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.
Unfortunately, yes. Stephenson is something of a founder of what became known as "cyberpunk," but his angle has always been the right wing of it, where the socioeconomic conditions are mentioned but not really addressed as the dystopia part of it as much as "government sucks and is bad so I guess corporations took over and that is fine, also look at how not normal and freakish those freaks are over there," and the protagonist is usually a libertarian wank fantasy of genius exceptionalism who wants to create a bubble society of fellow exceptional geniuses, not unlike his contemporary Orson Scott Card and how the "Ender's" books played out over time.
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?
William Gibson wrote some foundational pieces of cyberpunk that are a lot more savory and have significantly less of Stephenson's libertarian ideological baggage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson
I like his work enough that I quote him on one of my own books' chapter headers, specifically "The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed."
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.
If Stephenson was the First Impact of fedoracore libertarian brain, then Cline of "Ready Player One/Two" infamy was the Second Impact. :shinji-impact: :epsteingelion:
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.
A lot of it is :bootlicker: , some of it extreme enough where the sycophant directly says that billionaires have more life and more energy to them than the masses do. Big Yud of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" fanfiction fame said that around the time he received millions of dollars from said billionaires under pretense of "research."
As for the rest, my best guess is that it could be as lazy as Great Man Theory, unexamined, colliding with Just World Hypothesis, which leads to the assumption that the ruling class rules over the rest of us for some presumably good reason. :zizek:
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.
Vampires need minions to do the dirty work and to flatter them and to find fresh blood.
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".
The ending to Ready Player Two is even worse. The "hero" from the first book is now unironically a mind controlling near-omnipotent narcissist psychopath but both he (and the author) have zero fucking clue about how not heroic that all is, and then the "hero" ragequits by boarding a magic spaceship with a harem of mind-controlled sex slaves and goes into space to do... something, because ruling the Earth is too hard due to all those ungrateful peasants.
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.
