I don't get why the interviewer suggests that the author deserves some compensation. Did metaverse as an idea did not exist before Snow Crash?
Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
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Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#12Can anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.
William Gibson, Cixin Liu
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#13Can anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.
Nobody's really like Stephenson, but to the extent that he is something of a cyberpunk author, I'd say you might like some of these folks if you're not familiar with them yet:
1. William Gibson - Neuromancer, 'nuff said. The rest of the Sprawl Trilogy is great as well.
2. Rudy Rucker - I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but he is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
3. Richard K. Morgan - wrote the books that were the basis for the Altered Carbon series on Netflix if you're familiar with that at all.
4. John Brunner - not really "cyberpunk" but some of his work is often described as "proto-cyberpunk". The Shockwave Rider is one of his most famous works, and it is really good IMO. I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar yet, but it is also highly regarded.
5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
6. Daniel Suarez - Daemon and Freedom were really good.
7. Vernor Vinge - I'm only part of the way through A Fire Upon the Deep now, but so far so good. His works are also usually highly recommended amongst HN'ers.
8. Bruce Sterling - I know of him from his non-fiction work The Hacker Crackdown, but he has also written some well-regarded science fiction.
9. S.L. Huang - The "Cas Russell" series is excellent, as techno-thriller / sci-fi stuff goes. I won't say it's anything real deep but the books are fun to read.
10. K.C. Alexander - The "SINless" series is.. um... well, I enjoyed the first two books (not sure how many there even are, that might be it). They probably aren't for everyone, but if you like them, you'll probably really like them. I'll just try to illustrate with one example line from one of the books: "You haven't lived until you've fisted a nun under the cheap light of a neon Jesus".
11. Charles Stross - fellow HN'er and famous author! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross Writes radically entertaining stuff, including the Laundry Files series, Halting State, Glasshouse, etc. I'd say Glasshouse is an absolute "must read".
12. Greg Egan - I especially recommend Permutation City.
13. China Miéville - Check out Perdido Street Station
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#14I don't get why the interviewer suggests that the author deserves some compensation. Did metaverse as an idea did not exist before Snow Crash?
Vaguely similar ideas existed in True Names and Neuromancer, but no, the metaverse as we imagine it today did not exist before Snow Crash.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#15What an odd interview. I got the sense that the interviewer was really looking for Stephenson to lash out with some juicy rant about how awful Facebook is, but he is so mild about the whole thing.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#16He hinted at the revenue model being a big difference between whatever Facebook is building and the plot of his novel "Snow Crash" Can someone fill in the specifics? I guess the trouble is that for Facebook, you're the product, and advertisers are the clients - but, what is the revenue model of the metaverse from Snow Crash?
In snowcrash, p2p network IO is cheap, compute is expensive. This sets up a metaverse where users render themselves and their content for others. The renders are streamed. No one controls the metaverse itself as it's more of a self hosted, federated affair.
I think there is some sort of main street with some reserved space but it's akin to a url.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#17Snowcrash was forgettable. Vernor Vinges Rainbows End and stutf in Orson Scott Cards books left a much bigger mark. Esp the way the chimp troupe gets manipulated by the network. We see Vinges "belief circles" all around us.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#18Can anybody recommend authors like Stephenson? He is my favourite author by far and it's going to be a sad day when I exhaust his works.
Iain Banks. His "Culture" novels are maybe the smartest space opera ever written.
start with Player of Games. The various books have no common plot thread, can be read completely out of order; Player is by far the most accessible.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#19If Mark Zuckerberg trademarks "Metaverse", William Gibson should trademark "Mark Zuckerberg".
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee...
>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”
>[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...]
moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.
Re: Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
#20Snowcrash was forgettable. Vernor Vinges Rainbows End and stutf in Orson Scott Cards books left a much bigger mark. Esp the way the chimp troupe gets manipulated by the network. We see Vinges "belief circles" all around us.
You know, you can express enthusiasm without tearing something else down. There was no need for your first sentence.
Personally, I loved Vinge’s “True Names” short story, which I believe may be the first “virtual reality” story. I also loved Snow Crash for its in-your-face gonzo attitude.