Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII

[Cutlass]

The Black Company - by Glen Cook.

 

[Kozmos]

Finished volume one on Mitrokhin archives. Very dry and a bit of a slog at parts, but certainly illuminating about the KGB and it's methods. I'd recommend it to those skeptical of the spying allegations against Russia. Now onto Snow Crash, which is so much more fun than I'd expected and a Tale of Two Cities before I go back to volume two about KGB in the Third World.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. Published in 1991.

 

[Tahuti]

Moonchild by Aleister Crowley.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Finally got around to finishing Neuromancer by William Gibson

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Nearly finished with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. Breezier reading than Marx's Capital, but way less snarky. Historical records and statistical techniques (i.e. not the anecdotes of factories used by Marx) are used to create an analysis of capital and inequality over the past two centuries and further into the current one. The main point is that in the future, the return on capital r will be much greater than overall economic growth g: r > g. The richest get richer faster than the rest, setting the stage for a potential return to the elite-dominated societies of the 18th century. Policy recommendations are proposed to avoid this, most importantly a global tax on capital to reduce the r:g ratio to a manageable level.

Don't really have too many criticisms myself, other than the author's insistence that improved access to education will solve a lot of problems. He repeats this point despite showing degree inflation and that increased access to education has not really improved social mobility. The "education is a sure path to economic success" meme has been a rather sore point personally as of late.

Also, apparently Jane Austen's books were essentially #landedeliteproblems. As if I needed another reason not to read them.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Finally got around to finishing Neuromancer by William Gibson

How did you like it? I recently acquired both it and Shockwave Rider, but haven't really gotten into either one. I'm reading a biography of Luther Martin (a delegate to the constitutional convention who refused to sign) called...Luther Martin: Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet.

 

[Traitorfish]

Neuromancer is a difficult read, in a cyberpunk-saturated world. Too much of it feels like parody to take entirely seriously. It's not bad, by any means, but you find yourself waiting for the punchline.

In contrast Snow Crash, which is almost as venerable, feels very fresh. I think that says a lot about where cyberpunk is, as a genre, that a "classical" rendition feels ridiculous, but is still so clearly the baseline of the genre that a parody which is very nearly as ancient still lands. We know it's ridiculous, but we haven't really figured out how to stop doing it.

Baffling, really, given that we're so much closer to the futures this fiction portrayed, that we're allowing a handful of science fiction writers from the eighties decide how we interpret what is increasingly our present. "Some defunct economist" indeed.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

I have just finished Raven Rock, a history of the US government's program to protect itself with bunkers in the event of TEOTWAWKI. My dad was sort of involved, so I really enjoyed it. Oddly Dick Cheney, The Dark Lord, The Evil One, was also very involved. Guess who was at the White House on 9-11? Dick, the perfect man for the job. Imagine that.

I am playing around with The Hitler Book, it seems that in 1945 Stalin had his intelligence guys prepare a book to try to answer the question, "Hitler; what was up with him?"

 

[Kyriakos]

Thrawn Janet, by R.L.Stevenson. Rather nice ^^

 

[Ajidica]

Neuromancer is a difficult read, in a cyberpunk-saturated world. Too much of it feels like parody to take entirely seriously. It's not bad, by any means, but you find yourself waiting for the punchline.

In contrast Snow Crash, which is almost as venerable, feels very fresh. I think that says a lot about where cyberpunk is, as a genre, that a "classical" rendition feels ridiculous, but is still so clearly the baseline of the genre that a parody which is very nearly as ancient still lands. We know it's ridiculous, but we haven't really figured out how to stop doing it.

Could you elaborate, specifically with regards to Neuromancer? I'm not entirely following on how parts of it feel like a parody. Some parts have aged poorly (5 mb of hot ram!) but on the whole I think it holds up better than Snow Crash, even taking into account the intentional parody aspects of Snow Crash. Neuromancer retained a strong sense of being grounded in reality, even in the less than stellar sequels. Not everyone knows a super hacker and lives in a dystopian slum policed by brutal riot squads. In Neuromancer most people live perfectly ordinary lives with perfectly ordinary jobs with perfectly ordinary concerns. The corporate intrigue and rogue AIs are on a level beyond most people.

 

[Traitorfish]

Could you elaborate, specifically with regards to Neuromancer? I'm not entirely following on how parts of it feel like a parody. Some parts have aged poorly (5 mb of hot ram!) but on the whole I think it holds up better than Snow Crash, even taking into account the intentional parody aspects of Snow Crash. Neuromancer retained a strong sense of being grounded in reality, even in the less than stellar sequels. Not everyone knows a super hacker and lives in a dystopian slum policed by brutal riot squads. In Neuromancer most people live perfectly ordinary lives with perfectly ordinary jobs with perfectly ordinary concerns. The corporate intrigue and rogue AIs are on a level beyond most people.

It's not that anything is specifically ridiculous, it's just that so much of what made the book different has become cliché. The cyber-noir, the aggressively gritty tone, the Japaniana that never builds to more than window-dressing, stuff that through no particular fault of Gibson ends up becoming the hallmarks of boilerplate cyberpunk. Even those parts of it which aren't supposed to be taken entirely seriously- cybernetic sunglasses are supposed to be a silly affectation, surely?- they've been reproduced so many times with straight-faced un-self-awareness that they still grate a bit. It's not that it's done poorly, it's a classic for a reason, it's just that it's all so... done. Snow Crash, I'll grant, shows a degree of wear, because the stuff it's parodying is itself dated, but a lot of that stuff persisted well into the 2000s, so it feels like a slightly-dated book from 2002 rather than 1992. (Although if there's a single respect in which its become markedly became dated, it's that its dystonia is a fundamentally pre-9/11 one, of secular, globalised ultra-commercialism; post-9/11 dystopias have run towards the fascistic.)

Perhaps the difference is simply that Neuromancer gives a fairly loose sketch of its world, so it's easy to fill in the blanks with whatever cliché you'd expect to find, while Snow Crash makes a deliberate point of screwing with your expectations and so is required to flesh out the world a bit more fully- it's about half again as long, and it wouldn't surprise me if that extra 50% was world-building. But that's partly what it means to age poorly, to become bent and distorted under the weight of what follows. Often when you go back to some a classic, genre-founding text, you're surprised by the ways in which it departs from the cliché- Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are far more weird and moody than you'd expect from the pop-cultural image of a "barbarian hero" story- but with Neuromancer, I found pretty much exactly what I expected to find: a well-written but unremarkable cyberpunk story.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Change Agent by Daniel Suarez is an excellent, fast paced, near future sci fi thriller. See the future.

 

[Borachio]

Thrawn Janet, by R.L.Stevenson. Rather nice ^^

You read it in Scots?

That's impressive.

Did you find it easy to read?

For example:

He had a feck o' books wi' him - mair than had ever been seen before in a' that presbytery; and a sair wark the carrier had wi' them, for they were a' like to have smoored in the Deil's Hag between this and Kilmackerlie. They were books o' divinity, to be sure, or so they ca'd them; but the serious were o' opinion there was little service for sae mony, when the hail o' God's Word would gang in the neuk of a plaid. Then he wad sit half the day and half the nicht forbye, which was scant decent - writin', nae less; and first, they were feared he wad read his sermons; and syne it proved he was writin' a book himsel', which was surely no fittin' for ane of his years an' sma' experience.

I can certainly pick out the meaning myself. Given time.

Or just gloss over certain words.

But I wouldn't say it's an easy read.

 

[Kyriakos]

I read the english adaptation of it
'A feck of books' sounds father-Tedish, though

 

[Takhisis]

It's not that anything is specifically ridiculous, it's just that so much of what made the book different has become cliché.

It sounds as if it were the Seinfeld/Friends of Anglophone cyberpunk literature.

 

[Kyriakos]

I tried to read Neuromancer once, cause someone from school had it. After the second page i was sure i didn't like how it was written. That said, maybe the greek translation was also to blame

 

[Leifmk]

I don't know if my Norwegian experience is transferrable to Greek, but translations of genre literature are often rather cruddy.

 

[Lillefix]

I tried to read Neiromancer once, cause someone from school had it. After the second page i was sure i didn't like how it was written. That said, maybe the greek translation was also to blame

It's notoriously hard in English as well. He invents word and doesn't explain them well. But that's his style.

edit: I see it's already mentioned.

 

[Traitorfish]

That may be part of the problem I had with it. Bad science-fiction writers will bury the reader in empty jargon, and it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between a subtle or impressionistic style of world-building and simple bad writing.