Let’s talk about Neal

“And so,” the snotty bunch of haz­ers asked him, “do you read?”

“Yes sirs,” he said. Knight­hood by coercion.

“What’s your favorite genre?” I asked, gaz­ing at the immense fore­head. “I was born with a large fore­head, and no, that is not a reced­ing hair­line, you jerk” he would tell me later, when we had become friends.

But going back to now, his answer was “Sci­ence fic­tion. Asi­mov. Long pause. Sirs.”

We groaned.

Sci­ence fic­tion, in that lit­tle clique, was passé. It was bor­ing and juve­nile, a resort of failed fan­tasy writ­ers (it was either that or . Worlds with scary green faced aliens and half baked sci­en­tific the­o­ries on time travel weren’t gonna cut it, not for hard nosed young men who could smoke a whole Ben­son & Hedges with­out cough­ing. By the way, we are a socially respon­si­ble blog and would like inform you that smok­ing in Bhutan can land you in jail, unless you are the king.

“Yes,” we said, “Foun­da­tion was good. Dick was good too.” Sti­fled laugh­ter. “But that’s it. No new ideas any­more, and how many vari­a­tions on time travel can you read ?”

“No, but …”

“Why do we get the sense you are try­ing to con­tra­dict us?”

“I mean yes… sirs. SF is not a hap­pen­ing field. I agree wholeheartedly.”

It has been a few years since the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pened, and I wish I could go back in time and take the side of the young man with a reced­ing hair­line and tell the oth­ers to go read Cyber­punk. That’ll only hap­pen in bad sci­ence fic­tion, so I’ll have to make do with a trib­ute to Neal Stephen­son.

The prob­lem with sci-fi (we all thought) was that it took itself too seri­ously. ‘Twas a genre lost in its gad­gets, a genre enam­ored with its clair­voy­ance, a genre filled with stuffy geek-writers who believed that mediocre plots could be trans­formed into clas­sics when set in the future in imag­i­nary plan­ets. Mar­garet Atwood helped weaken the impres­sion (you can’t really call her works sci­ence fic­tion, so scratch that) and William Gib­son broke its resolve, but Neal Stephen­son shat­tered it, burnt the rem­nants and shot the ashes up in the air with the weapons that he invented in Snow Crash. He did this by adding one ingre­di­ent to his books: irrev­er­ent satire. A self dep­re­cat­ing tone. Scathing social com­men­tary. Intrigu­ing new social orders, a healthy inter­est in the flow of money, an aware­ness of the impact of tech­nol­ogy on peo­ple. Ok, I was off by a few ingre­di­ents. Big deal.

His books are elab­o­rately plot­ted and incred­i­bly detailed ( and very long), draw­ing on ideas from sev­eral sources: Snow Crash blends in vir­tual real­ity with notions of a lib­er­tar­ian future, The Dia­mond Age is about society’s response to nan­otech­nol­ogy. The com­plex­ity of the ideas is bal­anced by the irrev­er­ent, satir­i­cal tone of the nar­ra­tive — Stephenson’s books never take them­selves too seri­ously. And that endears them to you — a self dep­re­cat­ing geek dis­cussing his ideas with pas­sion is much more lik­able than some­one earnestly try­ing to sell sto­ries about plants that grow on Mars. This excerpt from Snow Crash is typ­i­cal of how Stephen­son treats con­ven­tional sci­ence fic­tion , turn­ing hack­neyed ideas into fun.

The Deliv­er­a­tor belongs to an élite order, a hal­lowed sub­cat­e­gory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is prepar­ing to carry out his third mis­sion of the night. His uni­form is black as acti­vated char­coal, fil­ter­ing the very light out of the air. A bul­let will bounce off its arach­nofiber weave like a wren hit­ting a patio door, but excess per­spi­ra­tion wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed for­est. Where his body has bony extrem­i­ties, the suit has sin­tered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, pro­tects like a stack of tele­phone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliv­er­a­tor never deals in cash, but some­one might come after him any­way — might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, light­weight, the kind of a gun a fash­ion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the veloc­ity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cig­a­rette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliv­er­a­tor never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila High­lands. Some punks in Gila High­lands, a fancy Bur­b­clave, wanted them­selves a deliv­ery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliv­er­a­tor with a base­ball bat. The Deliv­er­a­tor took out his gun, cen­tered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slug­ger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The mid­dle third of the base­ball bat turned into a col­umn of burn­ing saw­dust accel­er­at­ing in all direc­tions like a burst­ing star. Punk ended up hold­ing this bat han­dle with milky smoke pour­ing out the end. Stu­pid look on his face. Didn’t get noth­ing but trou­ble from the Deliverator.

The Deliverator’s car has enough poten­tial energy packed into its bat­ter­ies to fire a pound of bacon into the Aster­oid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gap­ing, gleam­ing, pol­ished sphinc­ters. When the Deliv­er­a­tor puts the ham­mer down, shit hap­pens. You want to talk con­tact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny con­tact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with con­tact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliv­er­a­tor is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliv­er­a­tor so equipped? Because peo­ple rely on him. He is a roll model. This is Amer­ica. Peo­ple do what­ever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a prob­lem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fuck­ing stop them.

Just when you think “Bond wannabe”, you find out. That the Deliv­er­a­tor deliv­ers piz­zas in a world run by cor­po­ra­tions. That the deliv­er­a­tor is a soft­ware engi­neer with atti­tude. And you grin, shake your head and move on to the next chap­ter about Gov­ern­ment­less worlds.

The Deliv­er­a­tor used to make soft­ware. Still does, some­times. But if life were a mel­low ele­men­tary school run by well-meaning edu­ca­tion Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and cre­ative but needs to work harder on his coöper­a­tion skills.”

After Snow­crash and The Dia­mond Age — Cyber­punk Clas­sics — Stephen­son changed tack. Crypto­nom­i­con, his follow-up book, isn’t really Sci­ence Fic­tion, it is a “his­tor­i­cal techno-thriller.” It is an out­stand­ing book that has been has been com­pared in its breadth and scope to Gravity’s Rain­bow, Thomas Pynchon’s dense World War II clas­sic. But Stephen­son won’t mind it being called Sci­ence Fiction:

“The sci­ence fic­tion approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an aware­ness that this is dif­fer­ent.” [Link]

The book

fol­lows two par­al­lel sagas: that of cryp­tog­ra­phers dur­ing World War II attempt­ing to crack Axis codes and that of their descen­dants attempt­ing to use mod­ern cryp­tog­ra­phy to build a data haven in the fic­ti­tious state of Kinakuta, a small nation […]. It also details the polit­i­cal machi­na­tions that fol­low both efforts. [Link]

A much more con­fi­dent Stephen­son digresses heav­ily, includ­ing a point­less short story writ­ten by one of the char­ac­ters and Perl source code for a cryp­to­graphic algo­rithm he describes in the book. The book is a delight­ful read, each digres­sion a source of unex­pected plea­sure. Stephen­son blends in his fic­tional pro­to­gan­ists with real life peo­ple: Dr. Water­house, his cryp­tog­ra­pher hero spends time with Alan Tur­ing, and Ein­stein and Churchill make cameo appear­ances as them­selves. Crypto­nom­i­con is smart, supremely funny and densely packed with ideas and an acute aware­ness of the sev­eral soci­eties spanned by the plot.

[…]When he does get to the right floor, thought, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the under­ly­ing struc­ture of every­thing in Eng­land is post. There is no in between with these peo­ple. You have to walk a mile to find a tele­phone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the sense­less dyna­mit­ing of pay phones had been a seri­ous prob­lem at some­time in the past. And a British mail­box can pre­sum­ably stop a Ger­man tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The con­cept of stamp­ing out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable.

[…]Water­house has for­got­ten all of their names. He always imme­di­ately for­gets the names. Even if he remem­bered them, he would not know their sig­nif­i­cance, as he does not actu­ally have the orga­ni­za­tion chart of the For­eign Min­istry (which runs Intel­li­gence) and the Mil­i­tary laid out in front of him. They keep say­ing “woe to hice!” but just as he actu­ally begins to feel sorry for this Hice fel­low, who­ever he is, he fig­ures out that this is how they pro­nounce “Water­house.” Other than that, the one remark that actu­ally pen­e­trates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says some­thing about the Prime Min­is­ter that implies con­sid­er­able famil­iar­ity. And he’s not even the Main guy. The Main Guy is much older and more dis­tin­guished. So it seems to Water­house (though he has com­pletely stopped lis­ten­ing to what all of these peo­ple are say­ing to him) that a good half of the peo­ple in the room have recently had con­ver­sa­tions with Win­ston Churchill.

And per­haps in response to crit­i­cism that he couldn’t tie up his plots prop­erly, Stephen­son ends Crypto­nom­i­con well, tying up most loose ends. An awe­some, awe­some read.

A review of Crypto­nom­i­con at Slash­dot.

Which brings us to the Baroque Cycle, his ambi­tious tril­ogy set in the early 18^th cen­tury. Stephen­son insists that the Baroque Cycle is still Sci­ence Fic­tion, because the book mostly focuses on sci­ence in the Baroque Era. Hmm. He con­tin­ues using the tech­nique of blend­ing in fic­ti­tious peo­ple with real ones — the duel between New­ton and Leib­niz forms the back­drop for a large part of the cycle.

It is not Crypto­nom­i­con, but it is a fine book nev­er­the­less. Even though it feels a bit like read­ing a smart schoolboy’s scrap­book filled with news­pa­per clip­pings from the 17^th cen­tury, the writ­ing sparkles, and the char­ac­ters intrigue. (And the sec­ond book in the tril­ogy is set in eigh­teenth cen­tury India, which is another rea­son to read it).

And the books are also… you know what, this post is way too long. So with­out much ado, I’ll conclude.

There­fore, I con­clude, Neal Stephen­son is a good writer who writes elab­o­rately plot­ted sci­ence fic­tion full of irrev­er­ent humor. Hence, I infer, you will all go read his books and write your own reviews. Please wipe your glazed eyes and go back to your own blogs. If you are a came through google, sorry, no naked pic­tures exist on this blog, except on one post. Con­tinue searching.