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Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as op

by fmajid 7y ago

Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as opposed to how today’s best and brightest are focusing their energy into increasing ad click-through conversion rates by 3%.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    Reading some of that in the modern era was... uncomfortable but probably valuable.
- Kadin 7y ago
  I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.
maxerickson 7y ago
The Diamond Age is set in a horrifying dystopia. It's also not real clear that the outcome of the primer is a positive for the Mouse Army.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s, and it's very possible the book was revolutionary and groundbreaking in 1992, but it does show some age nowadays.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  I guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to their logical conclusion and subverting or inverting many others. It was one of the first influential works of the new wave of science fiction that came to be called post-cyberpunk (a genre notoriously hard to define beyond the obvious ”after cyberpunk”). The clear shift in narrative style after the prologue functions as a boundary of sorts, informing the reader that they are not in Kansas anymore. (Stephenson does this again, even more explicitly, in The Diamond Age!)
- maire 7y ago
  Snow Crash came out about 8 years after Neuromancer and 17 years after Shockwave Rider so I don't think it was groundbreaking. Having said that, I did enjoy it and I do see modern weak knock-offs of Snow Crash that have gotten praise from the pundits in the last couple of years. Cryptonomicon was awesome but too long. I wish it was cut down. I loved Diamond Age. I still think about it.
russh 7y ago
Most of Diamond Age is incredible, the rest not so much.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  It has Stephenson's usual problem where he forgot to write an ending and it just sort of stops.
kragen 7y ago
Even though the technology was mostly “used for good” it was still a nightmarish dystopia except for the tiny elite phyles. Nanotech was under tight centralized control, as the Foresight Foundation recommends, in the book, but numerous disasters happened anyway. Most of the population lived lives of miserable degradation despite enjoying material abundance due to the assemblers.

by fmajid 7y ago

IggleSniggle 7y ago

Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.

Barrin92 7y ago
the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.
- dllthomas 7y ago
  Reading some of that in the modern era was... uncomfortable but probably valuable.
Kadin 7y ago
I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.

maxerickson 7y ago

The Diamond Age is set in a horrifying dystopia. It's also not real clear that the outcome of the primer is a positive for the Mouse Army.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

Hmm, I read Snow Crash a few years back, mainly due to the praise. It was certainly a good book, but quite honestly I felt it was overrated. I'm in my late 20s, and it's very possible the book was revolutionary and groundbreaking in 1992, but it does show some age nowadays.

Sharlin 7y ago
I guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to their logical conclusion and subverting or inverting many others. It was one of the first influential works of the new wave of science fiction that came to be called post-cyberpunk (a genre notoriously hard to define beyond the obvious ”after cyberpunk”). The clear shift in narrative style after the prologue functions as a boundary of sorts, informing the reader that they are not in Kansas anymore. (Stephenson does this again, even more explicitly, in The Diamond Age!)
maire 7y ago
Snow Crash came out about 8 years after Neuromancer and 17 years after Shockwave Rider so I don't think it was groundbreaking. Having said that, I did enjoy it and I do see modern weak knock-offs of Snow Crash that have gotten praise from the pundits in the last couple of years. Cryptonomicon was awesome but too long. I wish it was cut down. I loved Diamond Age. I still think about it.

russh 7y ago

Most of Diamond Age is incredible, the rest not so much.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
It has Stephenson's usual problem where he forgot to write an ending and it just sort of stops.

kragen 7y ago

Even though the technology was mostly “used for good” it was still a nightmarish dystopia except for the tiny elite phyles. Nanotech was under tight centralized control, as the Foresight Foundation recommends, in the book, but numerous disasters happened anyway. Most of the population lived lives of miserable degradation despite enjoying material abundance due to the assemblers.