{"id":110,"date":"2007-01-05T09:50:24","date_gmt":"2007-01-05T13:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=110"},"modified":"2008-07-07T13:49:23","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T17:49:23","slug":"chips-picks-neal-stephenson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"Chip&#8217;s Picks &#8211; Neal Stephenson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;m better now.  Anyway, the latest installment in my ongoing Chip&#8217;s Picks project, is <B>Neal Stephenson<\/B>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Unlike many of the authors who&#8217;ve made my list of favorites, I haven&#8217;t read a whole lot of Stephenson.  I&#8217;ve taken several runs at him, with novels like <I>The Diamond Age<\/I> and <I>Zodiac<\/I> (both recommended by Shadow, whom I usually trust implicitly in such matters), and I just can&#8217;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 <I>In the Beginning&#8230;was the Command Line<\/I>, and the two Stephenson novels that I <EM>have<\/EM> 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&#8217;t like it, start your own blog.)<\/p>\n<p>Books to look for include:<UL><LI><I>Snow Crash<\/I> &#8211; As far as I&#8217;m concerned, this is <EM>the<\/EM> cyberpunk novel.  As a geek, my complaint about William &#8220;The Godfather of Cyberpunk&#8221; Gibson&#8217;s CP efforts is that he didn&#8217;t know anything about computers when he wrote them&#8230;and he proudly admitted that fact.  Stephenson, on the other hand, <EM>gets<\/EM> computers at a visceral level, and the fact that many <I>Snow Crash<\/I>-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&#8217;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.<\/LI><\/p>\n<p><LI><I>Cryptonomicon<\/I> &#8211; 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&#8211;well, the present of a decade ago&#8211;so there isn&#8217;t any technology in it that doesn&#8217;t already exist (and by now some of it is probably obsolete).  However, it&#8217;s got a heck of a CP vibe coming off of it and it&#8217;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&#8211;both computer and secret&#8211;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.<\/LI><\/UL><\/p>\n<p>Related:<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=92\">Robert A. Heinlein<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=100\">Dan Simmons<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=101\">Tim Powers<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=195\">Roger Zelazny<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=201\">Richard Morgan<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;m better now. Anyway, the latest installment in my ongoing Chip&#8217;s Picks project, is Neal Stephenson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}