Way, way in the back

I just finished reading Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. I'd been hearing about it for a while, and had meant to get to it. I finally broke down and read it at the emphatic recommendation of my friend Jack.

I really liked it. I was a little confused at first by Stephenson's odd melding of a very serious, grand story arc with other, somewhat more tongue-in-cheek characterizations. Kind of like watching "The Matrix" with the cast of "Spongebob Squarepants" as the main characters. I spent a little time trying to figure out how seriously to take him, but before long I was just riding along and enjoying it immensely.

With Stephenson's new series now getting underway, there's a great deal of analysis on his writing floating around. Much of it compares his stuff to William Gibson's. Having read almost everything Gibson's written, and now having read some of Stephenson's work, I can personally attest that much of that analysis is wrong.

Again and again I've heard people say the same thing: that Gibson's worlds are dark and dystopian, at least as compared to Stephenson's. Given what I've read so far I think this is precisely backward. In Neuromancer, for instance, the world isn't in all that bad a shape. Business is good. Life expectancies are up. Medical technology can replace entire bodies. Artificial intelligence is a reality; sufficiently far along in its development to have its own regulatory agency. Humanity has established a colony in space, where hang-gliding is a popular sport of the rich. There was some kind of military conflict in the recent past that he never does much to detail, but it was apparently minor enough that life has gone on in recognizable form. If anything, people are threatened by excess stability, spending their lives absorbed in simstim. Perhaps that seemed more dystopian when the book was written, but it sounds pretty freaking good to me right about now, in light of the current global state of affairs. Gibson's characters are certainly darker, but the story is about people coming together to engage in a complex criminal enterprise, so we should expect that the setting of the story will be the underbelly of whatever society it takes place in.

Snow Crash, by way of comparison, takes place in an America that has melted down almost completely. Free enterprise and gun rights are virtually the only recognizable remaining traits of what's left. There is, of course, a backhanded, if unsubtle, political message in this, which explains Stephenson's popularity among the Slashdot crowd, but it's never so oppressive or complete that it turned me away from the book. On balance, though, I'd much, much rather live in Gibson's future than Stephenson's.

I've seen Stephenson's work described as "geek fiction", and I guess I see why everyone says this. In my opinion, though, it's another point that struck me as being backward. Very few pages go by in Snow Crash without some technological detail concerning the "metaverse" being mentioned. Stephenson appropriately does not go to great lengths to give a thorough explanation of how the whole system works, but where he throws in a little detail here and there, the context is fairly accurate and technologically correct, or at least technologically defensible. I suppose to an english lit person this would be geek the text up pretty well, but as a technically-oriented person myself I found the terminology too familiar. It had the opposite effect on me, forcefully and continually reminding me that I was reading a work of fiction. Example:

…but “snow crash” is computer lingo. It means a system crash – a bug – at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times …

That one rather falls more into the “defensible” category than the “accurate” one. And again:

…”There’s a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in the gut every time you come in the door,” Da5id says. “I always have this premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash”
“Must be Bigboard”, Hiro says. “It has one routine that patches some traps in low memory, for a moment.”
“Ah, that’s it. Please, throw that thing away”, Da5id says. …

Gibson, on the other hand, rarely attempts to elaborate on the technology that underlies “cyberspace”. It’s a good thing, too, because whenever he does it dates the work pretty hard. One of his favorite tricks for instilling a sense of technological wonder in the reader is to describe the packaging in which the equipment comes:

…with the deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They’d left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive Hosaka computer; A Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Bruan coffeemaker…

The “Sony monitor” reference is as close as he comes in that excerpt to some kind of computer product that we would recognize. That passage also illustrates another of his tricks: the usage of a mix of recognizable and fictional corporate names (which Stephenson also uses, although not as effectively). For me, these little devices have exactly the opposite effect of Stephenson’s tech details. They deepen the technological “feel” of the world. I’m willing to believe that this came about as a result of Stephenson actually having a technological background, whereas Gibson does not, but all the same, Gibson’s world leaves me with a far greater impression of technological sophistication, merely by what he omits. This is all the more impressive when you consider that Neuromancer was published eight years prior to Snow Crash.

I don’t mean to slam Stephenson. Snow Crash is a great book, and I’ll definitely be buying and reading more of his work, but if you want to read something that epitomizes the unfortunately-named “cyberpunk” genre, start with Gibson. More accurately, start with Neuromancer.

The holding pattern is finally broken. The tower has given us permission to land. We've begun our final descent, turned ourselves toward the runway for the last time, and throttled this big sucker back. Nose up. Landing gear down. I sure as hell hope I haven't forgotten anything important.

I don't know why I'm irresistably drawn to airplane metaphors when I think about the last year-and-a-quarter of my life, but I am. My wife and I have been preparing, in meticulous detail, to purchase a new house. Our current place has been a great home for us, but with three people now living with it, and the future possiblity of a fourth, it has become uncomfortably cramped. Particularly since one of those three is now the human equivalent of the Tasmanian Devil running around the place.

Now we have close dates. We have mortgage agreements. We have contracts and receipts and any number of other officialities that have locked the whole thing in legal stone. All that's left now is a countdown, which is excruciating. I feel more exposed right now than at just about any time I can remember. I never thought I would be so grateful at the prospect of just being able to settle down into a mortgage payment for a while.

So please lock your tray-tables into their closed and upright positions, and here's hoping that there's no wind shear.