Words&Dirt

Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks is a highly stimulating read from my favorite living author. This collection of essays and short fiction sheds light on Stephenson’s personal background, writing methods, and modes of information synthesis. As always, we are treated to a very special version of the world––one seen through the eyes of an author who has carefully surrounded himself with some of the most intelligent, curious and capable humans on Earth (and who happens to be one of them himself).

Spanning roughly two decades (early 1990s––present), these writings never come together into a coherent whole, but that is clearly not Stephenson’s goal. By his own admission, Stephenson sets out to “conduct a shameless whitewashing of that historical record, picking only the good stuff, and editing even that to make it look better” (1-2). The result is a verbal sausage wrapped in the delectable sheath of Stephenson’s hallmark pith and perspicacity.

With the exception of an obnoxious yarn that seemed to glorify tax-dodging through the manipulation of virtual currencies, I didn’t have a strong reaction to the smatterings of fiction in this collection. I’ll focus my comments on the nonfiction pieces, which cover a range of topics and vary considerably in quality. Some essays contain fully fleshed out ideas and arguments, whereas others end before they even get going. One of the difficulties of writing about technology is that an article may already be outdated by the time it reaches the general public, and the danger of obsolescence grows with each passing month and year. New technologies are always in motion, so it’s often impossible to make concrete judgments about their effects on society, which can be permanent, ephemeral or anywhere in between. Fortunately, Stephenson’s writing is so adroit that even his outdated or underdeveloped pieces are still fun and engaging.

By far the most impressive offering here is an article Stephenson wrote for Wired in 1996 called “Mother Earth, Mother Board”. It’s a tour de force of innovative “hacker tourism” that outlines the technical, political and economic challenges of running fiber-optic cables across continents and oceans. Stephenson provides an engrossing and cosmopolitan portrait of the individuals and organizations, both current and historical, that gave us a world that “has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half” (235).

In an era when wireless logistics dominate most laypeople’s interactions with advanced technology and social media, it’s critical to remember that all wireless systems are predicated on a vast infrastructure of physical wires that transmit data almost instantaneously. Stephenson aptly appropriates the image of a wormhole to describe this phenomenon:

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world. (121).

Although my lack of technical chops prevented me from understanding the finer points of “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” I could still recognize it as a powerful and unique piece of expository writing. I was awestruck by the technical achievements of globalization and unnerved by the amoral force with which our most powerful technologies embed themselves in our lives and landscapes. It also left me curious about how fiber-optic technologies have changed and/or stayed the same in the two decades since this piece was first published.

Another gem in this collection is Stephenson’s “Gresham College Lecture” from 2008. It highlights Stephenson’s views on geek culture and speculative fiction (SF), including an interesting if not particularly novel theory of modern knowledge:

Choose any person in the world at random, no matter how non-geeky they might seem, and talk to them long enough, and in most cases you will eventually hit on some topic about which they are exorbitantly knowledgeable and, if you express interest, on which they are willing to talk, enthusiastically, for hours. You have found their inner geek…This is how knowledge works today, and how it’s going to work in the future. No more Heinleinian polymaths. Instead, a web of geeks, each of whom knows a lot about something. Twenty years ago, we called them nerds, and we despised them; we didn’t like the power that they seemed to have over the rest of us, and we identified them as something different from normal society. Now, we call them geeks, and we like them just fine, because they are us…We’re all geeks now. (78-9)

Stephenson echoed this last sentiment in his most recent novel, Seveneves. As much as I’m drawn to Robert Heinlein’s romantic notion that “specialization is for insects,” history has favored Stephenson’s view. The world is far too vast for even the smartest individuals to grasp more than a tiny sliver of available input, and new information is being created and disseminated constantly. But even if we have to give up on the brainy übermensch who will single-handedly lead the way to a new enlightenment, we gain something much more valuable: the concrete, irrefutable reality of our own interdependence, not just with other humans, but with the rest of the natural and physical world.

A world where smart folks think they have to get good at everything? That’s stifling. But a world where people excel within their niche of geekdom while using technology to access and utilize the knowledge of others? That’s a recipe for personal contentment and societal progress.

Speculative fiction plays a huge role in helping people discover and cultivate their inner geek. Even though I still think the best SF resides in books by Stephenson and his ilk, I’ve been delighted by the recent trend of “competence porn” narratives that have invaded Hollywood (think Interstellar, The Martian, and even films like Spotlight). It’s encouraging to think that the desires of SF fans are becoming mainstream:

SF fans…want to see intelligence at work…they want ideas. They want to learn something or to join with the author in speculating about a future or about a fantastical other world…SF thrives because it is idea porn. (82-3).

Speculative fiction is a much more dignified term than “competence porn” or “idea porn,” so I hope it continues to grow in popularity. As a start, bookstores could begin dealing with “the problem that Science Fiction is mysteriously, inextricably conjoined with the seemingly unrelated literature of Fantasy” (68). Separating these two sections, and even creating a separate one for speculative fiction, would help get the word out to geeks-in-waiting that there is a special kind of literature out there for them.

Despite the tendency of Stephenson’s enormous brain to keep readers at arm’s length, acolytes like me have nevertheless developed a strong emotional attachment to the man and his writings. Some Remarks reveals interesting details about Stephenson’s background, hinting at the experiences that shaped his brilliance and distinct brand of techno-libertarianism (a perspective I find both legitimate and repellent, depending on the issue/circumstances).

I’d no idea that Stephenson had much in common with David Foster Wallace, so his foreword to DFW’s Everything and More was a pleasant discovery. I have an ambivalent relationship with DFW, but loved Stephenson’s appraisal of him:

DFW’s writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect…[it's] a way of saying here is something cool that I want to share with you for no reason other than making the spark jump between minds. If that is how you have been raised, then to explain anything to anyone is a pleasure. To explain difficult things is a challenge. And to explain the infamously difficult ideas that were spawned in chiliastic profusion during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Infinities, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Hilbert’s problems, Gödel’s Proof) is Mount Everest. (285-6)

Not only did these passages help me better understand my own difficulties with DFW’s Infinite Jest, but they also describe with preternatural accuracy how I’ve come to feel about Stephenson’s work, which has played an indispensable role in my early adulthood.

Some Remarks closes with two essays about why modern humanity has trouble tackling big problems, and a third essay conveying a touching explanation of why Stephenson doesn’t usually write back to fans who contact him. Taken together, they capture precisely what is so appealing about Stephenson’s literary approach: He wants to take the long view on history and societal development, and then stuff it into the moment-to-moment experience of characters that are extraordinary but also deeply human. The result is that it’s impossible to read his work without becoming fascinated by what’s gone before, what’s possible now, and what might be just around the corner.

Rating: 8/10