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Anyone else feel like Stephenson can only produce "nerd-bait"? Most of his literary work doesn't have strong characterization or meaningful plots, and everything he writes has this tired, "The geek shall inherit the Earth," undercurrent.
There's a name for that: "science fiction."
Woah, Avatar makes way more sense now.
Yeah -- that's why I cited Stephenson in the essay I wrote about Avatar: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/27/thoughts-on-james-camerons-av... , which got upvoted on HN yesterday. I assume whoever submitted this link thought, "Stephenson ought to get a place of his own here."
It's a fantastic point, that we have an idealized view of how the critical elements of our infrastructure are created, so we make movie geeks with super powers... I guess we do the same with firemen and police and other parts of society that we rely upon and we have all those lame TV dramas.
Anyone else feel like Stephenson can only produce "nerd-bait"? Most of his literary work doesn't have strong characterization or meaningful plots, and everything he writes has this tired, "The geek shall inherit the Earth," undercurrent.
There's a name for that: "science fiction."
This guy covers some of the same ground, but much funnier. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI& ; feature=player_embedded