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RE: Booze, Fatalism, and Cyberpunk Morality in The Red Strings Club

in #gaming7 years ago

I've been meaning to read more William Gibson but just haven't gotten around to it.

Neal Stephenson doesn't really write in one particular genre and Snow Crash (and maybe The Diamond Age) is really the only one I would describe with cyberpunk elements. I like Cryptonomicon a lot but I wouldn't call it cyberpunk. More like a modern day (for when it was written) technothriller mixed in with a little historical fiction and some cryptography. My favorite books of his were the three books of the Baroque cycle but they would best be described as historical fiction. You might like Reamde if you haven't read it. Another sort of modern day technothriller but dealing with online gaming and digital currency. Anathem and Seveneves were very good but more hard sci-fi.

Neal Stephenson has this thing that he does where he likes to dive into the technical details of stuff in his books, whether it be computers, cryptography, sword fighting, the monetary system or whatever. Some people really like this (like me) but others don't find it so appealing.

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Mostly I'm more about characters than details. Like, in Snow Crash I wasn't a fan of Hiro and skipped ahead at points to the Y.T.'s sections as she was more interesting. In Gibson's works, Molly Millions was my favorite cyberpunk character (and still is), but I didn't much care about the others in the Sprawl trilogy. The others... It was working a late-night job and had time to read, so All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition were more about killing time. :)
PR's look into "what makes something cool" was done better by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he tried to pick apart the concept of "quality", in my opinion.