montag on 23/3/2017 at 03:38
You are not alone, but you are killing me! Around four years ago, I started a spare time job building built-in bookshelves. For the last two years it has been my (almost) only source of income. In 2016 and so far this year, I have taken on 13 projects. Out of those, 12 were "entertainment centers". On the plus side, the one true set of bookshelves was a massive wall of shelving 36' long by 16' high! I personally have a book collection of over 800 books, though the vast majority are paperbacks. My friends have all forsworn helping me move ever again, not just because of the books, but also because of my fossil collection. Boxes of books and boxes of rocks, somehow not popular with my aging friends, who would have guessed?
montag on 23/3/2017 at 03:51
Oh, more in line with this thread, I remember enjoying (somewhat, I had some reservations) a book called "Snowcrash" by Neal Stephenson. I know I owned it at one point in time, but can't put my hand on it now. I may have loaned it out and lost it, or it may just be lost in one of my many boxes. Can anyone offer their opinion on it, is it worth tracking down for a reread?
Malf on 23/3/2017 at 10:31
It's a very good book, one of the cornerstones of the cyberpunk sub-genre.
I didn't read it for a long time, but when I did finally get around to it, while some of the computing terms and tech were outdated, the overall story was compelling.
Neal Stephenson does not write short books however. Snowcrash is less guilty of his tendency towards inane filler than some of his later stuff (Cryptonomicon, I'm looking at you), but it still meanders rather aimlessly sometimes.
If you're interested in more cyberpunk, I also highly recommend Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy and Jeff Noon's trilogy of Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation.
Noon's more interested in playing with language than the science behind his fiction, but he takes the reader to some wonderfully weird places.
Rudy Rucker takes the reader to some equally weird places (both feature drugs quite prominently in their writing), and while not quite as poetic as Noon, still obviously enjoys playing with big ideas and language.
demagogue on 23/3/2017 at 11:11
Yeah Cryptonomicon is what I was trying to read last month or so, and it got to a point about a quarter in I was thinking wtf is even going on here. It's just one arbitrary tangent after another. I actually lost my bookmark one time and accidentally skipped ahead dozens, maybe even over 100 pages ahead and didn't even notice after an hour or so of reading before I realized it was mentioning things assuming I knew them that I hadn't read yet. It's the kind of story where that can happen.
Sulphur on 23/3/2017 at 11:42
A quick question since people are into cyberpunk: how much cyberpunk deals with the inner workings of the tech and the implications of it? I've only read Gibson, and I know for a fact he's bigger on the existential angst and corporate dystopia angle that cyberpunk enables, but do the other authors do stuff that deals with the workings of brain-computer interfaces, security layers, legislation, things like that?
The reason I'm asking is partly because I'm curious, and partly because I have a few ideas I'd like to explore, but very little in sci-fi hasn't been trod into the ground already, so I don't want to unintentionally rehash a bunch of things when I could just, you know, rehash them intentionally (if I ever get to writing this stuff, that is).
Malf on 23/3/2017 at 20:02
To be honest, cyberpunk tends to hand-wave that stuff away. Stephenson's generally one of the authors more obsessed with the tech, but that's probably because it gives him an excuse to write pages of tangential waffle.
It's mostly about consciousness, AI and what it means to be human in the information age. Personally, that's what interests me more. I find that when it tries to get too technical, it quite quickly becomes outdated due to the sheer pace of advancement we experience these days, and loses focus on the more interesting, philosophical ideas.
One of the ones I recommended above, Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy made that mistake early on. In the first book, he started talking about how much computer memory it would take to store the contents of the human mind, and as he wrote it in the Eighties, his estimates are rather... quaint. We're talking gigabytes.
The author himself realised his mistake, and veered away from being too granular later on in the series.
Another stunningly good cyberpunk novel I've just remembered is Ian McDonald's "Out on Blue Six". It's more along the messy lines of Rucker and Noon than Gibson's rather clinical approach, and possesses that sense of anarchy that brings the necessary punk to the cyber.
You could also try Cory Doctorow, he of BoingBoing fame. His books are passable, but I find that too often he's trying to ape Gibson by purposefully attempting to predict the future, where Gibson in his earlier novels effortlessly invented it. Essentially, where Doctorow is a technologist first, Gibson is most definitely a writer first.
But above everything else, if you want a cyberpunk book that really challenges you and expands your ideas of what's possible, read Jeff Noon's Vurt. It's dirty, hallucinatory, poetic, breathless and compelling. Calling it the Trainspotting of cyberpunk is doing it a disservice, but that's the closest comparison I can make.
Sulphur on 26/3/2017 at 05:06
Thanks, Malf. Vurt's my next pit stop once I'm done with my current set of books.
ToolHead on 26/3/2017 at 16:21
Not cyberpunk, but Greg Egan is a must for anybody interested in visions of far future human-machine interaction and artificial intelligence societies. Permutation City and Diaspora especially are fantastic.
