Comment by ecocentrik
Comment by ecocentrik a day ago
Of all the cyberpunk authors, Gibson, while one of the first, is probably the least interesting. Stephenson and Sterling are better writers and explore more complex ideas. Gibson has the occasional shadow of an idea that he explores with a few one dimensional characters. That said, I liked "Virtual Light".
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
What I always appreciated with Neal Stephenson is the level of nerdy detail in his books. It's what makes re-reading his books very enjoyable. Which is something I do every few years or so. Gibson's Neuromancer is often recommended as a thing to read next. But to me that's a very different type of book. Basically, Gibson uses a lot of word soup to create a futuristic vibe and mood but in the end it's just a stylistic thing rather than a coherent view of the future and at this point it's a bit dated. As a vision it was all a bit dystopian and cool at the time. But not very coherent.
Stephenson's world building has a bit more depth to it. You can pick up the Diamond Age today and it still reads well and in a way a lot of stuff that is going on with LLMs make that a super relevant book right now. There are a lot of ideas and moral dilemmas that the book raises. What happens if you take the notion of a poor girl receiving a quality education from an AI and it starts subverting the child's mind with crazily addictive story telling, and adaptive behavior. What happens if you create an army of a quarter million girls with a copy of the same AI book.
The reality of an ipad like device that might have some beefed up version of chat gpt on it that starts bonding with a toddler and executing an educational agenda over years is not that unimaginable any more. A lot of kids know how to unlock their mom's phone before they learn to walk/talk these days. Not the same thing of course but the whole morals and ethics around the topic are exactly what Stephenson explored in the early nineties with that book.
A lot that is science fiction in that book still is; but some of it just became science fact. In the same way, Snow Crash is still pretty fresh. The whole Meta thing a few years ago was directly inspired by that book. And they made a mess of it. We still don't have proper VR. But the tech is definitely getting closer.
Neuromancer never had that quality to me. It's alright as a book but ultimately a bit shallow.