Oh, dear.
Originally read this back in the mid-90s and, of course, was blown away, as so many were (are). So it seemed like a prime candidate for my ReReadVember (That is a Thing I've invented ...) -- revisiting books that have grown large in memory -- how do they stand up to the Test of Time?
Well, I've made it to page 102, and I'm giving up, and I'm a little sad, and definitely disappointed in myself. But I just can't hack it. (Hack It? geddit?) It's not just that time has caught up with what once was the edgy, postcard from the dystopian future, hacker vibe, and even what seems like the outlandish future fragmentation of the USA into a wild free-for-all of privatised nation-states and franchised public services. I mean, it's 2020, Donald Trump is President, a pandemic is ripping through the populations of our real nation-states, and some of their leaders are doggedly denying it even exists, and giving their unqualified friends the contracts for protective gear and vital equipment -- reading about the Mafia taking over pizza delivery just doesn't seem that outlandish ... or funny.
Some older SF novels I've been reading have been quaintly, charmingly wrong, but at least they still felt prescient in their wrongness. While Stephenson clearly had some of an inside edge on the internet, virtual reality, hacker culture and even the fragmentation of society ... reality caught up with his ideas and passed them in the fast lane.
"The computer is a featureless black wedge. It does not have a power cord, but there is a narrow translucent plastic tube emerging from a hatch on the rear ... In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fibre-optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world ..." (page 21)
Um. yeah, Hiro, I've got one of those, too ... A couple of pages before I gave up, we were supposed to be wowed because YT, the Kourier girl who is auditioning to be Hiro Protagonist's sidekick, has a biker uniform with a calculator on one thigh ("doubling as a taxi meter and a stopwatch") And on the other thigh, a personal phone. Be still, my beating heart ...
I think I could have taken the gosh-golly-wow rendering of what is now charmingly retro tech, and wildly dated attitudes to tech (It is, after all, fun to be reminded , from time to time, just how turbo-charged technology has been in our relatively brief residence of this planet ...) but what I just couldn't take was the clunky, exposition-heavy style. Everything is explained to death. The characters are ciphers ... cartoons who are there to press buttons, swing samurai swords, marvel at the tech, and explain why burger joints have become sovereign states, with their own passports, prisons are run like burger joints, and the Mafia will execute delivery guys whose pizzas are one second late ...
There is a scholarly paper here, on how unkindly time can deal with SF. But I don't want to be the one to write it ...
Originally read this back in the mid-90s and, of course, was blown away, as so many were (are). So it seemed like a prime candidate for my ReReadVember (That is a Thing I've invented ...) -- revisiting books that have grown large in memory -- how do they stand up to the Test of Time?
Well, I've made it to page 102, and I'm giving up, and I'm a little sad, and definitely disappointed in myself. But I just can't hack it. (Hack It? geddit?) It's not just that time has caught up with what once was the edgy, postcard from the dystopian future, hacker vibe, and even what seems like the outlandish future fragmentation of the USA into a wild free-for-all of privatised nation-states and franchised public services. I mean, it's 2020, Donald Trump is President, a pandemic is ripping through the populations of our real nation-states, and some of their leaders are doggedly denying it even exists, and giving their unqualified friends the contracts for protective gear and vital equipment -- reading about the Mafia taking over pizza delivery just doesn't seem that outlandish ... or funny.
Some older SF novels I've been reading have been quaintly, charmingly wrong, but at least they still felt prescient in their wrongness. While Stephenson clearly had some of an inside edge on the internet, virtual reality, hacker culture and even the fragmentation of society ... reality caught up with his ideas and passed them in the fast lane.
"The computer is a featureless black wedge. It does not have a power cord, but there is a narrow translucent plastic tube emerging from a hatch on the rear ... In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fibre-optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world ..." (page 21)
Um. yeah, Hiro, I've got one of those, too ... A couple of pages before I gave up, we were supposed to be wowed because YT, the Kourier girl who is auditioning to be Hiro Protagonist's sidekick, has a biker uniform with a calculator on one thigh ("doubling as a taxi meter and a stopwatch") And on the other thigh, a personal phone. Be still, my beating heart ...
I think I could have taken the gosh-golly-wow rendering of what is now charmingly retro tech, and wildly dated attitudes to tech (It is, after all, fun to be reminded , from time to time, just how turbo-charged technology has been in our relatively brief residence of this planet ...) but what I just couldn't take was the clunky, exposition-heavy style. Everything is explained to death. The characters are ciphers ... cartoons who are there to press buttons, swing samurai swords, marvel at the tech, and explain why burger joints have become sovereign states, with their own passports, prisons are run like burger joints, and the Mafia will execute delivery guys whose pizzas are one second late ...
There is a scholarly paper here, on how unkindly time can deal with SF. But I don't want to be the one to write it ...
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