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Rapid Tech Transitions (August Reading)
Sep. 3rd, 2006 12:29 pmOnly 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.