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precision posted:i dunno i feel like he has transitioned out of "nerd book" into "dad book" territory Absolutely, his pseudonym written book where they put big tv watches on a hundred random sample people across then country that reads their emotions, then used that knowledge of how Americans think to run a brain-modified presidential candidate was the last straw of actual sci-fi turning into Tom Clancy dad novels William Gibson’s recent stuff has been way more interesting, though I need to take another crack at the peripheral. I enjoyed pattern recognition, spook country, and zero history way more than most of stephenson’s recent stuff.
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Jan 20, 2022 13:45
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ante posted:Fair, he should just have a normal name like acclaimed sci fi author Spider Robinson Why isn't he named Spider Manson, like me?
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Jan 20, 2022 14:18
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Gibson's sequel to The Peripheral where Hillary won was pretty lame and his Twitter has a lot of Boomer Democrat energy.
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Jan 20, 2022 14:51
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Meal Stephenson
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Jan 20, 2022 14:54
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neal just write jack shaftoe in space and i'll buy it ok
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Jan 20, 2022 14:58
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I still sort of like Snow Crash. I always thought that the over the top writing style was poking fun at the cyberpunk genre and it made for an entertaining re-read. Diamond Age was okay, I just thought the worldbuilding was sort of lazy, and "nanotech" kind of becomes plot hole filler a little too much. I have REAMDE, but haven't read it yet.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:15
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Snow Crash is still great, it just is of its time and intentionally ott There are so many great moments and visuals in there that are very memorable
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Jan 20, 2022 15:25
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Atlas Hugged posted:Gibson's sequel to The Peripheral where Hillary won was pretty lame and his Twitter has a lot of Boomer Democrat energy. yeah The Peripheral is maybe his best novel but Agency was really boring and toothless not as bad as Stephenson's worst but disappointing 
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Jan 20, 2022 15:55
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Atlas Hugged posted:Gibson's sequel to The Peripheral where Hillary won was pretty lame and his Twitter has a lot of Boomer Democrat energy. lol yeah his twitter sucks absolute poo poo, with the caveat that he does post a lot of bird pictures that he sees on walks with his son
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Jan 20, 2022 16:13
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the best thing gibson wrote is that poem about his granpa in tennessee Agrippa: A Book of the Dead Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992.[1][2][3][4] The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh.[5] Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text's memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light.[5] & then on the day it was released to the art world the entire text of the poem was  mysteriously uploaded to the then-very-new internetthe whole thing was just rad as heck
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Jan 20, 2022 17:07
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Anathem is very good and the only one of his works worth reading. Only made it halfway through the first book in the baroque cycle before giving up out of coma inducing boredom.
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Jan 20, 2022 17:13
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rotinaj posted:though I need to take another crack at the peripheral. It’s excellent, although I had a lot going on when I read it so I only actually understood wtf was going on a third of the way through.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:06
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itt ANATHEM was the first book to have a trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWs1h5WAjWY frikkin rad as frik... would be cool on HBO
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Jan 20, 2022 18:09
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That has exactly the same energy as the Satan’s Alley trailer.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:12
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Vidmaster posted:usual sections where he goes into lots of detail about some obscure topic like Sikh gym etiquette if there are multiple Sikh guys working out together are they required to go around telling each other "yo sikh guns, bro"
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Jan 20, 2022 18:17
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Let's make this thread about good author Gibson instead of mediocre Meal Stephenson Remember how in Virtual Light all those people are living on a bridge in San Fran, and everyone thinks it's gotta be Golden Gate because that's the bridge in SF right? Well actually it's the bridge on the other side of town, the Oakland-Whatever bridge, that they live on 
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Jan 20, 2022 18:44
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gibson's pattern recognition was a great book. never liked a single neal stephenson book
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Jan 20, 2022 18:50
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Mooey Cow posted:Let's make this thread about good author Gibson instead of mediocre Meal Stephenson yeah gibson is way better than even the best stephenson... well maybe anathem and baroque cycle are gibson tier... maybe
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Jan 20, 2022 19:35
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Neuromancer is still the book I give to people who hate books but want to try one. Impossible not to have a good time with it and it doesn’t insult your intelligence
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Jan 20, 2022 19:39
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Gibson is super pretentious
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Jan 20, 2022 21:40
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:lol yeah his twitter sucks absolute poo poo, with the caveat that he does post a lot of bird pictures that he sees on walks with his son why are you pickle rick
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Jan 20, 2022 23:24
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precision posted:
He spends this entire novel referring to toilet paper as "bumwad" And then I saw that a) he was writing a sequel to it for some reason and b) it sounded like it was going to be a riff on Charles Stross' Accelerando. I was mildly interested, but then all the reviews bagged on it, so I didn't bother.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:42
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Reamde wasn't the worst book I've ever read but it was certainly down in the bottom 10 or 20. I stopped about 2/3rds of the way through. OP forgot about "The Big U" and "Zodiac". The big U was funny when I was in college, less so when I tried to read it about 10 years later. Zodiac was a book, I'm sure something happened in it and there was a plot and characters and everything, but it was the most blandiest bland book especially when compared to his other pre-Reamde stuff. Which as I mentioned earlier was terrible.
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Jan 20, 2022 23:47
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I remember The Cobweb being the better of the two books he wrote with his father in law, but that's not super high praise. Never read zodiac or big u, I'm only really aware of them from the lists in the back of his other books.
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Jan 21, 2022 00:43
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Snow Crash taught me about the existence of Sumer and dentatas, and for that I shall always be grateful.
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Jan 21, 2022 00:57
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Seveneves was trash. Neil Stephenson has this problem where he thinks tech billionaires are cool smart people and keeps putting them in his stories.
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Jan 21, 2022 01:03
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precision posted:itt ANATHEM was the first book to have a trailer? I like the Seagalesque fights
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Jan 21, 2022 01:45
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Snowycrash
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Jan 21, 2022 01:48
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yeah zodiac is fine... there's nothing wrong with it
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Jan 21, 2022 02:49
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The cobweb is the airport thriller one about nothing for 3/4th of the book, then it’s about Iraqi chemists synthesizing botulism poison and planning to kill a bunch of people Interface is the one about instant polling being the secret to politics and a dude with a brain implant becomes the ultra politician Both are acceptable but not good Zodiac is far more fun and is about actual ecoterrorism for the first third, then becomes about a wacky conspiracy plot He strikes me as a centrist/center-center left Tom Clancy who got more into tech than war fighting. I should reread pattern recognition, I did at least 2 of Gibson’s books as audiobooks
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Jan 21, 2022 03:34
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Baron von Eevl posted:Also one of the main characters is NDT, and another is basically Hillary Clinton, and she shoots a lady to death when she's breaking into the space station. Did this one feature Terry Goodkind as a guest collaborator?
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Jan 21, 2022 03:46
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I know two people who were the inspiration for minor characters in Zodiac (Kelvin, drawn from one of Stephenson's professors at BU who is a mad scientist in real life, and his kid). Anyway that's my Neal Stephenson story, thanks thread
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Jan 21, 2022 04:06
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I liked the new Kim Stanley Robinson book that was all about people dealing with global warming. New Stephenson book seems to be in that same genre, and my guess is that it'll be...not as good. Might have some wilder ideas, though.
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Jan 21, 2022 04:21
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precision posted:i saw Nealeo has a new one. it's about a super storm because of climate change or something? Can you sell me on one of his super good books I read one where it’s starts of with some dude named Enoch watching a hanging or some poo poo and it was really dragging on but does it get any better?
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Jan 21, 2022 05:08
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SilkyP posted:Can you sell me on one of his super good books That's the Baroque Cycle, specifically Quicksilver which I think is one of the best things he's ever written. I am surprised that someone up thread was calling it boring. I am a huge nerd for that time period and those historic characters though so a story that is ultimately about who invented calculus is right up my alley. The opening segment takes place in the "modern" timeline and is a framing device for the real story, which is set a few decades prior. It's the story of Isaac Newton through the eyes of his (fictional) college roommate and the swashbuckling adventures of Half-cock Jack, King of the Vagabonds, plus a million more characters. It covers the emergence of capitalism and modern banking, who should get priority for coming up with calculus, the rise and fall of governments, the emergence of modern England as a democracy, the development of the modern scientific method and experiments in early modern medicine, syphilis, early forms of cryptography, and the origins of modern trade and globalization. It loving rules. Anathem is my personal favorite and is easier to recommend than the Baroque Cycle because it's a standalone novel and not a months long project. It's the story of a boy who is living in what is effectively a monastery, but instead of dedicating their lives to god, they dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, mostly in an abstract way. They are locked inside for ten years at a stretch and are not allowed any tools to conduct their experiments with except for chalk and blackboards despite the world outside them being full of technological wonders. This is because every time the scientist-monks lock themselves away and start tinkering all they want, reality starts to crumble leading to global crises. The gates to the monastery are about to open for the first time in ten years, so the main character has to decide if he will come back to the monastery after the one week of exposure to the outside world they're allowed or if he'll rejoin his family and live a normal life. Then the government starts ordering specific monks to leave the monastery for unknown reasons, banished forever in a ceremony called Anathem. The mystery only deepens when the main character discovers something he shouldn't, something that shouldn't, and he begins to wonder if his name will soon be on the lists of the banished.
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Jan 21, 2022 07:48
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Aardvark! posted:why are you pickle rick i'm not really sure, but it's the same actual file URL as is in serious norman's avatar, making me wonder whether it was bought the normal way or whether it was a rambunctious mod
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Jan 21, 2022 10:17
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SilkyP posted:Can you sell me on one of his super good books yeah as said that's the start of the Baroque Cycle, which owns very hard. that said even as a fan of his it took me until my third try to actually get through the first book. weirdly enough, the first book is REALLY AWESOME on your second read because of stuff you know. The Diamond Age is a pretty quick read and it's one of his more interesting settings if u wanna try that one
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Jan 21, 2022 17:13
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also he wrote the entirety of THE BAROQUE CYCLE longhand... i suspect he used to have a raging cocaine habit because he talks about listening to speedmetal while he writes and then he writes 3000 pages by hand just for the hell of it lol
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Jan 21, 2022 17:15
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Anathem was great to read multiple times because the setting is so out there and unique that you’re like what is happening which was fun. Second read through you know plot points and can notice all the little nuggets you missed, just as enjoyable. Third and forth read throughs a were a bit disconcerting because I noticed differences, characters were gone and the plot was altered, also certain foods tasted funny now? Also didn’t Nelson Mandela die years ago? Now he was prime minister?? I don’t remember that happening haha. Good book still. by my fifth read through I realized that matter is just energy and then the pages started glowing and the government started asking me a lot of questions, a great star in the sky has MYSTERIOUS PORTENTS THEY ARE WATCHING WE MUST SIGNALL THEM THE KNOÖNS ARE COMING THE KNÖÔNS ARE COMING ALL IS LOST
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Jan 21, 2022 17:27
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lmao
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Jan 21, 2022 17:28
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