That was the best explanation of litfic vs. commercial/genre fiction I've ever read.
Neal is one of two living authors whose all books I buy. Happy to have found him during Covid, thanks to HN comments. I found Greg Egan during that time, and I am grateful to HN threads and comments on books.
Ah, I always wondered how Vancouver Island came to be - a fight between Stephenson and Gibson makes perfect sense.
given how Neal never goes online, i wonder how long he sat on this to reply
Another classic of his, Mother Earth, Mother Board: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
Ah, a classic. This was Slashdot’s high point.
Note: (2004)
Noted!
I love this site, but I miss classic Slashdot
Slashdot is still there.
It's kind of tiny compared to here (<1/5th the articles maybe?) but it still has an older/Slashdot-y crowd.
Oh man, remember when getting a BMW was the high of excessive greed?
Perhaps the biggest loss of cryptocurrency being branded as "crypto" is losing the Matt Blaze's thoughts on cryptography (and in turn, how this informed Stephenson's thoughts on these topics).
Anyway, in case you were curious:
Hobbs: https://web.archive.org/web/20041204055248/http://www.crypto...
Master Key: https://web.archive.org/web/20041022021127/http://www.crypto...
Matt Blaze is still around. I get the feeling he doesn't post often:
My first exposure to Neal was through Reamde and it's definitely the fastest I've managed to get through a novel relative to length. I really enjoy his style.
Tastes are interesting. I sprinted through Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon because they were so good. I struggled to get past the first few chapters of Reamde. Didn't engage me at all.
I recommend his older stuff to anyone else looking to check him out: Snow Crash is an undeniable classic, Diamond Age was absolutely incredible, and even Zodiac and In the Beginning Was the Command Line are both very good (although the last one is obviously more for computer people).
His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.
He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.
Anathem is written in English. There's just some made up words that are generally easy to figure out the meaning of.
The “made up language” is directly tied to the plot and overall themes, and leads to an “aha” moment.
It was still an awful lot to ask of a reader, and IMO, not worth the "reward." I agree with the person you are responding to. His early works are really amazing, but beginning with Cryptonomicon he became increasingly verbose and I found his later books a lot less fun to read.