Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004)

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86 pointsjdkee37 comments

Neal is one of two living authors whose all books I buy. Happy to have found him during Covid, thanks to HN comments. I found Greg Egan during that time, and I am grateful to HN threads and comments on books.

Perhaps the biggest loss of cryptocurrency being branded as "crypto" is losing the Matt Blaze's thoughts on cryptography (and in turn, how this informed Stephenson's thoughts on these topics).

Anyway, in case you were curious:

Hobbs: https://web.archive.org/web/20041204055248/http://www.crypto...

Master Key: https://web.archive.org/web/20041022021127/http://www.crypto...

Matt Blaze is still around. I get the feeling he doesn't post often:

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/

https://federate.social/@mattblaze

My first exposure to Neal was through Reamde and it's definitely the fastest I've managed to get through a novel relative to length. I really enjoy his style.

I recommend his older stuff to anyone else looking to check him out: Snow Crash is an undeniable classic, Diamond Age was absolutely incredible, and even Zodiac and In the Beginning Was the Command Line are both very good (although the last one is obviously more for computer people).

His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.

He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.

The “made up language” is directly tied to the plot and overall themes, and leads to an “aha” moment.

It was still an awful lot to ask of a reader, and IMO, not worth the "reward." I agree with the person you are responding to. His early works are really amazing, but beginning with Cryptonomicon he became increasingly verbose and I found his later books a lot less fun to read.

Anathem is written in English. There's just some made up words that are generally easy to figure out the meaning of.

Anathem was my favorite book by him. It has a lotta re-read value, I appreciate the work he did to make it feel like a complete, fleshed out world. But different folks have different tastes, and that's ok.

I also liked Seveneves, but it should have ended 2/3 of the way through. There was a point that would have made for an excellent ending (which is something Stephenson famously struggles with IMO), but then he forced in another 1/3 of a book that didn't engage me and which felt like it just petered out.

Anathem and Seveneves are my favorites of his, in that order. The orbital launch and operation in Anathem is probably my favorite piece of writing ever.

I’d argue that Seveneves DID end 2/3rds of the way through! There’s at least another third of a book that would’ve cleanly followed the end.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I jotted down these things that drove me nuts in Seveneves:

* Describes pykrete every time it’s mentioned, which is way too often.

* Say “light green arc” again.

* There’s always a TV tuned to the Epic.

* Spacers and Diggers speak the same language after 5,000 years of English-Russian hybridization?

* So much time spent explaining the different races, then absolutely nothing was done with it.

* Red vs blue space, then absolutely nothing was done with it.

* “Diggers” capitalized in first use, no lead-up.

* “Sonar Taxlaw”? Really? Her volume of the encyclopedia just happened to conveniently start with “sonar”?

* They just gave up on Mars sometime, I guess.

* Oh, look, a secret religion at the end because, why exactly?

* Diggers would not have been remotely like “rootstock” humans after evolving for 5,000 years in caves. Look how much we’ve changed since 3,000 BC.

I liked it, overall, but each of these yanked me out of my suspension of disbelief.

For me it was the juxtaposition of apparently realistic descriptions of orbital mechanics with the half-arsed handwavy gibberish about biology.

Maybe it's because I know more about life sciences than physics and simply missed that the orbital bits were equally nonsensical, but at least they didn't manage to shatter by suspension of disbelief. But then some vague magical genetics and a brief mention of "yeah, they can eat algae" are used to solve a bunch of intractable problems - and both treated as being far less interesting than, as you say, pykrete!

Given the title of the book and the fact that the final third hinges on the biological bits, it felt incredibly lop-sided - like he'd spent all his research time playing with Kerbal Space Program and only got round to stitching the two parts of the book together on the night before the deadline.

The biology stuff seemed far-fetched but plausible-ish, which was kind of how I saw the physics bits: sure, that might work given infinite tensile strength metals.

And sociology / anthropology / linguistics? Eh, we can wedge some stuff in once the important parts are done.

I didn’t hate the book at all. It was otherwise fun to read. But man, those bits I mentioned really stuck in my head and I couldn’t un-see them once I started noticing. Like, imagine that literally every time you were in a bar or restaurant with TVs, at least one of them was showing a documentary of the American revolution. Wouldn’t that be odd? Well, apparently in 7000 AD people just can’t get enough of their own founding history lessons.

Anathem, please reconsider. Do you remember the part about Artificial Inanity? Right before the entire book is revealed as an elaboration of Everett's MWI? It's right up there with Snow Crash's reflection on Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592

Polostan went down very easy. only read Anathem, Snow Crash, Reamde, Fall;, and Cryptonomicon. Plolostan was a novella compared to those. finished in a day or two on vacation and im a sorta slow reader

i like Polostan and generally recommend it. looking forward to the sequel in a few weeks. havent read anything Stevensons said about Polostan but if i had to guess id say it targets a YA audience instead of a high school/undergrad audience

amazing none of his books have been adapted. they play out like movies in my head, albeit a lot of men participating in the socratic method and waving at white boards

I think Zodiac would be the easiest book of his to make a movie version of.

Cryptonomicon definitely differs from Stephenson’s first phase but he’s had other phases since then. I’d lump that into the Shaftoe/Waterhouse small universe alongside the Baroque Cycle; some of the same names show up in REAMDE. (Sort of how there’s universe/character overlap between Snow Crash and Diamond Age.) Anathem has a similar vibe, though IIRC no character overlap.

These were indeed verbose. Some folks love it, some not as much. Then there was a deliberately semi-utopian near-futurism phase (Seveneves, whatever one it is with the cloud-seeding gun in West Texas) and now we’re into some historical fiction (Russian spy stuff).

Might be worth dipping in a toe again to see if any of these fits your fancy. Stephenson didn’t just swap to Cryptonomicon and stop there.

>whatever one it is with the cloud-seeding gun in West Texas

Termination Shock

Huh, I hated Snow Crash, but loved Cryptonomicon. Haven't read any of his other fiction.

I liked this interview, very nuanced and well-reasoned answers.

I highly recommend Baroque Cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle

I really enjoyed cryptonomicon and seveneves most recently. And while yes snow crash was a faster read with just the right amount of detail the stories in both cyrptonomicon and seveneves were absolutely worth the bit of extra detail in between. Could they have been edited shorter? Possibly, but the length of the adventure in part comes from the length of the text and I couldn’t see either being paced faster in hindsight. They were paced well.

Tastes are interesting. I sprinted through Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon because they were so good. I struggled to get past the first few chapters of Reamde. Didn't engage me at all.

The 'sequel' that does lean on some of Reamde's worldbuilding, 'Fall; or, Dodge in Hell' is much more oddly ambitious. But it is a very strange work. You have to be on board for the literary direction.

It's also concerningly prescient, as he often has been, especially in an early scenario in the book that shapes the world so the rest of the book can happen.

"Remember Moab" has become a sort of in-joke/shibboleth/curse for my close friend group as a reaction to (or identification of) the sort of FB/Instagram things that make real, normal people lose their minds forever.

> ... Reamde and it's definitely the fastest I've managed to get through a novel relative to length.

Same here. But I skipped far fewer paragraphs of his earlier works.

That was the best explanation of litfic vs. commercial/genre fiction I've ever read.

Ah, a classic. This was Slashdot’s high point.

Note: (2004)

Noted!

I love this site, but I miss classic Slashdot

Slashdot is still there.

It's kind of tiny compared to here (<1/5th the articles maybe?) but it still has an older/Slashdot-y crowd.

Oh man, remember when getting a BMW was the high of excessive greed?

Another classic of his, Mother Earth, Mother Board: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Ah, I always wondered how Vancouver Island came to be - a fight between Stephenson and Gibson makes perfect sense.

given how Neal never goes online, i wonder how long he sat on this to reply

I know he’s well liked, but damn. It’s difficult to take him seriously when he says things like “The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate.”

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