Snow Crash is probably Stephenson’s most Cyberpunk novel, but he is generally considered to be post-Cyberpunk. Stephenson is much more interested in technology and power structures than his often two dimensional characters.
Bruce Sterling is the main hub of Cyberpunk. Check out his anthologies to find other great authors.
Part of what makes Gibson both compelling and successful is that he writes about the social impact of technology. His focus isn’t technology but the impact tech has on people and their response to it. Famously, Gibson hated the sound of his Apple II floppy drive. He “invented” SSDs for Neuromancer for aesthetic reasons. Decades later, technology followed for it’s own entirely independent reasons.
Just finished “Klara And The Sun”, by Kazuo Ishiguro
great read really enjoy the style of writing.
and “Old man’s war” by John Scalzi not so impressed by this wanted to try some military sci-fi and this came high on a lot of peoples must reads, but got kind of predictable after a while.
onto Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
and Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different, by Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah, I have read those. I used to be a huge SF nerd when I was younger. Well, still am but I am totally not intereted in genre fiction anymore. Give me a great SF book that subverts the genre conventions and I’ll love it.
You articulated the reason why the other cyberpunk authors have not aged as gracefully as Gibson well, or rather, all SF authors. Hence why I only really hold Dick, Gibson and Ballard in high value.
How to do the work - Dr Nicole LePera
Jordan Peterson - 12 Rules for Life
Polyvagal Theory - Deb Dana
Hold Onto Your Kids - Dr Gordon Neufeld
Anchored - Deb Dana
Testosterone - Carole Hooven
The Master and his Emissary - Iain McGilchrist
Raising Boys - Steve Biddulph
I’d put Iaian Banks in the list of writers who manage to say interesting things despite writing SF. Listing Gison and PKD as sci-fi rather than literary fiction seems like hiding the brussels sprouts in pizza: a good way to expose nerdlings to better literature.
Vinge and Egan are both closer to Stephenson than literary fiction, but I’ve found them to be enjoyable.
I used to argue that any book or movie that could be spoiled should be spoiled. I’ve backed off from that quite a bit, since it does no harm for people to enjoy things. But good art stands up to multiple viewings.
This is incidentally my gripe with audio books. People who only listen to them as opposed to reading insist that they’ve “read” the book and that it’s essentially the same thing. Listen to a Pynchon book, or a Nabokov book, you will only understand the most shallow part of it, e.g. the story. Not the themes or the subtext. Reading, and re-reading is essential to understanding literature.
This may be a personal preference, but I don’t really see it.
Books are great, they are my preferred way to absorb stories, content and information. But oral culture has been an important part of human existence for probably as long as we’ve had language.
The importance of oral culture is particularly apparent in music theory. If you pick up a book on music theory without any experience playing music, you will be lost. Even if you have some experience, most music theory is still fairly useless without deeply engaging in the relevant musical practice. I suspect that the bulk of music theory is transmitted among musicians verbally and nonverbally as they practice and perform together.
Incidentally, the vast majority of adults read less than a book a year. Among people who read a book or more a year, most read many.
I think the difference is turning written words to oral stories: it just doesn’t work. With the amount of subtext and layers of meaning in great literature, an audiobook can never convey all of it, and due to the format it’s not easy to just flip a few pages back, or re-read a sentence a few times just to marvel it’s beauty. It’s a different method that works best with content made specifically for it. Just reading a classic book out loud makes the listener lose a lot in the translation.
Like for example this breathtaking and grueling sentence from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools”
Now there’s a sentence you read a few times. With an audiobook, it just flows by. Have you really internalized what’s going on? Has the reader read it in the feverish, poetic incantation that I hear in my head? I’m not sure I trust audiobooks to make justice to books like Blood Meridian.
Same with me. I just finished God Emperor of Dune a few days ago and am about to start Heretics.