This book is classic Stephenson: a firehose of ideas mixed together in a doorstopper of text, geeky theories of near-future technological advancement sharing space with lengthy ruminations on the utterly mundane. Really, I feel like this is three books, clumsily mashed together: 1) ultrarich game developer dies, inadvertently funding the R&D necessary to scan and upload brains; 2) an honestly quite fascinating road trip through an America where people have banded into groups that all embrace different realities based on the news feeds they subscribe to; 3) an actual retelling of the Bible, or at least the Paradise Lost bits, with God and the angels as amnesiac uploaded minds, that ends up positing that the future of humanity will end with souls existing eternally in a self-imposed uploaded afterlife, as long as server farms exist to maintain them. It was probably too much to cram into one book, but hey, I expect nothing less from Stephenson. Personally I think it’s the middle section that will stick with me the longest; the ideas felt the strongest and most germane to current events.
Tag: author-neal stephenson
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
I had no idea this was a new release, but it’s definitely timely: for instance, his characters can consult their pandemic apps to gauge their relative safety among others and determine whether they need to wear masks, or distance, or both; and one of the main characters has lost his sense of smell to covid-23 or something. I really enjoyed this book, which I consider Stephenson at his best and most focused; none of the thought experiments were really that wild, the characters were confidently drawn, and the casual references to realistic details (I too know what it looks like to see ski lights floating disembodied above the Vancouver skyline!) made the fantastic elements that much more believable. A great thought experiment about fighting climate change and sea level rise, and just some of the geopolitical fallout that could result.