Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming

https://www.wired.com/story/sci-fi-icon-neal-stephenson-global-warming/

by Thevet • 5 years ago

95 110 5 years ago

wired.com

woleium• 5 years ago

I really enjoy Stephenson's work. If you have yet to read any of his stuff i'd recommend starting with Cryptonomicon

karlshea• 5 years ago

Totally agree, it was my intro to his work.

I’d also recommend “Mother Earth Mother Board”, an essay of his also in Wired about the laying of an intercontinental fiber cable. Hugely enjoyable and a good peek into his writing.

Fnoord4• 5 years ago

My intro to his work was his essay: In the Beginning... Was the Command Line [1]. Back then I didn't read Snow Crash; a couple of years ago I did. Loved it! I haven't been able to get through Cryptonomicon. I did like Diamond Age, but as another commentor said it falls off at the end.

Written by someone with bad attention span when it comes to reading fiction (easily bored/distracted).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...

zabzonk• 5 years ago

Nah, Snow Crash. And then Anathem.

mrintegrity• 5 years ago

Snowcrash is where i would begin (where i did begin). It was some years ago now so i don't really remember why I hated cryptonomicon but I did, iirc, the plot jumped around all the time, I couldn't care about the protagonists. Am I remembering correctly that the whole plot ultimately revolved around a large stash of gold?

RandallBrown• 5 years ago

Cryptonomicon is a fictionalized telling of how Alan Turing cracked the enigma code and how that led to the future of computing.

The timeline does jump around between world war 2 and "modern" times. There was a large stash of gold, but I don't remember that being particularly important in the grand scheme of the book.

It's one of my favorite books of all time.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

I even enjoy his lesser novels and have read all of his novels multiple times. So, I've been looking forward to this one and just finished my second re-read of Fall, which has grown on me since it came out; probably one of his least accessible novels. Half of the fun in that one is all the back references to his past novels (e.g. Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, REAMDE) with characters and events being referred to.

So, maybe don't start with that one. Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon are probably all good ones to start with and all still very much on topic despite being a few decades old now.

michaelbuckbee• 5 years ago

Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books of all time, but as Stephenson's success has risen so has lack of editing.

He's the one author that I think would really benefit from releasing both a "mainstream" copy of his works and then a "director's cut" of the same story.

lindseymysse• 5 years ago

I agree with this. Snow Crash and Zodiak were such taut novels, Diamond Age was a little lush, and Cryptonomicon was a slog for me and then I tuned out.

My favorite remains Zodiak -- I read it over and over as a teenager and when I moved to Dorchester, MA years later had deja vu when I realized how well he captured the Boston area. I used to do stealth rides on my bicycle around Boston late at night because, yes, the cabbies will try to kill you. Fun times.

ryanSrich2• 5 years ago

Snow crash or seveneves are more accessible imo. That’s where I would start. No doubt cryptonomicon is an amazing piece of work, but it’s a beast to get through. Not as much of a beast as Anathem, but still tough.

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Anathem is my favorite book of his, but I definitely had to pause and reread and just decide not to fully absorb the detailed architectural descriptions of the maths/monasteries in the early pages.

beambot• 5 years ago

Diamond Age, Snowcrash, and Seveneves are much more accessible and (IMHO) better.

ncmncm3• 5 years ago

If you want a book where several things are happening on every single page, Reamde is for you.

People treat it like it is not his style because it is an absolute romp. It sends up every action/sf trope in one book. Russians, crashing a business jet, plasma cutter, off-grid extremists, you name it, it's in there.

fho2• 5 years ago

English is not my primary language and I had a really hard time getting into the Cryptonomicon. Started three times over 20 years and didn't make it over the first 100 pages the first two times.

Having now finished it I can say that it is definitely worth it, but I would recommend to start with something simpler, e.g. Diamond Age.

andyjohnson07• 5 years ago

I find him frustratingly variable. I enjoyed Snow Crash and reamde and some of his non-fiction work. A lot of the rest (including Cryptonomicon and Seveneves) seems over-long, over-digressive, and annoyingly inconclusive. I don't know why - he's clearly an intelligent and thoughtful author.

Gatsky• 5 years ago

I have read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I highly recommend The Diamond Age, it’s just so… interesting. And stunning in parts.

markrages• 5 years ago

Finally!

helloworld112• 5 years ago

Disaster number one: You can practically smell the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 massing microscopically. This was back in late July, just after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said that everyone, vaccinated or no, should go back to wearing masks inside.

Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it. Such worries among a large crowd of mostly young people such paranoia despite nearly complete vaccination? What was the goddam point of such heavy handed vaccine mandates in the first place if even after these vaccines that presumably work well to dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness, people should still scurry back behind all the health measures? At this point it's like going into panic mode over people possibly transmitting the ordinary annual flu to each other if the vaccines reduce the chances of death as much as is clinically claimed.

smt88• 5 years ago

Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it.

It's very obvious the writer is just acknowledging the odd circumstances of the meeting with Stephenson. This isn't Reuters -- the writer is setting the scene for the reader and adding personal perspective. He doesn't dwell on the topic.

Your response about Covid is ironically exactly what you're accusing the author of, an off-topic narrative wedged into a discussion about something else.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

People don’t understand risks or logarithms. The risk of a given consequence can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on characteristics but people want the same response. The risk can vary by time by orders of magnitude but people want the same restrictions.

Ultimately people can’t accept nonzero risk and conversely think that it is possible to eliminate all risk of something (at the same time happily accepting risks thousands of times higher)

agumonkey• 5 years ago

What's obvious now is how an uninformed mass can be impossible to operate.

People really couldn't grasp, and diluted themselves into endless guru talks.

Society should focus on invisible training (skills and communication)

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

Apocalypse terror sells

zpeti• 5 years ago

This. And also the west seems completely obsessed with safety, it trumps any other value now. But safety has a massive price, but that doesn’t matter any more.

I’m also guessing a large part of how politicians can make themselves seem useful is making people safe. There’s not much else for them to do any more everyone is so well off.

andyjohnson07• 5 years ago

Its just a device. One of the things that journalists (and particularly those who practice what used to be known as "magazine journalism") are taught is to "hang" their article on some current event or situation. The intention is to give the reader a feeling of topicality that links the content (a book launch in this case) to their present situation.

(Also your comments about vaccination and "panic" are bs.)

helloworld112• 5 years ago

I can think of no better word to describe the notion of otherwise healthy, not extremely elderly people being asked to go back to masks even inside DESPITE being vaccinated because of a new variant of the virus emerging despite it's having been shown to not be notably worse in terms of symptoms. Such things beg the obvious question: If the vaccines work, then why be asked to wear a mask again if nearly everyone's vaccinated? Or why mandate them even in preference to previous, recent infection if they work so weakly that the masks are requested again?

krageon7• 5 years ago

completely forced narrative

People are dying or getting sick and it impacts their lives. Nothing forced about that narrative. If it bothers you to read about it, you could probably hold off on reading new things for five years. Perhaps things will have changed then.

justin662• 5 years ago

nearly complete vaccination

Are you being dishonest or are you really that poorly informed?

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

Seveneves was about global warming ... kind of ;)

pabs3• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the plot of Snow Piercer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Piercer#Plot

citizenpaul2• 5 years ago

Why "finally?" Was thre some petition? Has he been claiming he would for a long time?

ZeroGravitas2• 5 years ago

I can't decide if I need a browser extension that just deletes the word "finally" from headlines, as it never adds anything but unnecessary drama or actively blocks the whole article from my view on the basis that it's probably clickbait bullshit.

Has anyone written an AI yet that can read the article and tell you that before you waste your time?

Fnoord4• 5 years ago

'Finally' denotes op'ed, subjectivity by author of Wired article. It signals those who care about global warming to click, while those who don't care are more inclined to skip. Ie. it has a use.

While you're at it you can do the same with questionmark / questions, cause the answer is probably "No.".

HN does use software to (de)prioritize certain titles and URLs.

drstewart• 5 years ago

Don't forget about the word "quietly". Usually trying to insinuate something shady is happening but always leaves me thinking: "Would I really expect them to broadcast this loudly?"

adwn• 5 years ago

Next week on HN: This AI can finally tell you whether an article is a waste of your time

mejutoco• 5 years ago

I have you covered! I developed this half-joking half serious extension to remove the word 'actually', but it already expanded to include words like 'literally. (each word is configurable individually)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/actually-no-remove...

If you comment on the webstore page with the request to add finally I will add the feature this week.

ycombinete• 5 years ago

It made me think of David Chappelle's famous "where's Ja?!" bit [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc

andyjohnson07• 5 years ago

"We've arranged to meet here to talk about his latest novel, number 17 over nearly four decades of wildly popular, cinder-block-sized sci-fi thrillers."

Because climate change is a major, global, and increasingly visible threat to our presence on this planet - and Stephenson hadn't made it a theme of any of his books over the last four decades. In the opinion of the article's author, this is significant. Seems reasonable to me.

drclau2• 5 years ago

I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme.

More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.

There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.

I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.

Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.

jeegsy• 5 years ago

Of the top of my head, I don't recall any other issue that the zeitgeist even tacitly required a fiction writer to cover. The book will probably be great but what an odd article!

citizenpaul2• 5 years ago

You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? This toxic attitude is really what I was poking at as I suspected it was the case. That or click bait sensationalism.

There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.

disneygibson8• 5 years ago

Because for many people (this author included), this topic is akin to a religion, complete with holy literature (sci-fi) and a high priesthood (scientists and sci-fi writers.) So when a "god" like Stephenson (the word god is used in the article to describe him) doesn't preach about the imminent End of Times, everyone gets nervous.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:

But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.

And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”

I followed up. About what?

Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.

Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”

Like I said, cultish.

krageon7• 5 years ago

I don't understand what that quote is supposed to tell the reader about cultish behaviour.

justin662• 5 years ago

Humor and hyperbole (both of which you've apparently failed to recognize) are not the central traits of cults.

bloat• 5 years ago

See also the use of the word "now", which seems to imply "Oh God, after everything else, what are they up to now?" as in (from the Daily Mail) "Now police blame victims for being burgled!"

foo27928• 5 years ago

"finally" is very much appropriate. No need for petitions. The article quotes Stephenson: “I'm a guy who found a niche writing fiction about technical and scientific topics. It seemed odd to me that I should get to the end of my career and never take a whack at it.”

ncmncm3• 5 years ago

I am thrilled to learn that the title of the book is about the absolute disaster inherent in typical geo-engineering ideas.

But nobody talks about how, as the oceans acidify, the basis for the whole, worldwide ocean ecosystem is teetering at the edge of collapse, and that, what, two billion? people today depend on that ocean ecosystem for their protein. (Calories are cheap. Protein is dear.) Wars will happen over access to the scraps.

Meanwhile, as extremely densely populated parts of the planet become uninhabitable -- first, the crops will fail -- the people who live there will not sit down and die. They will move, in their millions. (It is already happening, across and around the Mediterranean.) The places they will try to go are already populated, and crops there will be in trouble, too. There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable. But the refugees will not be going there, and will not be equipped to make the places livable. They will head for civilization, in places that do not want them.

Political pressure to try to keep them out will put right-wing extremists in power, whose solutions will resemble what were called "final". Once in power, they will start wars, as they do. Will those rapidly become nuclear wars?

Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.

Anyway, if civilization collapses, fossil fuel production and, thus, consumption, will plummet, and atmospheric CO2 concentration might start down, provided we have not got a positive-feedback cycle already locked in, as the tundra melts and decays.

Tycho• 5 years ago

Why would colder lands become arable at a slower pace than warmer lands becoming infertile?

ioseph• 5 years ago

Topsoil and rainfall doesn't magically appear when a tundra thaws

ncmncm3• 5 years ago

It is one thing to be technically arable, and wholly another to have infrastructure in place to take advantage of it.

But there is also no reason for the rates to match. It might even happen faster, but that will not be useful until much later.

krageon7• 5 years ago

Will those rapidly become nuclear wars?

No, because you are describing folks in shitty parts of the world. They will die just fine in regular wars and just because they aren't nuclear or the world will not end because we had them doesn't make it any less tragic.

Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.

Raise your children better than you were, because it won't be you dealing with the problems.

b112• 5 years ago

While not agreeing or disagreeing with your post, this part warranted I reply:

There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable.

This isn't really so for most, if not all crops.

The problem isn't the cold, it is growing season length, and sunlight, and shade.

I'm in southern Quebec, 300km from New York state. Some years, certain crops fail to reach maturity, as the growing season is shortened by too much rain / cloud cover. EG, old human editable yellow corn has a longer growing season than newer 2-colour/"peaches-n-cream" varieties, and sometimes never matures.

And in the spring/fall, the sun, even where I live, does not get far about the horizon, even at peak.

Many crops also cannot handle 24 hours of sun! Plants literally need rest cycles too.

So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.

Peat moss, and other such plants, do not need to produce large fruits or nuts to survive. And of course, our crops are picked for making the largest fruit/nuts, so require more time to be usable.

Stepping back from this issue, one thing of note.

Massive amounts of cropland is not used in southern Quebec, and other regions of Canada. Sometimes, it is not profitable to farm, and you can find lots of land sitting fallow.

Canada could easily double or even triple its crop output if food was more expensive.

I don't know how this applies to the rest of the world, but I do know that the EU does pay some farmers not to farm.

Outside of the economic realities, there is the fact that sometimes more tha 50% of Canada's wheat crop rots in silos.

This may seem horrifying, but is logical and sensible. Growing crops is not under our full control. Pests, drought, too much / not enough sun, means that there are bumper, and poor crop years.

You always want enough, or in the bad years people could starve.

Which leads to why the EU pays people not to farm, yet keep farmland. If conditions change, say some regions are at war, or have economic breakdowns, this fallow land comes into use, else again, we starve.

Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.

CRConrad5• 5 years ago

The problem isn't the cold, it is growing season length, and sunlight, and shade.
So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.
Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.

Oh, surely it will help to at least some extent? Wheat, and even more so barley and rye, have been grown up to at least the middle of Finland and northern(ish) Sweden for hundreds of years. And those were the old not-so-refined varieties.

sireat• 5 years ago

I am a fan of Snow Crash and Diamond Age and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co....

So it was a bit shocking to learn the following:

From the article: "From 1999 to 2006, Stephenson worked as a member of the technical staff at Jeff Bezos' private space rocket company, Blue Origin. A three-year stint at Intellectual Ventures Lab, the R&D arm of the science investment firm started by Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold, involved some climate-change-related research."

The Blue Origin work seems pretty logical.

The Intellectual Ventures stint/k proves that we all have a price for rose colored blinders.

Presumably Stephenson realized how ethically challenged IV is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

CRConrad5• 5 years ago

Yeah, before he realised and changed his mind, it probably seemed like just too good a deal financially to pass up. Perhaps with some element of "Maybe I can influence it for the better", which he then gave up on.

throwanem• 5 years ago

This isn't one of those climate books where small-town college professors get sad.

This, for anyone interested, is an entirely deserved potshot at Ian McEwan's 2010 Solar.

nobody99992• 5 years ago

If you'd like a decent read that has aspects of climate change as a central theme, check out The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

It's pretty good.

mitchbob• 5 years ago

https://archive.ph/lw5Pt

Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming

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