Interviewing Tim Sweeney and Neal Stephenson
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I finished it, but it was a slog. I could recommend reading the first half and then switching to the Wikipedia summary to see how it concludes.
Agree and I actually really enjoyed that part of it. He kind of seveneves'd it but I think the back half of them are fun. Wrapping up a story is never his strong suit. Lot of "and everyone sat down for a nice dinner. The end". Always worth it though.
That said, I personally also prefer his earlier books. Granted, snowcrash was a young mans fever dream, and you kind of grow out of it. A young ladies illustrated primer? That was kinda cool. Quicksilver? Yeah, an unexpected history lesson woven into a pretty long story. Liked it. But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.
The first and the second part of the book (which constitute most of the book) stand on its own. I think it's better to pretend the 3rd part doesn't exist (which is IMHO rather easy since it's just unnecessary) than to discount the whole book.
There's a story that he only allowed that book to be reprinted so that people would stop paying hundreds of dollars for a copy on eBay.
It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
All and every book I read before were for the lowest common denominator level of people. Sure, smart, educated, cultured, wise people could get more out of some of them (like Anna Karenina), but the books were written to be made accessible to each and every human.
Getting to know Neal's works has brought in a paradigm shift in my reading and thinking, and now I read other authors like Greg Egan, too.
Thanks to Neal for being himself. And thanks to HN for suggesting his works on books threads.
I am reading Quicksilver right now, and read Anathem, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age before. Loved each one.
If you are reading this comment, feel free to suggest me other authors or works, although not from Neal, as I will read ALL of his works, anyway.
Oh, and Iain M Banks. More accessible, I’d say, but no shortage of Big Ideas.
100% solid agree. That's what makes a book worthwhile to read.
I saw The Man in the High Castle series when I had time for webseries, and while it was kinda mid, it had some great aspects.
Suggest more if you can. Need not be Sci Fi.
I also liked "Second variety" which has also been rendered as a audio play IIRC.
And, for the non-sci-fi part, A Scanner Darkly is pretty weird. Has also been rendered as a movie...
With Banks, the worlds (Culture being a major one) are more fleshed out, but somehow to me not as interesting. I've read several of his books, but somehow didn't enjoy the Culture ones a lot (read Player of Games, Use of Weapons and Excession). I did like the A Song of Stone a lot, but that's not even sci-fi. I'm aware my opinion is quite unpopular regarding Banks.
His sci-fi books (Anathem, Diamong Age, Snow Crash) are not just detailing technology, but the whole society. All of the detailed descriptions about concents and avouts (in Anathem) is without any technology since they explicitly disawow technology.
You seem to have a very specific idea of what constitutes "worldbuilding".
In my mind, every scifi has to do worldbuilding, because they deal with some non-existent worlds - they can't just rely on reader's being familiar with reality. They can't just say "imagine it exactly like today's US, just with faster than light travel". The authors have to describe the setting of the plot to the reader to at least some detail. Stephenson does that in my opinion very well and it's the main draw for me.
His shorts are where he shines, but I’ll admit to having read and enjoyed his entire corpus, down to the man’s withering legal correspondence.
I’ve gotta say I do love the culture series and his sci-fi works, but I have an equal amount of shelf space dedicated to Iain Banks - The Bridge and Whit stand out.
Therefore, I always recommend that people start reading his short stories, and avoid his books. See also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805118>
> It’s quite telling that almost all of the movies based on his works have been based on his short stories, not novels.
Because that's easier to adapt to 2h films than a long novel? Lots of short stories become film.
Though well-done in it's own right, the 3-Body Problem Netflix series does not quite do justice to the intricacy of Liu's writing in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. You might find the change of pace to be somewhat jarring in comparison to Stephenson but it fulfills a similar enjoyment of Science Fiction.
While not very high quality as literary works, the books are products of originality, and deep thought.
I just appreciate that these books were written down.
I kind of liked Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
I have planned to read other works by Cixin Liu, and check out Ken Liu's works.
Great suggestion, by the way.
I've read a lot of Stephenson and I don't mean this as a knock against him exactly, just an observation: he writes in a way that is inclined to make the HN crowd (myself included) feel smart because we are the target audience.
If you look at a lot of the protagonists, many of them are startup founders and game designers and coders and cryptographers and mathematicians, going on "heroes' journeys" where they save the world and/or get the girl. Nerds (aka hackers) who save the day. It's almost like it's engineered to stoke the egos of technologists.
Stephenson (who - again - I have read a lot of, and admire in a lot of ways) will always feel to me like a bit of a relic from early Internet culture, where a sort of persona was idolized. The startup founder / hacker / clever man (it was always a man).
A similar author to me is Andy Weir.
But if I spelled out all nuances and caveats, then that wouldn’t be a comment, right?
Neal's books aren’t for smart people like Quantum Mechanics books are. I know.
But then again, what is smartness? Isn't a lot of what smartness is, is having the right background and preparedness?
All caveats and nuances can't be included everywhere, right?
I read Andy Weir's Peoject Hail Mary. It's something that I liked, yeah, but would have much more appreciated when I was 17. Not right now.
Now I like my books to be more wide, covering multiple aspects of reality.
E.g., when you read Permutation City, it is not only some SciFi, but it enables you to think deep and hard about consciousness and self.
I am yet to read Dune, but I think it is also a "deep" book.
It's so hard to get past this, and it's intuitive and understandable to me why that's the case - given the state of "web3". IMO he is correct in that there are extremely interesting things going on there, but I think for many it's easier to dismiss it altogether.
Metaverse is escapism and alternative socializing in capital letters. For me, Metaverse in the 80s is me typing BASIC programs, playing Alley Cat, and watching a friend play Prince of Persia (in reality, not VR). Metaverse in the 90s is me borrowing pirated games from a friend and logging into BBS talking trash till early morning. It has always been here. It never left. It IS immersive. It doesn't need some VR devices to be "more" immersive. In fact, the more "modern" we become, the LESS immersive it seems to be, with all those online ads and other shits.
Welcome to the Metaverse.
Immersion, like resolution, keeps leveling up in ways I don’t find easy to go back on.
Infocom, the leading maker of the text adventures you talk about, used to advertise that the brain is the most powerful graphics technology (https://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=6312). When playing their games as a kid, I remember the sense of wonder with what then felt like an entire universe contained inside the computer. I tried to "trick the computer" into letting me go places that weren't technically part of the game!
When thinking about the games back then - and I say that not with a sense of nostalgia, but simply remembering how I felt about these games before I understood how they worked - I wanted to go to every house in the scenery, every city building I was driving by. I wanted to see if I could go there, knock on the door and there would be people and adventures waiting for me everywhere.
That dream was the metaverse indeed. Great graphics of course helps a lot, but they are not the main characteristic of this immersion. It's depth, content, the sense that every couch in the room could have a long lost and forgotten receipt under it.
Adding people often breaks the immersion, especially in Free to Play games. When you are in a medieval world and suddenly a player called "Memes4Ca$h" dressed in a pink armor shows up, it breaks the immersion. The ideal environment would either need true human role players or AGI-managed characters.
A single world: There is a single main Substrata world, which is filled with user-generated content and scripts. Rendering this and running physics for it is such a difficult technical problem that most other metaverses don't even try! Instead they tend to have lots of separate worlds / rooms. A single main world was important for me, partly as a result of reading Snow Crash.
Technology sharing: I recently added Luau scripting, which is a fantastic Lua fork from Roblox. It allows sandboxed script execution, has a JIT mode, and has all the usual benefits of Lua (easy binding code etc.).
Substrata also imports standard formats like GLTF. GLTF actually allows pretty good reuse of assets between metaverses.
Crypto: Substrata optionally uses Ethereum NFTs for land - people can pay for land in Fiat, and then optionally mint the land as NFTs. The big advantage of using NFTs here is that allows land to be traded on the 'secondary market', without me having to do anything, and without my permission and involvement. If I didn't use crypto then i would need to implement some kind of marketplace myself, perhaps with an escrow system for land transfer etc, and have to deal with fraud and chargebacks etc.
(In Gibson's "Neuromancer", an Ono-Sendai is a brand and/or type of cyberdeck).
The Metaverse is a bit like federated services: it springs from some idealism rather than giving users anything they actually want or need.
The Apple lawsuit, in hindsight, I think was a serious miscalculation. I think Apple's (and Google's) monopolies will end but they won't let them go willingly and it'll be worse for both companies because it'll be Congress and the EU who will decide how that works.
A court action is a way to force the issue earlier under existing legislation but only if you win. And Epic most clearly did not. So Apple is emboldened. There should be no reason that Netflix or Amazon or Epic should have to pay the Apple 30% tax (it's probably less by some agreement they have) on digital purchases purely through their existing payment platforms. That seemed like the most natural way to attack the monopoly (which is both a monopoly on distribution and payments).
Anyway, I put the Metaverse in the same category as the Star Trek transporter except a transporter would have utility.
All because of Fortnite. A game that was a flop before they copied Pubg mechanics.
But it's obvious why it's mostly under 18 who play it and spend money on the hats specifically to look cool or to impress others. At a certain point you realize there's not much value in it unless you enjoy specifically seeing those hats yourself whenever you use the product.
In addition, roblox a third-person game, so you see your own character constantly - while a lot of value is lost in a first-person title without getting creative (e.g. weapon skins in shooters).
That's the root of so many issue with the modern Internet, but every "solution" is just more cloud nonsense, instead of addressing the core connectivity issue.
I don't need virtual reality when even just the act of moving a file from one computer to another is already such a dysfunctional mess.
A person with one of the very longest runs in history as CEO of a tech company? A tech company CEO who is also involved in all the company's engineering and knows what he is talking about?
> Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux.
Didn't they stop developing the macOS and Linux versions and give those players their money back?
What a monster. I can see why people wouldn't want to be in the same room as him for some reason.
I have my doubts. For example, he claims that they won't support Linux because it's too niche but Linux has been (slightly) ahead of MacOS in the Steam survey for a while now (context: Fortnite is available on MacOS). Making is mistake is human, but he's sticking to his guns despite objective metrics to the contrary - I would expect more from a renowned CEO.
Of course if you include the first half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious that I was talking about engineering when it comes to "knows what he is talking about." The question of whether Linux is worth supporting is at least half a marketing question. I doubt they're wrong about it, but I try to keep an open mind...
> objective metrics to the contrary
Please do share.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Expand "OS Version."
> at least potentially, more profitable.
This is because MacOS is more widespread as a general purpose desktop operating system. Those statistics are irrelevant here. Linux is a more widespread gaming operating system. Dogma is pointless drivel.
This is what SteamPlay and tools like proton and WINE solve. Why develop for Windows when you can build with respect to tools like those, and if the customer base exists, then allocate resources?
> objective metrics to the contrary
Of the 2ish% of the market gaming on Linux, what subset will buy your software? If I had one customer in 50 who submitted nearly half of all of our support tickets for development that wasn't transferrable to the other 49 and I couldn't charge them to cover it, I'd fire them, too.
And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse."
I appear to be a little odd in liking Reamde as much as I do, but if you want something lower-concept and more thriller-like, I really enjoy Reamde.
Imagine if movies were like that: a huge slog for 1h15, and then a twist at 1h50 at which point it actually gets interesting/entertaining.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good slow burn read/watch, but "slog" is not that.
My biggest problem with him is, and I don't really mean it as an insult, but he's like a poor man's Pynchon or Hesse. If you like maximalist and historical fiction or like reading about people in monasteries might as well pick up GR or The Glass Bead game.
I'd say Anathem is his best book overall, but the first 100 or so pages is almost pure world building without much action which might turn people away.
Seveneves is close and is more accessible from the beginning. Just skip the last (after time jump) part of the book which is... unnecessary and bad.
But Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and REAMDE were amazing.
TBH it seemed very ... "idealistic" in a way, "racist" would be another word, but I'd like to avoid the word's moral connotations. Just the idea that the descendants of this particular Eve are physically strong and then descendants of this Eve are intellectuals. It kinda seemed like a fairy tale instead of an actual development, which would realistically end up way more "messy".
I found the first one a slog, but the second one more than made up for it. It’s end to end swashbuckling fun. The third one is pretty clever, painting a colourful, accessible summary of how englightenment philosophy and science, and debt-based capitalism shape the modern global economy.
(At least… that’s how I recall them >15 years on)
On Seveneves, no two people seem to agree on which half of the book is "bad", but I will say in general that the first half is more popular among the base. I thought the latter was fine.
I think the idea is that you wouldn't understand everything either if you were actually transported into the future: there would be a ton of new terminologies, unfamiliar concepts, and a changed culture that takes different things to be a matter of course.
At some point in the book, around half way IIRC, there is an event that happens which explains the title. And it goes from something like an interesting hard sci-fi, to a sort of weird meandering fantasy thing that took a nuke to my suspension of disbelief. It also felt like the book was basically two entirely different books at that point. I simply could not get into it, or passed it.
I suppose I understand why he made that choice, but I don’t have to like it.
Seveneves was much more accessible, as was The Rise and Fall of DODO, and the Baroque Cycle. Fall or Dodge in Hell is a bit more challenging but for different reasons than his early works, the subject matter is just more abstract.
No doubt they are all meandering and longwinded, the newer ones perhaps more so, but that’s Stephenson, it can be a strength and a weakness.
It actually isn’t. That is the name he works under, a sort of stage name, as he styles himself as a sort of programmer celebrity. His actual name is Hiroaki. (This is mentioned in the book.)
I'm not explicitly saying you're lying but I'd like more evidence.
“Stupid name,” she says, shoving the card into one of a hundred little pockets on her coverall.
“But you'll never forget it,” Hiro says.
I.e. the name is an obvious marketing gimmick.
I have read a number of novels in Bengali that are like this, but was refreshing to see one famous book by a famous author in English.