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I've forgotten the ending to Anathem. The Reamde was a solid ending, but the ending was basically a set piece of "libertarian country gun nuts vs. terrorists" and was bad.

If it was 25 pages shorter it probably would have been fine. It was SO. LONG.


Anyone pick up the new Stephenson yet? Bought it but haven't read it.

perhaps more of the author’s perspective coming through than intended.

That's my theory.

I just finished the fourth book and speaking of "Stephenson endings" that was not one.  Everything wrapped in a very neat bow, felt well-paced, resolves all the things you want to see resolved but also leaves openings for more stories.

I gave up looking for gender clues a third of the way into the first book; it's clearly very deliberately undefined.  Even after the crew has seen Murderbot's face they don't slip into any masculine or feminine pronouns, which means either they're all really diligent about not assuming gender (it is the future, after all) or its human features are so perfectly androgynous that it doesn't read as either.

For better or worse, this is a reason Murderbot comes across as female, based on conventions of the genre and societal expectations.  Similarly, it’s what one assumes when they find a Sci Fi author with two first initials and a last name, or a forum poster with a gender-neutral username and an anime avatar..

I've only read the first three but I definitely thought of Murderbot as female. I'm not sure I could point to anything on the page to justify that.

I’ve read the first four, and yes I also thought Murderbot was female in appearance.

There’s a lot of coyness about their appearance that made me think so, as well as perhaps more of the author’s perspective coming through than intended.

I've forgotten the ending to Anathem. The Reamde was a solid ending, but the ending was basically a set piece of "libertarian country gun nuts vs. terrorists" and was bad.

Arrivng tomorrow - Koumei and the Five Fates

https://youtu.be/D6iblGunMnQ

By "Stephenson ending" you mean no ending at all, right?   

I remember when I read the Baroque Cycle I was impressed by the fact that it actually felt like it had an ending (a very longwinded one, mind you), as compared to Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash where I remember them just kind of trailing off.  I can't remember now where Anathem and Reamde fell on that scale.

Just started on the fourth Murderbot book.  They're extremely in demand at the library right now so I'm being forced to pace myself, but it's kind of nice to have each trip to the library (to pick up the next volume as soon as it shows up on my hold shelf) feel like Christmas morning.

I went to the library last week and ended up picking up Neal Stephenson's new(est) book, Temination Shock.

His previous book to this (Fall or Dodge in Hell) was so horrible that I barely made it halfway through so I wasn't expecting much, but this one was actually more like his older books. Does have a "Stephenson ending," but at least it wasn't the abomination the previous book was.

My second time I was stunned at how much I'd missed the first time because I wasn't looking at game sites, etc.

The third time that I just started, not so much, and yeah, slower.

We are all really soon going to be like cockroaches skittering in the walls of vast swells of AI text where AIs are talking to AIs.

Which the AI-chasing parts of Big Tech companies don't really want but are powerless to stop because they're all dumb cunts. I was talking with someone at an academic publisher who suddenly reached out to me about a conversation I had in person with his predecessor about a manuscript I'm working on. That was four years ago. This guy was like "wow we want this book stat, send up a prospectus! Send us the almost completed manuscript!" and I was like "this is kind of weird". It turns out he was going through his predecessor's notes for the last decade of those kinds of conversations and he was hot to get everything in the door because the big corporation that bought this press a few years back signed a deal with several big AI players to sell them all the draft manuscripts they are working with for LLM training because they all have run out of text despite scraping the entire Internet, the entire corpus of Google Books, every digitized manuscript, every digitized archive. They don't care what's in the drafts, just that it's not by AIs. But they're not going to be able to get ahead of the AI Centipede wave where the AIs are shitting into social media and consuming their own shit and training themselves into a deadly recursive space where the shortcomings of their present training models get amplified. There's nothing human left to eat, and they're going to crowd us out of the textual spaces we've used to communicate with each other.