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Stephenson as a Sci-Fi Author always struck me as Kurt Vonnegut for remedial readers, or as part of the Cory Doctorow league of Cyberpunk Authorship compared to

Stephenson as a Sci-Fi Author always struck me as Kurt Vonnegut for remedial readers, or as part of the Cory Doctorow league of Cyberpunk Authorship compared to the peaks of the genre like William Gibson.

theGnuMe 3y ago
That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do you mean) for us lay people?
- piltdownman 3y ago
  Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre. This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its name. His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity. You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the Korean War. Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation of the American University system as it geared towards research over pure academia. The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.". The plotting characterisation and story beats when not directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of Neuromancer. Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre. Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA audience.
  - wintermutestwin 3y ago
    While I generally agree with this well written criticism (ChatGPT?), you ignore Snowcrash's most interesting (to me) idea: the Sumerian "Nam Shub" (mind virus) and its intersection with the metaverse, which I found to be an all too plausible prediction. One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given my username) Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will be trounced...
    - piltdownman 3y ago
      I'm not sure whether to be appalled or flattered by the ChatGPT comparison at this stage of Language Model maturity, but I'm sure there's some hiberno-english artefacts in my breakdown that will advocate for my analog autonomy! The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon: "We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub." or even the post-coital after-images of VR "His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall." My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement. Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        I'm not sure if you are GPT. But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly. (it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
I liked the review comment he used to feature on his own website: "Umberto Eco without the charm".
throw4847285 3y ago
Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  That's not really that bad of a description of Gibson in any of his eras, but also that's what a lot of readers want, PKD without most of the madness. "The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's most mad/trippy setting so far.
  - throw4847285 3y ago
    Interesting. I will give it a look. I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose. I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
- notahacker 3y ago
  yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other writers could imply an entire world with a few well chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash which is basically caricaturing cyberpunk, he feels the need to explain how everything works. Which doesn't necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate. Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters
k2enemy 3y ago
That's a terrific way of putting into words my thoughts about Stephenson, except I've thought of him as Thomas Pynchon for remedial readers rather than Vonnegut.
- piltdownman 3y ago
  If I'd ever successfully made it through Gravity's Rainbow, I might have contended so as well!
  - southwesterly 3y ago
    Crying of Lot 49 is short and sweet.
  - k2enemy 3y ago
    I'd recommend Against the Day, then if you enjoy that, try Gravity's Rainbow again. It continues some of the timeline of Against the Day. GR is super tough for the first third but gets easier and more enjoyable.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      AtD gets sidetracked with long stretches of s&m-laden filth. GR reads like a fever dream but it's interesting both thematically and in prose (it's also dirty, but doesn't linger as much).
      - shwaj 3y ago
        Username checks out. Funny, I remember GR as being filthier, such parts don’t jump to mind regarding AtD. AtD is one of my all-time favorite books.
        slothtrop 3y ago
        Having read them both twice (I like them all really) I remember more of the gross stuff in AtD than otherwise, maybe because it seemed more coherent on the page.

theGnuMe 3y ago

That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do you mean) for us lay people?

piltdownman 3y ago
Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre. This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its name. His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity. You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the Korean War. Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation of the American University system as it geared towards research over pure academia. The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.". The plotting characterisation and story beats when not directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of Neuromancer. Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre. Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA audience.
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  While I generally agree with this well written criticism (ChatGPT?), you ignore Snowcrash's most interesting (to me) idea: the Sumerian "Nam Shub" (mind virus) and its intersection with the metaverse, which I found to be an all too plausible prediction. One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given my username) Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will be trounced...
  - piltdownman 3y ago
    I'm not sure whether to be appalled or flattered by the ChatGPT comparison at this stage of Language Model maturity, but I'm sure there's some hiberno-english artefacts in my breakdown that will advocate for my analog autonomy! The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon: "We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub." or even the post-coital after-images of VR "His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall." My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement. Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      I'm not sure if you are GPT. But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly. (it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

I liked the review comment he used to feature on his own website: "Umberto Eco without the charm".

throw4847285 3y ago

Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.

WorldMaker 3y ago
That's not really that bad of a description of Gibson in any of his eras, but also that's what a lot of readers want, PKD without most of the madness. "The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's most mad/trippy setting so far.
- throw4847285 3y ago
  Interesting. I will give it a look. I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose. I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
notahacker 3y ago
yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other writers could imply an entire world with a few well chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash which is basically caricaturing cyberpunk, he feels the need to explain how everything works. Which doesn't necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate. Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters

k2enemy 3y ago

That's a terrific way of putting into words my thoughts about Stephenson, except I've thought of him as Thomas Pynchon for remedial readers rather than Vonnegut.

piltdownman 3y ago
If I'd ever successfully made it through Gravity's Rainbow, I might have contended so as well!
- southwesterly 3y ago
  Crying of Lot 49 is short and sweet.
- k2enemy 3y ago
  I'd recommend Against the Day, then if you enjoy that, try Gravity's Rainbow again. It continues some of the timeline of Against the Day. GR is super tough for the first third but gets easier and more enjoyable.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    AtD gets sidetracked with long stretches of s&m-laden filth. GR reads like a fever dream but it's interesting both thematically and in prose (it's also dirty, but doesn't linger as much).
    - shwaj 3y ago
      Username checks out. Funny, I remember GR as being filthier, such parts don’t jump to mind regarding AtD. AtD is one of my all-time favorite books.
      - slothtrop 3y ago
        Having read them both twice (I like them all really) I remember more of the gross stuff in AtD than otherwise, maybe because it seemed more coherent on the page.