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Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming
- woleium 5y agoI really enjoy Stephenson's work. If you have yet to read any of his stuff i'd recommend starting with Cryptonomicon
- zabzonk 5y agoNah, Snow Crash. And then Anathem.
- karlshea 5y agoTotally agree, it was my intro to his work. I’d also recommend “Mother Earth Mother Board”, an essay of his also in Wired about the laying of an intercontinental fiber cable. Hugely enjoyable and a good peek into his writing.
- Fnoord 5y agoMy intro to his work was his essay: In the Beginning... Was the Command Line [1]. Back then I didn't read Snow Crash; a couple of years ago I did. Loved it! I haven't been able to get through Cryptonomicon. I did like Diamond Age, but as another commentor said it falls off at the end. Written by someone with bad attention span when it comes to reading fiction (easily bored/distracted). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
- mrintegrity 5y agoSnowcrash is where i would begin (where i did begin). It was some years ago now so i don't really remember why I hated cryptonomicon but I did, iirc, the plot jumped around all the time, I couldn't care about the protagonists. Am I remembering correctly that the whole plot ultimately revolved around a large stash of gold?
- RandallBrown 5y agoCryptonomicon is a fictionalized telling of how Alan Turing cracked the enigma code and how that led to the future of computing. The timeline does jump around between world war 2 and "modern" times. There was a large stash of gold, but I don't remember that being particularly important in the grand scheme of the book. It's one of my favorite books of all time.
- teekert 5y agoI love science fiction and read a lot of it, but I just couldn't get through Cryptonomicon, I just have the feeling that after a lot of pages nothing is really happening. Should I just keep reading until it gets better then? The start seems super slow with 0 interesting developments.
- dagw 5y agoHonestly, and I say this as someone who loved the book, it doesn't get 'better'. If you don't like the prose and structure of the first 50-100 pages you probably won't like the book.
- teekert 5y agoThanx, that's all I needed to know. I have sometimes pushed through hundreds of pages because I knew something was coming, but if nothing is coming I really prefer to spend my time otherwise :)
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI was going to offer the same advice (and generalize it to anyone who writes big books, whether its the count of monte cristo or modern sci-fi epics) people who write long books, and therefore people who read them, generally aren't in it for the destination, but the journey. Having said that, there are some authors mentioned in this thread that didnt immediately click with me that are now my favorites. There's usually at least one (relatively) short book that should give you an entryway to try them out, without the full commitment.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoI even enjoy his lesser novels and have read all of his novels multiple times. So, I've been looking forward to this one and just finished my second re-read of Fall, which has grown on me since it came out; probably one of his least accessible novels. Half of the fun in that one is all the back references to his past novels (e.g. Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, REAMDE) with characters and events being referred to. So, maybe don't start with that one. Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon are probably all good ones to start with and all still very much on topic despite being a few decades old now.
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoCryptonomicon is one of my favorite books of all time, but as Stephenson's success has risen so has lack of editing. He's the one author that I think would really benefit from releasing both a "mainstream" copy of his works and then a "director's cut" of the same story.
- lindseymysse 5y agoI agree with this. Snow Crash and Zodiak were such taut novels, Diamond Age was a little lush, and Cryptonomicon was a slog for me and then I tuned out. My favorite remains Zodiak -- I read it over and over as a teenager and when I moved to Dorchester, MA years later had deja vu when I realized how well he captured the Boston area. I used to do stealth rides on my bicycle around Boston late at night because, yes, the cabbies will try to kill you. Fun times.
- tgv 5y agoAnd let's not mention Seveneves.
- pengaru 5y agoSeveneves was alright, but Anathem, fuck me do I have better things to do. Anathem was the first time I felt a complete disrespect for my time from Stephenson.
- unionpivo 5y agoFunny Anathem is still my favorite book from him. Read it 4 times by now, which is quite rare for me. Seveneves I didn't particular like and sometimes skipped pages at a time. Just goes to show how peoples taste is different.
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoAnathem is definitely my favorite novel of his, too. Seveneves: just stop after act 2. Pretend the last couple hundred pages of the book don’t exist. Fall: this is the first Stephenson book that I ended up skimming. I could not bring myself to care about the endless retelling of Paradise Lost. And yes, I’ve even read The Big U. It was better than Fall, imo.
- ryanSrich 5y agoSnow crash or seveneves are more accessible imo. That’s where I would start. No doubt cryptonomicon is an amazing piece of work, but it’s a beast to get through. Not as much of a beast as Anathem, but still tough.
- nitrogen 5y agoAnathem is my favorite book of his, but I definitely had to pause and reread and just decide not to fully absorb the detailed architectural descriptions of the maths/monasteries in the early pages.
- ryanSrich 5y agoI lost count of how many times I started and stopped anathem before finally pushing through to finish it. It has to be at least 5 or 6. It’s worth it imo, but I agree there are entire sections that I will never fully understand.
- krageon 5y agoYou could tragically gloss over 90% of that and still have a very solid story.
- beambot 5y agoDiamond Age, Snowcrash, and Seveneves are much more accessible and (IMHO) better.
- ncmncm 5y agoIf you want a book where several things are happening on every single page, Reamde is for you. People treat it like it is not his style because it is an absolute romp. It sends up every action/sf trope in one book. Russians, crashing a business jet, plasma cutter, off-grid extremists, you name it, it's in there.
- fho 5y agoEnglish is not my primary language and I had a really hard time getting into the Cryptonomicon. Started three times over 20 years and didn't make it over the first 100 pages the first two times. Having now finished it I can say that it is definitely worth it, but I would recommend to start with something simpler, e.g. Diamond Age.
- andyjohnson0 5y agoI find him frustratingly variable. I enjoyed Snow Crash and reamde and some of his non-fiction work. A lot of the rest (including Cryptonomicon and Seveneves) seems over-long, over-digressive, and annoyingly inconclusive. I don't know why - he's clearly an intelligent and thoughtful author.
- Gatsky 5y agoI have read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I highly recommend The Diamond Age, it’s just so… interesting. And stunning in parts.
- markrages 5y agoFinally!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Proven 5y agoIsn't science fiction emanating from climatist and globalist circles good enough for y'all? > Stephenson think there might be a novel there. "Nothing else matters in comparison. It's going to be the issue for 100 years" It's not going to be an issue because 5 or 10 years from now it will become obvious how useless these efforts are, and everyone will just move on. It's already something many people know, but the cost of fanatical climatist policies hasn't been passed on to socialist-leaning voters. Once the average voter has to set their winter room temperature to 19C or buy less food, we'll see how enthusiastically they'll vote for climatist agenda. Stealing more via taxation won't work because the pie will keep shrinking. And 100y from now there will be other places to live.
- helloworld11 5y ago>Disaster number one: You can practically smell the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 massing microscopically. This was back in late July, just after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said that everyone, vaccinated or no, should go back to wearing masks inside. Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it. Such worries among a large crowd of mostly young people such paranoia despite nearly complete vaccination? What was the goddam point of such heavy handed vaccine mandates in the first place if even after these vaccines that presumably work well to dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness, people should still scurry back behind all the health measures? At this point it's like going into panic mode over people possibly transmitting the ordinary annual flu to each other if the vaccines reduce the chances of death as much as is clinically claimed.
- kybernetyk 5y agoApocalypse terror sells
- zpeti 5y agoThis. And also the west seems completely obsessed with safety, it trumps any other value now. But safety has a massive price, but that doesn’t matter any more. I’m also guessing a large part of how politicians can make themselves seem useful is making people safe. There’s not much else for them to do any more everyone is so well off.
- Fnoord 5y agoLook at how authoritarian the lockdowns in Australia, China, and various other Asian countries were. It worked, unlike the weak lockdowns in Europe. Look at how authoritarian governments are, like Russia, Turkey, any country in Middle East, Belarus, Myanmar. Safety (for the ruling tribe) sells, as does security theater (post 9/11), but its not unique to West. Nor is it useless (if it were, it would simply not exist).
- kybernetyk 5y agoSeveneves was about global warming ... kind of ;)
- pabs3 5y agoReminds me of the plot of Snow Piercer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Piercer#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Piercer#Plot
- citizenpaul 5y agoWhy "finally?" Was thre some petition? Has he been claiming he would for a long time?
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI can't decide if I need a browser extension that just deletes the word "finally" from headlines, as it never adds anything but unnecessary drama or actively blocks the whole article from my view on the basis that it's probably clickbait bullshit. Has anyone written an AI yet that can read the article and tell you that before you waste your time?
- Fnoord 5y ago'Finally' denotes op'ed, subjectivity by author of Wired article. It signals those who care about global warming to click, while those who don't care are more inclined to skip. Ie. it has a use. While you're at it you can do the same with questionmark / questions, cause the answer is probably "No.". HN does use software to (de)prioritize certain titles and URLs.
- drstewart 5y agoDon't forget about the word "quietly". Usually trying to insinuate something shady is happening but always leaves me thinking: "Would I really expect them to broadcast this loudly?"
- adwn 5y agoNext week on HN: This AI can finally tell you whether an article is a waste of your time
- mejutoco 5y agoI have you covered! I developed this half-joking half serious extension to remove the word 'actually', but it already expanded to include words like 'literally. (each word is configurable individually) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/actually-no-remove-actual/dnjekdlckidinafaebkhcojebjjpphkb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/actually-no-remove... If you comment on the webstore page with the request to add finally I will add the feature this week.
- ncmncm 5y agoI am thrilled to learn that the title of the book is about the absolute disaster inherent in typical geo-engineering ideas. But nobody talks about how, as the oceans acidify, the basis for the whole, worldwide ocean ecosystem is teetering at the edge of collapse, and that, what, two billion? people today depend on that ocean ecosystem for their protein. (Calories are cheap. Protein is dear.) Wars will happen over access to the scraps. Meanwhile, as extremely densely populated parts of the planet become uninhabitable -- first, the crops will fail -- the people who live there will not sit down and die. They will move, in their millions. (It is already happening, across and around the Mediterranean.) The places they will try to go are already populated, and crops there will be in trouble, too. There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable. But the refugees will not be going there, and will not be equipped to make the places livable. They will head for civilization, in places that do not want them. Political pressure to try to keep them out will put right-wing extremists in power, whose solutions will resemble what were called "final". Once in power, they will start wars, as they do. Will those rapidly become nuclear wars? Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome. Anyway, if civilization collapses, fossil fuel production and, thus, consumption, will plummet, and atmospheric CO2 concentration might start down, provided we have not got a positive-feedback cycle already locked in, as the tundra melts and decays.
- krageon 5y ago> Will those rapidly become nuclear wars? No, because you are describing folks in shitty parts of the world. They will die just fine in regular wars and just because they aren't nuclear or the world will not end because we had them doesn't make it any less tragic. > Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome. Raise your children better than you were, because it won't be you dealing with the problems.
- Tycho 5y agoWhy would colder lands become arable at a slower pace than warmer lands becoming infertile?
- sireat 5y agoI am a fan of Snow Crash and Diamond Age and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co.... So it was a bit shocking to learn the following: From the article: "From 1999 to 2006, Stephenson worked as a member of the technical staff at Jeff Bezos' private space rocket company, Blue Origin. A three-year stint at Intellectual Ventures Lab, the R&D arm of the science investment firm started by Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold, involved some climate-change-related research." The Blue Origin work seems pretty logical. The Intellectual Ventures stint/k proves that we all have a price for rose colored blinders. Presumably Stephenson realized how ethically challenged IV is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
- CRConrad 5y agoYeah, before he realised and changed his mind, it probably seemed like just too good a deal financially to pass up. Perhaps with some element of "Maybe I can influence it for the better", which he then gave up on.
- throwanem 5y ago> This isn't one of those climate books where small-town college professors get sad. This, for anyone interested, is an entirely deserved potshot at Ian McEwan's 2010 Solar.
- nobody9999 5y agoIf you'd like a decent read that has aspects of climate change as a central theme, check out The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's pretty good.
- s7r 5y agoThe discussion about heroes, technologism, and hopelessness, are all distractions in my opinion. After 3 years of trying to understand meaningful things we can do about climate change, I've come around to a simple perspective: The way we mitigate + respond to climate change, and other crises happening around us, is by organizing in our communities. Why organize? Organizing begets collective action. Individual and collective action are both crucial to dealing with these issues. Building relationships at a local level, listening to issues and worldviews from our neighbors, and organizing to address shared challenges, can help us support individual changes (like lower impact lifestyles) and community-level transformation at the same time. How do we organize? Just start doing it. Find out the community activities happening around you, or call over a few friends and discuss some local issues you each care about. Here's a [simple tool](https://rebrand.ly/just-start https://rebrand.ly/just-start) to help you find activities near you (pulled from calendars of community organizations), and resoruces to help you start / publish your own organizing activities. It also includes local data, which could open your eyes about some important things happening in your community (e.g. air quality level, cancer risks from air toxics, vulnerability and resilience indicators). It's also [open-source](https://github.com/sbutler-gh/just-start https://github.com/sbutler-gh/just-start) — would love to collaborate, and hear your perspectives, if it interests you. ___________ On another note, if you're interested in three years of mis-steps and learnings about climate change, here's more of that story (see child comment or [blog](https://www.sambutler.us/climate-perspective https://www.sambutler.us/climate-perspective) — it couldn't all fit in one comment)
- mitchbob 5y agohttps://archive.ph/lw5Pt https://archive.ph/lw5Pt