Snow Crash

I just started reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I came across a reference to this book while reading about transhumanism and technological singularities. Very interesting stuff, available through wikipedia. I was made aware of these theories through some of the science-fiction books I read, mainly Dan Simmon’s Illium and Olympos and Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space novels. Speaking of which, a new collection of novella in the Revelation Space universe is coming out this fall. its called Galactic North. It’s an interesting trend in scifi lit, especially the theories governing posthumans.

I knew of neal stephenson because of his 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. At the time i was studying math and someone that this would a great read for me. I have to say I enjoyed it a lot. I’ve been trying for the last year to read the Baroque Cycle, but i have failed in my attempts. I will try again later on, maybe after having reread the Cryptonomicon, since the Baroque Cycle provides a lot of background on the characters that appeared there. I guess it’s probably because I was expecting scifi and ended up with a mostly historical novel. It reminds me of the summer I tried and succeeded in reading War and Peace.

I just learned that Neal Stephenson has provided a wiki named the Quicksilver wiki for the Baroque Cycle. I just love wikipedia. It’s one of the best reference tools. One article just leads to another and another, a vast repository of information, much more actualized through web 2.0 and a form of blogging than any other encyclopedia. It took some time for the content to stabilize and to sophisticate, but its a mainstay of web 2.0.