Review:
Some Remarks, by Neal Stephenson
| Publisher: |
William Morrow |
| Copyright: |
June 2013 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-202444-2 |
| Format: |
Trade paperback |
| Pages: |
336 |
This is going to be another weird review, since I read this essay
collection about three months ago, and I borrowed it from a friend. So
this is both from fading memory and without a handy reference other than
Internet searches. Apologies in advance for any important details that I
miss. The advantage is that you'll see what parts of this collection
stuck in my memory.
Some Remarks is, as you might guess from the title, a rather random
collection of material. There's one long essay that for me was the heart
of the book (more on that in a moment), two other longer essays, two short
stories, and thirteen other bits of miscellaneous writing of varying
lengths.
I found most of the short essays unremarkable. Stephenson uses a walking
desk because sitting is bad for you that sentence contains basically all
of the interesting content of one of the essays. I think it takes a large
topic and some running room before Stephenson can get up to speed and
produce something that's more satisfying than technological boosterism.
That means the most interesting parts of this book are the three longer
works.
"In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" was previously published in
Wired and
is
still available.
Some Remarks contains only excerpts; Stephenson
says that some of the original essay is no longer that interesting. I had
mixed feelings about this one. Some of the sense of place he creates was
fun to read, but Stephenson can't seem to quite believe that the Chinese
don't care about "freedom" according to his definitions in the same way
and therefore don't have the same political reaction to hacker culture
that he does. This could have been an opportunity for him to question
assumptions, but instead it's mostly an exercise in dubious, sweeping
cultural evaluation, such as "the country has a long history of coming up
with technologies before anyone else and then not doing a lot with them."
A reminder that the detail with which Stephenson crams his writing is not
always... true.
Stronger is "Atoms of Cognition: Metaphysics in the Royal Society
1715 2010," which covers material familiar to readers of Stephenson's
Baroque Cycle. The story of Newton,
Leibniz, their rivalry, and the competing approaches to thinking about
mathematics and science was my favorite part of that series, and in some
ways the non-fiction treatment is better than the fictional one. If you
liked the
Baroque Cycle, this is worth reading.
But the highlight of the book for me was "Mother Earth Mother Board."
This is a long essay (50,000 words, practically a small book and the
largest part of this collection) about the laying of undersea fiber-optic
cables. Those who have read
Cryptonomicon will recognize some of the themes here, but there's
way more to this essay than there was to the bits about undersea cables in
Cryptonomicon. It's mostly about technology, rather than people,
which puts Stephenson on firmer ground. The bit about people reads more
like a travelogue, full of Stephenson's whole-hearted admiration of people
who build things and make things work. There's a bit of politics, a bit
of history, a bit of tourism, and a lot of neat trivia about a part of the
technological world that I'd not known much about before. I would say
this is worth the price of the collection, but it too was previously
published in
Wired, so you can just
read it
online.
Those reading this review on my web site will notice that I filed it in
non-fiction. There are a couple of stories, but they're entirely
forgettable (in fact, I had entirely forgotten them, and had to skim them
again). But, for the record, here are short reviews of those:
"Spew": This originally appeared in
Wired
and can still be read on-line. The protagonist takes a job as a sort of
Internet marketing inspector who looks for deviations from expected
profiles. While tracing down an anomaly, though, he finds another use of
the Internet that's outside of the marketing framework he's using.
It's unlikely that anyone who's been online for long will find much new in
this story. Some of that is because it was originally published in 1994,
but most of it is just that this isn't a very good story. Stephenson
seems to have turned up his normal manic infodump to 11 to satisfy the
early
Wired aesthetic, and the result is a train wreck of jargon,
bad slang, and superficial social observation. (3)
"The Great Simoleon Caper": Originally published in
TIME, this story too is still available
online. It's primarily interesting because it's a story about Bitcoin
(basically), written in 1995. And it's irritating for exactly the same
reason that Bitcoin enthusiasm often tends to be irritating: the
assumption that cryptocurrency is somehow a revolutionary attack on
government-run currency systems. I'm not going to get into the ways in
which this doesn't make sense given how money is used socially (David
Graeber's
Debt is the book to read if
you want more information); just know that the story follows that path and
doesn't engage with any of the social reasons why that outcome is highly
unlikely. Indeed, the lengths to which the government tries to go to
discredit cryptocurrency in this story are rather silly.
Apart from that, this is typical early Stephenson writing. It's very in
love with ideas, not as much with characterization, and consists mostly of
people explaining things to each other. Sometimes this is fun, but when
focused on topics about which considerably more information has become
available, it doesn't age very well. (5)
Overall, there was one great essay and a few interesting bits, but I
wouldn't have felt I was missing much if I'd never read this collection.
I borrowed
Some Remarks from a friend, and I think that's about the
right level of effort. If it falls into your hands, or you see it in a
library, some of the essays, particularly "Mother Earth Mother Board," are
worth reading, but given that the best parts are available on-line for
free, I don't think it's worth a purchase.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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