Neal Stephenson

I love Neal Stephenson . I’ve read all of his books, some of them multiple times. Well, except the Baroque Cycle trilogy, which I’m saving for a special period of time to get lost in them, and from everything. Last week I read In the Beginning…Was the Command Line . For the second time. This time I read it on my Kindle, which was fitting. Stephenson wrote it in 1999. As we exit 2020, it’s a great reminder of the place technology was around 20 years ago. It shows how much has changed and how little has changed. ...

In Neal Stephenson’s newest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel , the protagonist Richard “Dodge” Forthrast uses the phrase “The Miasma ” to refer to the collection of technology that we commonly call “The Internet.” When I first came across the phrase, I said out loud, “Brilliant.” I was poking around on the Miasma this morning looking for a reference to this and found this Slashdot post about an interview with Stephenson from PC Magazine . ...

I didn’t read much last month, but I got an email this morning from someone who mentioned that I’d like Greg Egan’s Permutation City . I read it in April when I was in Japan on my Q219 Vacation with Amy but never really blogged much about it. When I got the email today, I thought of two novels that I’ve read this year that are in the same vein. They are Blake Crouch’s book Recursion and Neal Stephenson’s book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. ...