Rapid Tech Transitions (August Reading)
Sep. 3rd, 2006 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseOnly two, because I'm a flake, and also because I read one-third of a Neal Stevenson novel.
What Just Happened (James Gleick): Collection of Gleick's tech-y articles through the '90s into the 21st C. I thought it was going to be a more in-depth look at the internet explosion, so I was pretty disappointed. The best parts were the earliest articles: the more things change, the more we stand on the cusp of the Utopian Tech Future (Some Assembly Required). If we could just figure out how to debug Microsoft's "features", we could conquer the world. Some things have improved - an early article on user vs. MS Word battles proves that beyond a doubt - but some problems, like privacy advocacy, remain with us.
Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1 (Neal Stephenson): Noted SF writer does historical fiction; readers scratch their heads, frantically seeking the alternate universe branch-points. (Hint: stop while you're ahead.) This is part of a bigger work, and it shows in painful ways: the plot's extremely leisurely, and is - so far - mostly double-framed. Quicksilver opens with Enoch the Red, alchemist, seeing Daniel Waterhouse, natural philosopher, in Puritan Massachusetts. The narrative switches to Daniel's point of view, then spends 300 pages developing substantial flashbacks to England, circa mid-17th century. The characters are reasonably well-drawn, and fiction about the dawn of the Royal Philosophical Society hits my happy science-geek nerve in the same way that Kim Stanley Robinson does, but the novel's positively Russian in scope and ambition, and I'm not sure I'm up for that. Bizarrely, Quicksilver and recent bio lectures make me want to go read Cryptonomicon; I blame my introduction to pseudo-random number generation for this.
For people hopelessly confused about how the series should be read (like me!), I offer the wiki page, which explains what goes where. I'm not even going to try; my series/novel/book/volume vocabulary breaks down when the HC and pb publications diverge radically.
What Just Happened (James Gleick): Collection of Gleick's tech-y articles through the '90s into the 21st C. I thought it was going to be a more in-depth look at the internet explosion, so I was pretty disappointed. The best parts were the earliest articles: the more things change, the more we stand on the cusp of the Utopian Tech Future (Some Assembly Required). If we could just figure out how to debug Microsoft's "features", we could conquer the world. Some things have improved - an early article on user vs. MS Word battles proves that beyond a doubt - but some problems, like privacy advocacy, remain with us.
Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1 (Neal Stephenson): Noted SF writer does historical fiction; readers scratch their heads, frantically seeking the alternate universe branch-points. (Hint: stop while you're ahead.) This is part of a bigger work, and it shows in painful ways: the plot's extremely leisurely, and is - so far - mostly double-framed. Quicksilver opens with Enoch the Red, alchemist, seeing Daniel Waterhouse, natural philosopher, in Puritan Massachusetts. The narrative switches to Daniel's point of view, then spends 300 pages developing substantial flashbacks to England, circa mid-17th century. The characters are reasonably well-drawn, and fiction about the dawn of the Royal Philosophical Society hits my happy science-geek nerve in the same way that Kim Stanley Robinson does, but the novel's positively Russian in scope and ambition, and I'm not sure I'm up for that. Bizarrely, Quicksilver and recent bio lectures make me want to go read Cryptonomicon; I blame my introduction to pseudo-random number generation for this.
For people hopelessly confused about how the series should be read (like me!), I offer the wiki page, which explains what goes where. I'm not even going to try; my series/novel/book/volume vocabulary breaks down when the HC and pb publications diverge radically.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 02:31 pm (UTC)I think that Cryptonomicon is a better book -- it certainly moves along faster, and one of the two story lines is modern day. One of the characters in Quicksilver makes appearances in Cryptonomicon, but you probably knew that already.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 05:23 pm (UTC)I heard as much when I was googling around a bit. I don't know anything else, so far, but Cryptonomicon sounds like the sort of book I'd enjoy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-11 03:40 pm (UTC)Yeah Cryptonomicon is in a similar style, but the plot is only one book long. If you can adjust yourself to enjoy the journey vs. the destination, the Baroque cycle quite a trip. Hadn't caught the comparison to KSR's science characters doing science, but it's quite apt.
And yeah, there's just the one "wtf" concept to keep it from being completely mundane.
Crypt is even more mundane, although "mundane" may not be the greatest adjective for Stephenson's writings. He's been quiet (or collaborating) for several years now. I wonder what's on the horizon?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:15 pm (UTC)You mean Enoch Root?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 10:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-13 12:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-13 04:54 am (UTC)It's definitely an interesting book. At least as "interesting" as the Baroque cycle in terms of factual soliloquies and odd infodumps with the benefit of being more...contemporary. The people, motives and social mores are all much more recognizable.
Daniel's quite a bit more of a geek than his ancestor, though, while Shaftoe's a lot more grounded.