Salon Interview with Neal Stephenson

papertiger writes "Andrew Leonard has an interesting story, Code, on Neal Stephenson. He also has a FAQ on the book which is worth reading. " And I get to see Chris DiBonia today-who has my signed copy,

Comments

Re:Why Finux and not Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

This very question was asked at the Boston reading on Monday. Basically, calling it Finux fictionalizes it, and that allows him to change what he needs in service of the book. When Neal transports NT into the book, he brings in all the real-world aspects of NT: produced by Microsoft, semi-replacement for the old Windows, etc.

Let's say he wants something similar-a OS made by a worldspaning megacompany, but without, say, the baggage of Microsoft being beseiged by DoJ, Linux, etc. So he calls it Ultrasoft RP, and he has most of the background there (most people will know what he's talking about), but he can change crucial details. He could say the RP kernel was created by a prodigy 10-yr old girl and was ripped away from her by said evil corporation, which is not (to the best of my knowledge) something you can say about NT. Calling Linux Finux allows Neal to take the essence of the concept and dress it up as he wants.

Dave*

Why Finux and not Linux?

[Brett Viren]

I am reading Cryptonomicon now (which, so far is just great), and I have one question: He mentions by name, Windows, BeOS, UNIX and other real live OSes (well, excluding Windows as R.L. [grin]) but when he comes to Linux, which he praises heavily, he calls it Finux. Obviously, the name is a play on the name of Linus's home country, but, what I wonder is what is the motivation for comming up with an artificial name for Linux when actual names of all other OSes are used?

Anyone have any ideas?

-Brett.

Cryptonomicon: What's Good and Bad?

[Frater 219]

I've actually read this monster of a book. (For those who haven't as much as seen it yet, Cryptonomicon is more than nine hundred pages long. This is longer than either James Joyce's Ulysses or Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!, though substantially shorter than the Bible.) I've read it -- and I'm not sure what to think of it.

Let me say first that I liked this book, and that I would definitely recommend it to those who've enjoyed Stephenson's other work. However, that doesn't mean I don't have problems with it, which I do. Here are a few impressions:

The editing, at least in this first printing, is nothing short of terrible. The book is full of typos; the FAQ-documented one in the middle of a Perl script is just the most technically relevant. Some are truly embarrassing -- using "damn" to mean "dam" in one place -- while others just look to be the sign of a lack of spell-checking.

Another example of poor editing is evident in the large portions of the book which are printed in a monospace (non-proportional) font, intended to resemble email or other computer text. Real email does not contain ligatures (those jammed-together "fi" and "fl" characters), and in a real monospace font, the spaces themselves are the same size as the letters.

Early in the book -- in the part excerpted on the Web page -- Stephenson commits the Bill Gates Crypto Error. This is my expression for referring to, in the context of crypto, "factoring large prime numbers", as Gates did in The Road Ahead. Naturally, it is very easy to factor large prime numbers; what is hard is to factor composite numbers which are the products of large primes. This is called "prime factorization", but the numbers being factored are most definitely composites.

Okay, enough of the technical bickering ... on to the book's ostensible artistic content. First off I would like to say that if I were an academic literary critic I would already be working on a paper entitled "Representations of the Sexual in the Works of Neal Stephenson." When I was reading Snow Crash for the first time I boggled over Stephenson's characterizing vicious, warlike, sexually violent, patriarchal cultures (like the Old Testament Hebrews) as islands of rationality and sanity in a sea of Ashtoreth-worshipping, feminized, oversexed, primitives. After The Diamond Age I dismissed it largely as reverence for "people of the Book" (as opposed to "people of the Seed" perhaps?), but after Cryptonomicon I'm not so sure. He honestly doesn't seem to have a place for a culture, or a character for that matter, which is simultaneously technically creative and sexually open. And now he's even promulgating the old saw that masturbation drains away your creative energies. I find it surprising that he never brings his sexual conservatism to bear against Alan Turing -- though homosexuality does get Turing's ex-lover Rudy in trouble with the Nazi regime, it seems that Stephenson has extended his sexual views past their Old-Testament basis, at least insofar as accepting Turing & Co.

In the light of Larry Wall's eminently reasonable adoption of the postmodern aesthetic in discussing Perl, the Net, and (post)modern culture, I find Stephenson's sniping at postmodernism to be rather silly. While his spoofs of academia -- as in the characters Charlene and Geb (that's G.E.B., as in Hofstadter's book) -- may well be deserved, he seems all too willing to sweep the postmodern under the rubric of the decadent, morally loose, and irrational. These are, ironically enough in a WWII novel, basically the same critiques that the Nazi regime made of "modern" (e.g. Picasso) art.

That's about all I can come up with right now -- oh, one other thing: How the fsck did Enoch Root come back to life?!

Re:Cryptonomicon: What's Good and Bad?

[kday]

I spent the better part of this last weekend reading Cryptonomicon, and I certainly enjoyed it (enough to cancel plans so I could stay home and read it). But I too have a few nits to pick with the book.

As far as vague impressions go, I distinctly got the feeling that this book was overambitious. Stephenson has got some great ideas, and he excells at constructing an intriguing plot, but his departure from the more blatant SF style of his previous books revealed his literary awkwardness, IMHO. He writes text like one might write code. Functionality is dominant, but he surrounds it with a lot of /* semi-relevant embellishment. */ Aside from his propensity for technical content, and the sheer size of this novel, I really don't understand the comparison to Thomas Pynchon alluded to in the Salon "interview".

What I think seperates this book from "literature" in my mind -- fancy binding nonwithstanding -- is a lack of depth in both characterization and symbolism. I don't think I would gain any more understanding of the novel by reading it again -- unlike, say, Gravity's Rainbow, which I could reread every six months for the rest of my life and probably still find new meaning in it.

Anyway, I have no doubt that someone could write an interesting paper on sexual elements in his novels. I didn't find it objectionable, but I was definitely struck by the how utterly shallow Stephenson's charactarization of his female characters is. His women all seem to be a sort of Platonic ideal according to -- for lack of a better classification -- the male geek. (I admit I find them appealing, but they're just plain unrealistic. They might as well all be 6' Amazon lingere models with male brains grafted into their feminine bodies.) However, deep characters are not his strong point, nor, if I may suppose, his intent. He's an idea man, and this is a techno-thriller.

Regarding the masturbation incidents, I don't think it's clearly characterized as draining creative energy. Waterhouse Sr. made the observation that he did his best work after visiting the whorehouses. Waterhouse Jr. when he's in prison does seem to experience a creative burst, though. I dunno. This, like quite a lot of other tangents in the book, could easily be omitted and the book would not suffer.

The Enoch Root character was interesting. I understood him as a sort of emissary -- his presence in the novel wasn't as a normal character, but more as an embodiment of the superhuman. The superuser among us, so to speak. I think his name was clearly intended to evoke this idea, but his humanity (the affair with Julietta, the explicit death scene) is sort of confusing. Perhaps, more mundanely, Enoch Root is a title in the Societas Eruditorum, rather than an individual. Enoch was a biblical patriarch, and we all know who root is. Not only that, but apparantly (from an Altavista search on Enoch I just did) according to Christian mythology, Enoch is thought to never have died, and he "...was a member of the line of descent through Seth by which the knowledge of God was preserved." (italics mine).

Finally, I should say that the reason I am a little disappointed with this book is because I liked it so much. If it was just another SF novel, I wouldn't think to complain about it. But this was good enough to deserve critical thought.

Re:Cryptonomicon: What's Good and Bad?

[look]

No, you are the one blatanly wrong here. Pi is a transendental number. It cannot be fully expressed in a finite quantity. You can cut a stick with length 22/7 inches, or 3.14 inches or 3.14159 inches, but you *cannot* cut a stick to *pi* inches. You can only approach it.

Stephenson and Postmodernism(s)

[Frater 219]

I see one major problem with what you just said: you seem to be seeing "postmodernism" as one big thing, and that's just not accurate. There are a lot of views and attitudes which are labeled "postmodern", and some of them are incompatible with others. The academic, politically-correct litcrit "postmodernism" which Stephenson directly mocks in the character of Charlene isn't at all the same thing as, say, Larry Wall's "postmodernism". In fact, they're almost diametric opposites.

I for one think that calling Charlene postmodern is to confuse the issue. Charlene is intolerant and politically-correct, and uses her position as a scholar to mistreat Randy. Her intolerant breed of feminism is a good example of a "totalizing discourse", something that postmodernism tends to critique.*

Have you read "Perl, the first postmodern computer language"? While I think he makes some mistakes about Modernism, he can at least get the point out about postmodernism.

That we live in a postmodern world does not mean that we're not allowed to have opinions or be right or wrong. To me it means things like these:

• No one person, or culture, is right or moral all the time. We should value our ideas and our culture, but we shouldn't assume that they are the source of all virtue or knowledge, and that other people or cultures have nothing to contribute.
  
• Because nobody is right all the time, we need to seek out information from people we disagree with, or who have different perspectives, in order to become educated. This doesn't mean that every perspective is equally useful, only that there's no single perspective which contains all the information in the world.*
  
• Because no culture is right all the time, it follows that our culture is sometimes not right. Some of the rules, generalizations, and assumptions which we are taught aren't true -- or at least aren't entirely true. We need to find out which ones aren't true, and quit teaching them to each other.
  
• An "original" idea isn't entirely original. It depends on a lot of cultural context, and on a lot of precursor ideas. (There would be no Perl without C, sh, awk, and so forth.) Hence while the nominal author of a work has indeed made something new, s/he hasn't made it ex nihilo. To paraphrase Newton, every great author or creator stands on the shoulders of giants -- and him/herself tends to have a few others on his/her shoulders as well.
  

(This is of course just a partial list. Any other people out there who think postmodernism has something useful to offer, please add to it.)


* Michel Foucault, a postmodern cultural critic if ever there was one, refers to perspectives that claim to understand the whole world as "totalizing discourses". Marxism is his classic example; a die-hard Marxist claims that all social phenomena can be explained completely in terms of economics. Charlene's warrior-feminism is a totalizing discourse which sees everything in terms of white male aggression. Foucault holds that totalizing discourses don't work.

Kinda ho-hum stuff

[vlax]

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Cryptonomicon (so please don't spoil it for me!) and I'd really like to recommend this book, but I can't. Not that it's a terrible read. I'll take Cryptonomicon over Tom Clancy's latest piece of trash any day. (That doesn't say much, I'll read the nutritional information on the side of a bag of M&M's over a Tom Clancy novel.) The characters aren't badly drawn although they can get a little too cliche. The scenes are fairly well set and the book doesn't bog down too much. And, as in all of Stephenson's novels, there's a brief section of pure humour to be found somewhere in it. In Snow Crash, it was the toilet paper memo, in Interface, the "Prince of Darkness" chapter, and in Cryptonomicon, it's the e-mail from Randy describing his adventure in the Phillipines. I read it out loud to my girlfriend and had her on the floor laughing.

What's missing seems to be a subtext. Snow Crash has a brilliant assault on the libertarian anti-utopia. Diamond Age attacks the 20th century's whole idea of cultural progress, suggesting it's an illusion altogether. Interface slags the process of packaging candidates and selling them like underarm deodorant, adding a few very 90's tricks to this otherwise kind of tired topic. Even Zodiac trashes the softer minded part of the environmental movement. But what is the subtext of Cryptonomicon? I don't know. I hope it's not his weak and insipid attacks on postmodernism. I know, it can be fun, but flamming a pomo is like eating Chinese food: at first you're satisfied, but a few minutes later you want another one. Honestly, we've all been there, and Alan Sokal did it better.

If I want to read WWII historical fiction, I can read a Mitchner novel, and the world of high-tech start-ups is already a little too heavily chronicled. So what is this book for? What does this book have to say that takes 900 pages? At page 650, I have yet to figure it out.

I don't feel that I wasted my $25 getting this book, but I learned little, and I can't say it's made me think. The book may be a commercial sucess, but I can't call it an artistic one. It's well crafted so far, which is pretty good for the Stephenson who seemed to have such a hard time bringing the Diamond Age to a satisfying close.

I really like Stephenson, I have since I bought Zodiac on a lark in train station years ago. He's going where others aren't, and I appreciate that. But he's not Pynchon, at least not yet.

This interview didn't seem to cover any new ground either, except to confirm that he has a background in tech. Salon is a big enough deal that they should be able to keep his attention long enough for a good interview.

`Novel' way to avoid export controls?

[Max Hyre]

After reading the decision on the Bernstein case (see the /. article for a refresher), the typo in Stephenson's book struck me as a perfect defense.

The decision refers to the Government's claim that the functional aspects of crypto override any First-Amendment issues. (See pp. 4235, 4236, 4238n., and the dissent on pp. 4246ff.) Thus, we can export the first edition of Cryptonomicon in machine-readable form, free of obnoxious restraints, precisely because it doesn't function. A comment on the code would be nice, or a pointer to the errata, but if the code don't work, the Government can't claim it's crypto!

Any takers? :-)

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Uh..........

[MAXOMENOS]

The interview mentions that Neal Stephenson created the idea of a consentual computer-based reality....I was under the impression that William Gibson did this way back when, with his novel Neuromancer, where he coined the term cyberspace. Am I missing something here?

Re:Uh..........

[Mr. Slippery]

Vinge's True Names was years before Gibson. I also recall a story by Ben Bova (I think) called The Duelling Machine that (I think) was even earlier, which involved VR but in a different context. Gibson does get credit for "cyberspace", though.

The Crypto in Cryptonomicon

[hwestiii]

Quite by accident, I happened across this link to a site from Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer who dreamed up the crypto system used in the book. It is a fairly detailed description of how to implement the Solitaire system. It is detailed, but it is a rather simple and elegant system, and the details are relatively few. I would like to know just how tongue-in-cheek (or not) the multiple references to the 'secret police' are.

mugshot

[landtuna]

Shouldn't Neal Stephenson have his own Slashdot icon by now? :)

Yes, but not what you think...

[Kaa]

AFAIK both the concept and the word 'cyberspace' were invented before Gibson.

Kaa

Nope, not at all

[Kaa]

The point is not measuring pi, the point is precision. Whatever is the length of your stick, it is expressed as a finite number (physics takes care of this, think scale of atoms). Pi is not a finite number, ergo...

Kaa

The interviewer is more concerned with himself

[Kaa]

Isn't an interview supposed to show you the person being interviewed? I got a distinct impression that this "interview" was about Andrew Leonard's ruminations about talking with Neal Stephenson, and I'm not that interested in them.

New/interesting info about Stephenson/Cryptonomicon: zero. New info about Andrew Leonard: self-obsessed. Avoid.

Kaa