Okay so I'm only at like the first chapter but I honestly can't tell if the stupid little bildrungsroman bit about the midwestern tech bro turned feudal lord is intended as satire.
Choice bits:
...(he) found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behaviors were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.
...while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.
Honestlt I'd assume satire but coming from what I know about Stephenson I'm really not sure.
So Shadowrun game books being shopping catalogs for defining your character by what brand of laser rifle he operates and barely even caring that you can't improve the society you're fighting for... is totally in line with the very roots of cyberpunk. Great.
Has there ever been a single kernel of hope in the genre, or has it always been a sham?
The guy is possibly the biggest amplifier, if not the progenitor of fedoracore libertarian brain. I also can't deny that I couldn't put Cryptonomicon and Seveneves down until I finished. I really liked Fall.. but like Dodge, he's 100% a weird guy with bad opinions.
Honestly that Epstein emoji is too real. Reading the passage I was wondering why these reddit ass writers always portray the wealthy as talented and passionate individuals instead of their true private monsterous natures. I think the one who got it most right was Banks.
Never heard of Yudkowsky before but i just spent half an hour on his rationalwiki page. And, surprise surprise, :epstein: donated to his brain genius foundation.
The ending to Ready Player One is this meme, with the author shooting the larger points over his own head and going "Wow! Optimus Prime".
Fall was a good read, but also a total nightmare as he, without any real judgement, builds a world where the living slave away for the dead.😱🤯
Only thing I've read from him was Seveneves which gets wayyy into eugenics shit toward the end so yay I'm gonna say that's a :yikes:
take away the last third and it's absolutely solid hard scifi, the last parts in the distant future are so unnecessary
I’m shocked that his editors let him publish the back third of that book.
It was egregious even for him. They let him tack an entire nearly-unrelated novella on the back of what I thought was a decent book (Stephenson's political leanings aside). It was almost like he wrote the first part just to sneak in his weird far future eugenics fanfic of his own work.
Is it really that bad (I never even heard of this author till today)?
It's not that the content is excessively terrible or problematic, it's that the first part of the book is a perfectly good, self-contained story, and then there's an "epilogue" that is almost an entire novel on its own that is almost totally unrelated to the first part of the book. It wasn't so much that it was bad as much as a totally bizarre choice.
yeah, it's a total mess, a baffling tonal shift like it was fan fiction written by some redditor who studies physics
to be fair, the megastructures were hella cool, though... they just didn't belong in that book
That's exactly what I thought, like he wrote fan fiction based on his own writing. The concepts he describes are cool, but if he or his publisher were that set on publishing it, they should have published the first part and then took the second part and polished it into a proper follow up. As you say, baffling decision.
I think whats more important is where the book is going with this. If this is a naive dscription from an unreliable narrator, that's fine. If those entired two pages of Great Man theory are not criticized or subverted in the text of the novel, then it's not worth my time.
Honestly, I'm not sure either. He seems to love tongue in cheek bits, which can provide some convenient plausible deniability for all the individualist/meritocratic stuff.
