Chip’s Picks – Neal Stephenson – Science Fiction Brewed Fresh Daily

I apologize for not posting anything of substance for a few weeks; real life came running up and bit me right in the butt. Fortunately I’m better now. Anyway, the latest installment in my ongoing Chip’s Picks project, is Neal Stephenson.

Unlike many of the authors who’ve made my list of favorites, I haven’t read a whole lot of Stephenson. I’ve taken several runs at him, with novels like The Diamond Age and Zodiac (both recommended by Shadow, whom I usually trust implicitly in such matters), and I just can’t seem to get into them. On the other hand, Stephenson has made it clear for many years that he has the Geek Nature with marvelous essays such as In the Beginning…was the Command Line, and the two Stephenson novels that I have managed to wade through, I absolutely love. So I make no apologies for including him on my list of favorites on the strength of a whopping two books. (If you don’t like it, start your own blog.)

Books to look for include:

Snow Crash – As far as I’m concerned, this is the cyberpunk novel. As a geek, my complaint about William “The Godfather of Cyberpunk” Gibson’s CP efforts is that he didn’t know anything about computers when he wrote them…and he proudly admitted that fact. Stephenson, on the other hand, gets computers at a visceral level, and the fact that many Snow Crash-like things are happening in the real world two decades after he predicted them illustrates that. This has got all of the CP tropes that you’d expect, including many (such as the overall breakdown of society) that I really hate in other CP works. And yet, somehow, this thing works. Call it the feel-good cyberpunk novel of the century. Then go floss your cranial shunt.

Cryptonomicon – This, honestly, is science fiction only if you squint a little. Okay, a lot. It takes place in the past (World War II) and present–well, the present of a decade ago–so there isn’t any technology in it that doesn’t already exist (and by now some of it is probably obsolete). However, it’s got a heck of a CP vibe coming off of it and it’s big enough to plausibly use as a defensive weapon, so read this sucker today. It follows the fortunes of three generations of intertwined families with a bent for code–both computer and secret–and explores some of the unexpected ways that computers impact our lives. Alan Turing has a cameo, which gives this novel some street cred with hardcore geeks.