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I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

…other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

In the Beginning…was the Command Line is a thin, non-fiction, humorous manifesto describing the drift from the clean, simple OS to the bloated, overly controlling, icon flaunting, UI driven OS. It was written and published online in 1999, when the Mac OS was at it’s worst and Windows was just achieving true digital blasphemy with its revolting browsers, monopolistic practices and bombastic bloatware. For windows users it was still pretty true until Windows 7 came out last year. Shortly after the online rant came the book. But the online version is still available here.

Stephenson has since recanted a bit, admitting it was overstated. But, hey, that’s what rants are for. And, of course, technology rolls on. Imagine reading “In the Beginning…” on the iPad.

I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

…other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

After reading Snow Crash, I picked up The Diamond Age the first chance I got. I figured it’d maybe be a sequel, or another action-packed cyber-punk thing like Snow Crash. The only thing the two books had in common was writing style and complexity.

Once again, this book is too complex to describe the plot in any sensible way. The environment where the story takes place is enough novelty to carry most sci-fi fare: Imagine a time when anything can be made from existing molecules, restructured by a machine, following a recipe created by engineers. Need a spoon, just request it, like you’d request a web page from Google. A microwave-size device spits it out in seconds. Need a mattress? Find a bigger machine, make your request, and voila. The input is simply siphoned from the sea. Anything, any size, any complexity.

Society has (similarly to Snow Crash) broken into new segments, but instead of burbclaves, it’s more like classes. The engineers have redefined themselves as a class, modeled after Victorian-era ideals. One of the most talented of these engineers gets selected for a project: to make an interactive story-book for the daughter of a magnate. But he makes three copies: One for the magnates daughter, one for his own, and one gets into the hands of a tough little orphan girl. The books act as tutors for each of the three girls. There are any number of subplots, including viral memes spread by sex cults, along with nano-bots, Confucianism and revolution. Imagine that! Well, you couldn’t if Stephenson weren’t your guide.

The “Should I read this?” question isn’t really answered here, is it? The answer is, if you’re a geek, you should read this. If you don’t like it, you may not be a real geek.

I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

…other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

I started with Snow Crash. A colleague, younger and smarter and hipper than I, suggested it. In case you think this is ordinary sci-fi, you should note that it is among the Time Magazine Top 100 Novels (1923 to present). Honestly, it’s not just me!

Snow Crash was published in 1992, which is worth noting because it predated the World Wide Web. Yet it predicted modern immersive online worlds, a la Second Life. In fact, the creators of Second Life have attributed their inspiration to this book. It also predicted the suitcase-sized nuke people have been worried about lately, although the terrorist in question is certainly not of a stripe anyone would’ve predicted. And the “hero protagonist” of the story is a Japanese-American hacker named, er, Hiro Protagonist. Hot Damn, that’s some fine pun-ditry!

Stephenson also ran with the trend of White Flight to gated communities, and the breakdown of centralized government towards a mix of organized crime, anarchy, and ethno-religious isolationism to its ultimate conclusion: The Burbclave. (Suburban Enclave, for the less tuned-in.) And the stuff about the poor nuclear-powered guard-dog-bot who’s task it is to protect one such burbclave is enough to make you swear off buying a Roomba! None of which will make sense to you until you drill into the world-gone-mad that Stephenson has conjured. It’s almost as bad as Citrus Heights. Remember 1992? The Reagan-Bush recession (remember the first Bush? He couldn’t speak in complete sentences, either). The Burbclave, of course, is the outcome of the trend that Reagan started of killing government, and causing societal breakdowns. After Bush II and the Contract on America, we’re nearly there. Another 8 years of that kind of leadership, and this novel becomes even more prescient. If not for the ’90’s, we’d be there now. Read this book now, so you can be prepared, haha! This novel is more zany and fast paced than dark and foreboding, though. The characters are fun and hilarious, and the action is non-stop. And, honestly, I’m leaving out the good parts in this review, because there’s no point trying to explain…

Next week: The Diamond Age

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

I’ve been rereading “The Baroque Cycle” a trilogy of books by Neil Stephenson. I just finished “The Confusion”

“The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)” (Neal Stephenson)

But you should definitely start with the first in the series:

“Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)” (Neal Stephenson)

I honestly think this is the most fun I’ve had reading a book. The possible exception might be the Terry Pratchet books, but as fun as those are, they are a “quick read”. The Baroque Cycle is three physical books, but could easily be six. These babies are fat! Yet every paragraph is fun, interesting, intriguing and even educational.

The time period is the 1600’s and the advent of the modern age of science is at hand. The characters include real people: Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz, various kings, queens, and sundry nobility of France, England, Russia, Germany, and more. The story exposes early economics, venture capital, political science, warfare, alchemy and “natural philosophy” in a delicious multithreaded storyline spreading over most of the lifetime of the lead characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza a woman who works her way from slave to Duchess. If you read Cryptonomicon, some of these names may ring a bell. The thread of characters that spanned from WWII to the Dot Com era now reach back to some 400 years earlier.

It is for geeks, but perhaps the swashbuckling and historical context might spread the target audience. The sheer audacity of Stephenson to write such massive tomes of such broad scope with such phenomenal detail makes him a great writer. When you read the details of London burning, or the intrigues of the court of Versaille, you suspect that Stephenson must have been there, taking notes.

If you can hack these, go back and read everything of his. There are no bad Neil Stephenson books. He became famous for Snow Crash.

“Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)

But my favorite before this series, was Diamond Age.

“The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)

If someone sat down today to cover the possibilities of nanotech in a novel of the dystopian future, you could never imagine it would become so interesting a study of social constructs, much less that it would be a great read. But if you take into account that it was written back around ’95 you’d have to believe, once again, that Neil Stephenson owns a time machine.