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Thursday, May 28, 2020

Some Remarks: Essays and Other WritingSome Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's no other way to put this:

It's a grab-bag.

You have no choice what has been put in it and sometimes it's a few truly awesome short stories and sometimes it's an interview or two and sometimes it's light, almost spur of the moment ramblings and sometimes it's an in-depth essay (through Wired) the delves (or dives) deep into the history, present, and future of undersea data cables.

For some reason I can't quite fathom, my mind keeps swimming around the traveling hacker bits. On the one hand, I thought a great deal of it was delightfully quirky and it gives us a real backbone to the internet at large, from a physical perspective, but on the other hand, I thought it was JUST TOO LONG.

Not everyone is going to have the same mileage with it. I'm generally quite patient with tech stuff and it fascinated me to a certain point until I was just -- okay already, I'd love to have a story now. ;)

Here are some freaking fantastic highlights tho:

The fight between Neal Stephenson and William Gibson! Epic!

The debate between Vegging-out and Geeking-out.

Genre talk, book talk, book talk, and more book talk. :)

But those short stories? Damn... they got me going. And the unpublished book he said he would never finish? GAAAAHHHH!

I WANT MY SERIAL MURDERER IN THE SHIRE!

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