MattScho
Full Member
- Dec 3, 2020
MIT did an interview with him, and they asked him about how he was able to get the metaverse so right back in 1992. His answer: because it was so obvious. It's kind of like wondering how someone came up with the idea for Google Earth.Soo...I picked up some Neal Stephenson on MattScho's suggestion. Holy crap...I can't believe I've not read this guy before now.
Snow Crash started off with the best chase scene I've ever read. The near-future worldbuilding is fantastic. There's oodles of snark and witty dialogue in his dystopian future. Think RoboCop meets Blade Runner. A VR Metaverse is a major part of the plot - amazing since this was pubbed in 1992. Stephenson manages to get a lot of present technology right.
About the only faults I could find were a miserable attempt at a romantic sub-plot and oh-god-that-ending.
I've not yet finished Cryptonomicon, but I hope the ending is better. The book sure is longer. Snark is cranked to eleven in this one. Sometimes, Neal doesn't know when to put the Joker back into the deck.
Most of the tangents he goes off to are interesting, but some are way too long. I'm a geek, and I understand the more technical passages. Still, geeks doesn't need everything explained to them, and non-geeks will tire of the info dumps.
Stephenson plays with history a bit. I sometimes had to Wiki-dive to parse what was real from creative license.