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"We've arranged to meet here to talk about his latest novel, number 17 over nearly four decades of wildly popular, cinder-block-sized sci-fi thrillers." Becaus

"We've arranged to meet here to talk about his latest novel, number 17 over nearly four decades of wildly popular, cinder-block-sized sci-fi thrillers." Because climate change is a major, global, and increasingly visible threat to our presence on this planet - and Stephenson hadn't made it a theme of any of his books over the last four decades. In the opinion of the article's author, this is significant. Seems reasonable to me.

drclau 5y ago
I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme. More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change. There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94. I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series. Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.
- andyjohnson0 5y ago
  Permutation City and Diaspora are excellent books by Egan.
  - drclau 5y ago
    Was wondering what to pick next. I’ll pick Diaspora, thanks to your comment. :)
  - mypastself 5y ago
    I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early. I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler. When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
    - andyjohnson0 5y ago
      I'd broadly agree with your comments about Diaspora. The characterisation isn't great, but what makes it so impressive to me is the colossal (time, space) scale of the thing.
jeegsy 5y ago
Of the top of my head, I don't recall any other issue that the zeitgeist even tacitly required a fiction writer to cover. The book will probably be great but what an odd article!
citizenpaul 5y ago
You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? This toxic attitude is really what I was poking at as I suspected it was the case. That or click bait sensationalism. There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.
- andyjohnson0 5y ago
  > You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? No, that's not what I meant at all.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    But even if it wasn't what you meant, it certainly is an impression one can pretty legitimately get. Maybe more so from the headline than the whole contents (can't quite recall, already a few days since I read it); but that only shows that the constant clickbaitification of headlines sucks.

drclau 5y ago

I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme. More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change. There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94. I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series. Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.

andyjohnson0 5y ago
Permutation City and Diaspora are excellent books by Egan.
- drclau 5y ago
  Was wondering what to pick next. I’ll pick Diaspora, thanks to your comment. :)
- mypastself 5y ago
  I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early. I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler. When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
  - andyjohnson0 5y ago
    I'd broadly agree with your comments about Diaspora. The characterisation isn't great, but what makes it so impressive to me is the colossal (time, space) scale of the thing.

jeegsy 5y ago

Of the top of my head, I don't recall any other issue that the zeitgeist even tacitly required a fiction writer to cover. The book will probably be great but what an odd article!

citizenpaul 5y ago

You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? This toxic attitude is really what I was poking at as I suspected it was the case. That or click bait sensationalism. There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.

andyjohnson0 5y ago
> You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? No, that's not what I meant at all.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  But even if it wasn't what you meant, it certainly is an impression one can pretty legitimately get. Maybe more so from the headline than the whole contents (can't quite recall, already a few days since I read it); but that only shows that the constant clickbaitification of headlines sucks.