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The focus being on character development and conversation and scenes shows you might be a fan of soft sci fi. Thats OK. Different strokes, different folks, et

by VLM 10y ago

The focus being on character development and conversation and scenes shows you might be a fan of soft sci fi. Thats OK. Different strokes, different folks, etc. The only real problem Diamond Age has from a hard sci fi perspective, is its 20 years old and everyone knows about additive manufacturing and 3-d printing and slicing objects to be printed and feedstock issues and compiling and analog analogies to digital logic gates and compilers and natural language processing and the dangers of closed source, the idea of more or less tablet computing and wikipedia rolled into one. Its all really boring today of course, other than he got quite a few details wrong and its fun to spot them. Twenty years ago, of course, its ideas were absolutely mindblowing. I really enjoyed exploring and daydreaming about the new engineering and new computer science and new concepts in Diamond Age. Sure there was some fluffy interpersonal story to fill it out, but I mostly ignored it for the fascinating hard sci fi concepts. In the late 90s it was a truly awesome hard sci fi novel. Not a very good soft sci fi novel, but whatever. Someone should suggest a modern hard sci fi novel... published in the last year or two.

ashark 10y ago
Oh, the ideas are good, certainly. I'd have rather they'd been delivered in a much better novel half as long, though—which is, I suspect, as long a story as Stephenson could have managed from that promising beginning without wrecking it. It would have been less irritating if none of the story had been good, really, but that first section is great. I don't think it's very good hard SF, either. It does so much that its explorations of the social implications of the advances—which are the whole point of fleshing out an entire novel from the "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we could X?" concepts that the book is full of, rather than writing the short essay or even (these days) tweet that would suffice to explain them as well as the book does—are underdeveloped and/or feel false. The density of these drops off quite a bit early in the book, too, leaving little to chew on but the confused characterization and the increasingly unsatisfying story.

by VLM 10y ago

ashark 10y ago

Oh, the ideas are good, certainly. I'd have rather they'd been delivered in a much better novel half as long, though—which is, I suspect, as long a story as Stephenson could have managed from that promising beginning without wrecking it. It would have been less irritating if none of the story had been good, really, but that first section is great. I don't think it's very good hard SF, either. It does so much that its explorations of the social implications of the advances—which are the whole point of fleshing out an entire novel from the "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we could X?" concepts that the book is full of, rather than writing the short essay or even (these days) tweet that would suffice to explain them as well as the book does—are underdeveloped and/or feel false. The density of these drops off quite a bit early in the book, too, leaving little to chew on but the confused characterization and the increasingly unsatisfying story.