Some Remarks
1 New York Timesbestselling author Neal Stephenson is, quite simply, one of the best and most respected writers alive. He's taken sf to places it's never been (Snow Crash, Anathem). He's reinvented the historical novel (The Baroque Cycle), the international thriller (Reamde), and both at the same time (Cryptonomicon). Now he treats his legion of fans to Some Remarks, an enthralling collection of essays--Stephenson's first nonfiction work since his long essay on technology, In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, more than a decade ago--as well as new and previously published short writings both fiction and non. Some Remarksis a magnificent showcase of a brilliantly inventive mind and talent, as he discourses on everything from Sir Isaac Newton to Star Wars.
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2014–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Neal Stephenson has a great perspective on this is his book Some Remarks.
- A classic. This is reprinted in Stephenson's book Some Remarks, which also has some other essays and stories (all quite a bit shorter than this though). Worth checking out if you like Stephenson.
- Probably the most articulate and persuasive piece analyzing treadmill desks is Neal Stephenson's "Arsebestos" in his book of various essays Some Remarks. If this is a link to said essay I wouldn't know, the server is crushed...
- Fantastic article of course.
This has been republished in Stephenson's book Some Remarks [1], which also includes a bunch of his other non-fiction (as well as a couple fiction short stories). Highly recommended.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Some-Remarks-Essays-Other-Writing/dp/B...
- I bought "Some Remarks" by Neal Stephenson just to give this story to someone.
- "Why is the world so troubled right now?" also reminds me of Neal Stephenson's comments in Some Remarks and "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out" (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?):
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
One can see the bizarrely powerful rejection of science in parts of the right (regarding climate change), the left (regarding vaccines) and obviously in much of the Middle East.
