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

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?!

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.

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