I'm not sure whether to be appalled or flattered by the ChatGPT comparison at this stage of Language Model maturity, but I'm sure there's some hiberno-english artefacts in my breakdown that will advocate for my analog autonomy!

The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon:

"We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."

or even the post-coital after-images of VR

"His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall."

My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement.

Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.

I'm not sure if you are GPT.

But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly.

(it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)

You'll turn my head sir. I'm privileged enough to have an English Degree, a passion for Science Fiction, and a debating background. I'm also composed almost entirely of strongly held, and often contrary, convictions, so revel in the thrust and parry of online debate. Particularly during office hours.

Re: ChatGPT - I'm guessing it would be more easily detected than you think. It's a paradigm leap from Markov chains and the like, but I'd imagine it would still hallucinate a quote or reference some non-existent book in making a comparison at some point.

If it ever gets adept at literary criticism or critical theory as opposed to just cargo-culting its way past the lower threshold of readers I'll probably be in despair. Let's keep it trained on JIRA rather than JSTOR just to be safe, lest something like Roald Dahl's 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator' come to fruition.

Haha, you can sure pen a phrase. I’d be shocked if you’re a circa 2024 GPT.

You're killing me.

I like the cut of your jib, good sir.

Kudos. I would read more of this.

I’ve seen few more ready and thorough responses in my time here, but despite the perfunctory acknowledgement that you might have, I can’t help but feel you still missed the point.

Comparing Stephenson to Vonnegut feels like comparing an inside joke to an epitaph.

The comparison was more to dissuade people from grouping them together in the Canon. If I was to be trite I might say that the likes of Slaughter House 5 and Neuromancer are Graphic Novels, whereas Snow Crash is a Graphic Novel.

When I learnt that Snow Crash was actually originally conceived as a Graphic Novel, it was like a large puzzle piece finally clicked into place. I would have preferred to judge it on its merits in that medium to be frank, as Stephenson is very passionate and has some interesting takes and somewhat Randian fascinations tertiary to his plotting, but ultimately I feel that his narrative reach always exceeded his grasp.

As for missing the point, I can only point to my acknowledgement of the existence of Snow Crash's TvTropes page, and my countless hours arguing the point online on this and other fora!

I liked the review comment he used to feature on his own website: "Umberto Eco without the charm".

Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.

That's not really that bad of a description of Gibson in any of his eras, but also that's what a lot of readers want, PKD without most of the madness.

"The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's most mad/trippy setting so far.

Interesting. I will give it a look.

I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.

Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose.

I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.

yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other writers could imply an entire world with a few well chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash which is basically caricaturing cyberpunk, he feels the need to explain how everything works. Which doesn't necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate.

Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters

Part of your complaint is probably related to his style. Neuromancer was his first novel, and his style, while remaining distinctive, has improved substantially over the years. You may like it better in the The Bigend Trilogy: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: all vintage, recognizable Gibson, but not actually science fiction, and very much in tune with the world post-9/11. As much as I love all of Gibson, those three are my favorites, especially the first.

Dividing his books into "trilogies" is a little misleading; they all happen in the same shared universe and some common characters, but don't have deeply connected stories. Give Pattern Recognition a try, and see if 20 years makes a difference to you. (If you like audiobooks, Pattern Recognition is a gem, with almost the perfect fusion between story and narrator.)

In some of his books, he is supposed to engage with vèvès from voodoo as similar to electronic circuit diagrams, according to a long ago Guardian comment [1], and I’ve never been able to track it down in “the sequels to Pattern Recognition” (as opposed to Count Zero) to my satisfaction.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/nov/21/william-gi...

That's a terrific way of putting into words my thoughts about Stephenson, except I've thought of him as Thomas Pynchon for remedial readers rather than Vonnegut.

If I'd ever successfully made it through Gravity's Rainbow, I might have contended so as well!

I'd recommend Against the Day, then if you enjoy that, try Gravity's Rainbow again. It continues some of the timeline of Against the Day. GR is super tough for the first third but gets easier and more enjoyable.

AtD gets sidetracked with long stretches of s&m-laden filth. GR reads like a fever dream but it's interesting both thematically and in prose (it's also dirty, but doesn't linger as much).

Username checks out. Funny, I remember GR as being filthier, such parts don’t jump to mind regarding AtD. AtD is one of my all-time favorite books.

Having read them both twice (I like them all really) I remember more of the gross stuff in AtD than otherwise, maybe because it seemed more coherent on the page.

Love the username.

I don't remember AtD as being particularly filthy, but it has been a long time. It remains one of my all-time favorites. If nothing else, I'm indebted to the book for encouraging me to seek out literary westerns such as Warlock by Oakley Hall and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.

Crying of Lot 49 is short and sweet.

Gravity's Rainbow and The Diamond Age certainly both feel like they'd have been better books if the author could keep his fetishes to himself...

This checks out. NS is my favorite fiction author, but I am not intelligent enough, at least in the required way, to understand Gravity's Rainbow.

I'm sure there are numerous things that I didn't understand but could have if I were more intelligent or better read.

It became a lot more enjoyable for me on my second attempt when I gave up on the idea of understanding everything. Sometimes things get explained later in the book. Sometimes not.

It was poorly written and the story was something a teenager would dream up, but your complaint is that the editing wasn't finished? Is that how you judge a story?

Cryptonomicon is one of my all time favorite books. Diamond Age and Snowcrash were only ok.

you are not alone. I think he has interesting ideas he incorporates into his books/stories but I don't think he's a very good writer. Personally I need someone to be a good writer for me to enjoy reading their books - otherwise the experience is draining instead of uplifting.

Snow Crash was supposed to be a graphic novel, and then the illustrator quit. It's not at all like any of the other Stephenson novels.

On the other hand, I find your fixation on errors odd -- sounds like your complaint is with the editor, not the author.

I choose to accept Snowcrash as a clever satire on how vapid and empty cyberpunk is as a genre.

I have read three of his books so far - Snow crash, Cryptonomincon, and Seveneves.

By far his most fully formed and epic book for me has been Seveneves. It is hardcore Sci-Fi at an epic scale both in world building and time.

I got 700 pages in when I had to return it to the library or be sent to collections.

One or two decades ago I read on some newsgroup on the internet (and having experienced it myself), that Neal Stephensons storylines never actually

Yes, that pretty much sums him

He's written far better, both on the sci-fi side and otherwise.

imo, it goes Anathem > Cryptonomicon > The Diamond Age > Seveneves > Termination Shock > Snow Crash. The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction, but I didn't get into it. REAMDE is a techno-thriller, and a divisive one, where it lands depends on whether you enjoy that style.

"The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction"

Apart from the suspiciously well informed immortal character and the magical gold? I wonder what could explain those...

Ok, pedant.

> The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction

... written in a SciFi mindset, I would say.

I personally can't stand his style of writing. Tried to power through Snow Crash but couldn't do it.

Just not my cup of tea.

Try Zodiac and Interface (authored under the co-pseudonym Stephen Bury).

I will give it a shot, thank you.

Came here to say this. Both of those books are underrated. Interface is a particular favorite of mine and it has help up fairly well.

Yeah I’m in the same camp. Tried to read Cryptonomicon and immediately felt lost.

Stephenson is an ideas guy. The books are just loose vehicles for all his ideas and things like plot, characters and (gasp) endings are not center stage.

There are so many ideas in his books, mountain upon mountain that it’s no wonder some of them ended up being real products in following decades. They are great fuel for the technical imagination.

I have only ever read Snow Crash. I enjoyed it. However, I read it in 1992. When I think about it now, I bet reading it today would seem odd... like watching old 1950s shows that make predictions about the world of tomorrow.

Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk like Gibson.

You’re missing that the low effort and placeholder names are part of the joke, making fun of how cyberpunk tries to seem cool by trying to be raw, gritty, and low effort… like rock stars that try too hard at pretending to care about nothing. Stephenson does it to a comical extreme, e.g. naming his main character Hiro Protagonist. His other books are not in that style.

I have heard this, but it seems more like laziness to me. Thanks for the perspective.

The density of creative jokes about being gritty and low effort in Snow Crash isn't possible without substantially more thought and effort than writing normal fiction. Laziness won't produce a book that has people laughing out loud as they read it 32 years later. If anything, I think the problem with Snow Crash is it has become so popular and lasted so long, people get less of the jokes now, because nobody remembers what he was satirizing anymore.

Low-effort and high-tech, to paraphrase Gibson‘s M.O.

> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk

Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that Snow Crash is satire, I recommend reading Headcrash, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to Snow Crash. If Snow Crash is the original Robocop (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then Headcrash is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (completely over-the-top).

> like Gibson.

It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it.

Almost everyone gets a gritty Blade Runner image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin.

Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. Johnny Mnemonic (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of The X-Files.

Snow Crash must feel really dated in 2024 so I don't recommend starting with that book. Diamond Age is a fairly accurate description of the present and a possible near future, but somehow written in the 90s. We aren't choking on nanite dust and still haven't quite gotten 3d printers to the level described in the book but the Neo-Victorian social stratification is on track and machine learning is transforming education in ways hinted at in the book.

What are you missing? His books that take place in the present or the future are thought experiments focused around the ways technology can transform society. He is pretty good at grounding his characters in fairly complex social landscapes and then describing the ways technology (real or imagined) interacts with and influences that landscape. You might also be missing his surreal sense of humor if you thought names like Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash were placeholders.

As a new reader you might be more I'd start with his newer books and work backwards. I haven't read "Termination Shock" yet but I would recommend both "Fall" and "Seveneves".

Termination Shock was pretty good, but seemed kind of low-effort, not a typical Stephenson blockbuster.

I found Termination Shock to be his worst by far, in large part because it felt too contemporary. It felt awfully similar to a music album mandated by the studio to an artist that really didn't have anything to say, so he just skimmed trending news of the time, went down a shallow rabbit hole or two then wrote a half-hearted but verbose blog post and called it a novel. I didn't get any sense of passion from it.

Neal Stephenson doesn't write novels. He writes novel-length entries in an encyclopedia.

Each of the novels is the size of an encyclopedia, which is why I gave up after Cryptonomicon.

TBH I had to start Snow Crash multiple times until it 'clicked' (e.g. "what's with the bizarre writing style..."). It's more of a "super hero comic" than a "science fiction novel". I still like to read it about once a year if I want a quick fix.

I haven't noticed any of the errors in the text you describe though.

The thing with the classics is that three decades later the topics that where novel back then are science fiction tropes today, because everybody copied them over and over again. Same with Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, etc...

FWIW though, I'm not a big fan of Neal Stephenson's more recent books. The last one I really enjoyed was Anathem, and the last one I attempted but didn't finish was REAMDE. Now for something where I really don't understand the hype: Ready Player One. What a drivel ;)

I feel you.

I felt for the hype on Reddit around this author and read two books. Snow Crash felt like he wanted to jump on Gibson's train and save the world building altogether because people are supposed to know Gibsons Cyberpunk already.

Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending.

Stephenson is not for me I guess.

> Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending.

That's how I felt the first time I read it. After the second it started to grow on me, and gets better with every read through. The audiobook is excellent as well.

I got through it, but I see more value in it for the ideas than how they're executed and how it's written.

I agree. I usually finish most books I start but Snow Crash was an exception. I can't quite articulate my distaste. Looking back, one of the small things that ticked me off was Hiro Protagonist – I couldn't take the book seriously at all. Felt almost overly cheesy and clichey.

I'd like to give him another shot with Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age. I've appreciated him elsewhere, like as a podcast guest. He definitely has an interesting mind, just didn't enjoy Snow Crash.

I haven't finished the article yet and am currently reading it. But FWIW I'll just park this howler from the first paragraph here:

> "prophesying what innovations are to come"

No. Prophesy is the ability to see or correctly guess the future - a future that would have happened without the prophecy.

Christopher Hitchens nailed it absolutely when he noted that science fiction is rarely prophetic, rather it's taken as a blueprint for post-facto design. It is self-fulfilling, influential fiction.

It seems unlikely that there has ever been someone making a prediction, never telling anyone about the prediction and then living his life as if he never made the prediction.

I predict that Donald Trump will claim election fraud in states he loses in 2024. Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly?

There's some difference between an author like George Orwell writing a detailed novel which enters popular culture and sells millions of copies - and two blokes at the pub saying the royal family are lizards controlled by the saucer-people.

> Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly?

No. It would be self-fulfilling if Donald Trump claimed election fraud specifically (as in, he's explicitly announcing it!) because gitfan86 said it would happen.

If you look at something like the metaverse, a lot of the people trying to build a metaverse are explicitly citing stuff like Snow Crash as the motivation for what they're trying to build. That's what makes it self-fulfilling--the people trying to build the thing in the real world are using the fiction as a blueprint.

The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were for that.

"Kids need to get answers from humans who love them".

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...

Thank you for sharing this!

The Diamond Age was one of my favorite books and Neil's answer distilled and clarified a major theme of the book perfectly.

God dammit I wish I had seen that a few months ago when there was a dozens-long HN thread where people were arguing that that wasn't what he meant or that it wasn't important to the success/failure of the different branches of that project in the book.

> The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book.

Wait, did you mean The Diamond Age is an excellent book? Or... has someone made/written the book-within-the-book into an actual (e-?)book?

The full title of the book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to refer to it by its main title, rather than just its subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of a different book, even if that book is a fictional book within the book.

If I started talking about how great The Modern Prometheus is, people would generally either a) be very confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad for not simply calling it Frankenstein.

I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.

I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even closer to reality!

I’ve seriously toyed with the concept. It may be possible now to get an application like that on a tablet, offloading computation to OpenAI and its ilk, but it wouldn’t be reliable. We’re not good enough at text and image generation to do it autonomously yet. We’re a little better at speech synthesis than Stephenson predicted, but it might still be nice to have a ractor too.

Interestingly, I started reading it over xmas break -- based on a recommendation. I got, probably, a quarter of the way through it before I went back to work. And I haven't felt the urge to pick it up again.

I was reading above comments about how liking NS is a matter of taste. So I'm not sure if I just "don't get it" or if maybe it's just "not my type of story."

FWIW, so far, I just simply don't care about any of the characters. Just curious for those that like the novel: should I? Or is it more about the ruminations of technology that is important in this book?

Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle. It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the book.

It might help to think of the characters as archetypal because he's writing about the future and these archetypes will be present in the future - the people who make history will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in their behaviour.

And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.

I’ve read a couple NS books. I feel like the plots and characters are the dues to be paid in order to explore the SCI for concepts and worlds. Kind of like the stitching between action/chase scenes in a Fast and Furious movie. The plot is not the point.

https://archive.is/mBH2q

This article's wrong. It's not the Illustrated Primer that presages the chatbots, it's the Librarian in Snow Crash. His "intelligence without consciousness" take is spookily accurate, I think.

Not really. He multiple times goes out of his way to have the Librarian state that it cannot understand analogy.

There's literally a paper on improved success at prompting by having a model create an analogous problem, solve that, and apply the approach to the original problem:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01714

I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum means internet, syndevs means computers.

> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

Anathem is my personal favorite of his for precisely this vision of near future history, and what the world does about it.

Thanks for this quote. "Artificial Inanity" seems about as useful of a concept as "negative information" (from Foundation?) has been.

> The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information.

The same point is made in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.

What's the stunning prediction talked about in the title? Because it sounds like he doesn't think he predicted today's AI, or that he thought about AI much in that story.

> The technology that drives the book wasn’t really AI as we think of it now—I was talking to people who were working on some of the underlying technologies that would be needed to communicate on the internet in a secure, anonymous manner. I guess it’s implicit that there’s an AI in there that’s generating the story and increasing the degree of sophistication in response to the learning curve of the child, but I didn’t really go into that very much; I just kind of assumed it would be there.

It’s worth noting that in the book the “AI” is partly a live connection to a human being.

Gen AI and its potential impact has been covered by Stephenson multiple times.

I wrote a short post on some of the references in Anathem.

It's also a large plot point in Fall or Dodge in Hell. One of the characters open sources some generative ai to fill the internet with slightly untrue spam.

https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7...

Gibson > Stephenson

Whenever I think I am remembering Snow Crash, I’m actually thinking of characters and plot lines from Neuromancer!

That is because Stephenson is intentionally parodying Gibson.

...and didn't bother much describing the world his story takes place in because he expected you to know Gibson's Cyberpunk already.

https://archive.is/mBH2q

Just out of curiosity, do pieces like these get written because a journalist is randomly interested in the idea, or does the author's publisher reach out to the magazine and suggest a puff piece topic?

Very much both. Plenty of pieces like this are PR-driven, but quality publications are always looking to write interesting pieces independently of PR pitches.

Many pieces come about because an individual journalist pitches an idea to their editor.

gargoyles -- never, ever, ever gonna be cool. Trust me.

But the Apple Gargoyle Pro is cool, right? It has an outward-facing display that shows your eyes.

I’m curious how his prediction about generative AI in Fall will play out. Mild spoilers ahead (not really plot relevant):

He basically predicts that any form of leak intended to harm the subject depicted will become ineffective, since nobody will accept text, voice and video recordings as authentic anymore and people will actually perform “preemptive strikes” on the search space themselves, which will in turn be plausibly deniable for the same reason.

Does Neal Stephenson have an orb of seeing? I haven’t read any of his works or predictions but if he can tell the future then that’s worthy of a scientific study, I would posit. Wouldn’t be called predictions then, I suppose.

Not sure if he’s the only one who wrote about possible future outcomes with the tropes listed in the article. But then they wouldn’t be called tropes either, I suppose.

How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on how things have turned out?

After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those in the CS/AI/ML world for a long time. Furthermore, "conversations" with machines have been a model for human-AI interaction for a very long time. Stephenson didn't invent that idea.

From my perspective, Stephenson appears to have been engineered to meet my optimal reading specification. This improbability makes it among the best evidence I have that I am living in a simulation, along with the sound of Wayne Rogers (guitarist, not actor), the flavor of fresh doogh, the A944 west of Alford, several others.

https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/techno...

It's pretty interesting to re-read Baroque Cycle as well in the world of AI.

In particular, the universal language based on math sure has some interesting thoughts that are applicable in the era of embeddings and AI.

And if you can't get into it - pick up the audiobook version. It's fantastic

Given the topic, I would disappointed if this article were written entirely by a human.

Its paywalled, so it right there with the topic and classism.

I dont get whats supposed to be prescient about writing a book with an AI in it, in 1995.

And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution.

This claim seems to hinge on on the Primer in the Diamond Age which uses an actor to read out its text, which is taken as a metaphor for ChatGPT being built on human output.

I mean, the Primer/Ractor combo seems like a cool thing to have in a book, but I don't see why this is a 'most stunning prediction'

His books are so long he has written so many of them that the odds will approach 100% he coins some neologism

https://archive.ph/u75bw

Cryptocurrency too - in Cryptonomicon. Not exactly as it is used today, but along similar lines...

Cryptocurrency was a hotly, if niche, debated topic in 1990s, which formed the backbone for Stephenson writing Cryptonomicon.

I've been a fan of his since Snowcrash came out, and was hoping the article would be interesting, but instead it reads like someone that has consumed too many of his own press releases. Starting off with, "It’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate," was really disappointing.

Who's writing sci-fi today that we will look back on as predictive?

no one. can't see past the event horizon.

I find "Stephenson predicted ChatGPT!!" to be an incredibly stupid hot take, and I'm a fan of Stephenson.

I would argue an equally prescient prediction of his is from Snowcrash, the use of sophisticated disinformation and psyops to mass-reprogram the human race, and the innate immunity or resistance to it that some people have. That vision of the future is now playing out in realtime.

Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepositioned to the relevant bit @10:54). One of his editor's at Wired magazine also made a comment about editing his work in his book talk about Fall or Dodge in Hell at the Interval [2].

This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54): [10:54] Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it. [11:11] A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. [11:21] But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick. There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a private jet that blows up, some people die, there's confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is. [12:59] For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete, you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end. [13:27] I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people, but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one.

This is a transcript of an unknown (to me) Wired editor talking about Stephenson's copy: I will tell you I was working under Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiberoptic cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not improve it as an editor. It was the cleanest copy I'd ever worked with ever with any other writer and I actually worked with a lot of writers so I will say you have something going on there about your first drafts that are uneditable. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s

That quote on Anathem is interesting because it's the one book I've read by him that felt the most "...and that's the ending, you can figure out what happened afterwards" of his books. I wouldn't say it's a particularly satisfying ending while you're reading the book, because the logic of the climactic scene and ending is hidden, but afterwards it does leave you going "huh, it actually kind of works." Seveneves had a much more conventional ending and, in the narrative logic of the book, was quite satisfying to read even though I wouldn't say that book is his strongest book overall.

"Mother Earth, Mother Board" is one of my favourite pieces of non-fiction writing.

Anathem is the only Stephenson book I've read that had a proper ending. (Granted I've skipped a lot of his more recent stuff.)

Him saying "Snow Crash had a great ending, there was lots and lots of action at the end!" is really telling. The problem wasn't the climax, Neal, the problem is that you hit the climax and then stop instantly. You need a denouement. When you take the readers to a towering peak, you need to let them coast back down again, not just throw them off a cliff.

I presume that you dislike Hamlet, Macbeth, Dune, and Children of Dune on the same grounds then? All of those end in similar ways.

> Hamlet and Macbeth are stage plays, not novels. Different expectations.

Dune was the start of a series. It didn't need to wrap everything up in a tidy bow. And its ending was still much less abrupt than Snow Crash's, where the book ends on the same page as the villain's death.

I haven't read Children of Dune.

Was this supposed to be a gotcha? Were you trying to catch me lying, like I secretly do like abrupt endings?

In Dune, the villain is arguably the emperor, and we only find out what will happen to him on the last page, the last page of a whirlwind chapter that concludes all sorts of things that were building up for the whole book. So I don't accept your assessment that Dune ends less abruptly than Snow Crash's.

I don't see how Shakespeare gets excused because he wrote stage plays, but Stephenson does not because he writes books. They're both fictions, with endings that could have been wrapped up with more ceremony.

No gotcha, I'm not even trying to persuade you of anything. I'm trying to point out that Stephenson's reputation on endings is largely undeserved, pretty much just a self-perpetuating myth, and that even if he does have a few abrupt endings he is not unique in this regard. I never hear anyone complain about Herbert's or Shakespeare's endings, which are demonstrably abrupt.

> I'm trying to point out that Stephenson's reputation on endings is largely undeserved, pretty much just a self-perpetuating myth

The first time I read Snow Crash, the first time I'd even heard of Stephenson, I loved the action leading up to the end but thought it ended with a disappointing thud. Same with Diamond Age, same with Cryptonomicon... I read all of these before I had any connection to the internet memeplex around Stephenson. Anathem was a notable exception, with a nice proper denouement, and that was after I'd found out that lots of other people found Stephenson endings unsatisfying. I also didn't find fault with Zodiac or The Big U, although these were of course somewhat more conventional than his later works.

I don't think you understand why thousands of people find most of Stephenson's endings unsatisfying. That's fine for you. It does not mean that the rest of us are just making it up for the memes.

I honestly think the Hyperion series does a better job predicting the enshittification of everything at the hands of AI than anything Stephenson wrote. And as an added bonus, it throws in some really interesting thought experiments about what a sentient AI would logically conclude the "right thing" to do with humanity was.

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