Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.

SoylentNews Book Club - Discuss: Snow Crash, Start Reading: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

posted by martyb on Saturday January 05 2019, @11:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the discuss! dept.

takyon writes:

February: Fiasco by Stanisław Lem
March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor

Discuss Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in the comments below.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein was published in 1966:

The book popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"), and helped popularize the constructed language Loglan, which is used in the story for precise human-computer interaction. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations credits this novel with the first printed appearance of the phrase "There's no free lunch", although the phrase and its abbreviation considerably predate the novel.

The virtual assistant Mycroft is named after a computer system from the novel.

Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
SoylentNews Book Club - Discuss: Snow Crash, Start Reading: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 20 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 07 2019, @05:48PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday January 07 2019, @05:48PM (#783265) Journal

    If I especially like a book, I'll read it more than once. I have read Snow Crash only once. Not bad, but it's one of those stories that's over the top. It's cyberpunk carried to caricature extremes.

    The setting has humanity well down the road to Hell, living in corporate fascist walled-- well, you can't call them gardens, more like weed patches. The depiction of the Feds was especially silly.

    The main thrust can be taken as feelgood for nerds, or as mockery of same, in that the normies don't want or need hackers any more, after using them to build out a computer network, until faced with a mysterious crisis that looks like it's going to need some serious hacking to figure out. Of course, the villains have realized early on that hackers are their biggest enemies, the ones most likely to be able to expose and counter their scheme, and have targeted them first. So there aren't a whole lot of hackers left by the time the normies understand something is wrong and that nerds are prime targets, and maybe they ought to rediscover some value in nerds since whatever is doing them in evidently thinks them worth the trouble of eliminating.

    There's also an elevation of nerdiness to a pillar of civilization. Ancient Babylon rose from savagery to civilization through the insights and efforts of nerds. Why, we might still all be savage beasts today if not for those early nerd heroes, hacking our very brains.

    And the villains, it's not clear who they are, or even if they are, if there are any human conspirators behind it all. Maybe it's just a disease? But no, we eventually learn that there are human villains behind it all, and who do they turn out to be? Why, the very worst anti-intellectual dirtbags you can imagine: televangelists!

    All in all, a kind of nerd fantasy that's a bit embarrassing.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2