Combining a cyberpunk that would sign the very Philip K. Dick , but also projecting itself towards other genres such as historical fiction, the good Neal Stephenson is today on everyone's lips as a creator of the well-known metaverse. The virtualization of existence as a possible channel for an overpopulated world, the possibility of surrendering to an imagination in the hands of an AI capable of achieving all our desires...
Snow Crash was, back in 1992, an avant-garde novel that computer engineering could only dream of and that today seems to embrace as a new hope. And of course, the child's father, a certain Neal Stephenson, is alive and well today to capitalize on the general immersion in that new world.
Because many other thinkers, scifi version, ended their days without being able to enjoy their stories as self-fulfilling prophecies as closely as in the case of Neal. Neither Huxley with its happy world fed up with synthetic drugs par excellence, nor Orwell with their Big Brother lurking, they went from offering us interesting fantasies while they were alive. That is why Neal is the lucky human capital that all the technological gurus approach as the oracle of Delphi.
Regardless of whether the metaverse issue is channeled more effectively, or not, the literature made in Neal Stephenson remains. Universes apart or closer locations only than from other times. Always interesting stories to enjoy a narrative with its point of transcendent adventures...
Top 3 Recommended Neal Stephenson Novels
seveneves
The end of the world will come under the chords of the famous REM song "It's the end of the world as we know it". And there will be no choice but to dance to the tune of the appropriate sect that ends up being right among so many enlightened people who have been warning us.
But literature has always owed a debt to the world after the apocalypse. Because we may not all clap like the poor dinosaurs did. Once everything has been destroyed, by the fire of the last sun; or frozen on a permafrost spread over the entire planet Earth, only a few astronauts or the wealthiest guys who already saw it coming, will be able to leave testimony of what all this was...
When a catastrophic event turns the Earth into a time bomb, a headlong race against the inevitable begins. The world's leading nations draw up an ambitious plan to ensure humanity's survival beyond our atmosphere. But the intrepid pioneers face all sorts of unforeseen dangers, until only a handful of survivors remain...
Five thousand years later, their descendants - seven distinct races that make up a population of three billion people - embark on another daring journey into the unknown, towards an alien world totally transformed by time and cataclysms: Earth.
Anathema
To approach this novel is to enjoy the awakening of a new world from the most metaphysical perspective. Neal Stephenson makes us participate in a transcendental genesis where the ideas that give context and support to everything that the new world is creating as a replica of the Big Bang begin to be considered.
Finding God is useless, reaching the definitive knowledge of the cosmos is, however, a matter of a very particular faith. With Anathema we cannot doubt that there is life on other planets or on different planes. Sophistication in the form so that, once the gears of the essential mechanism have been discovered, we can observe it from the plane we want.
The planet Arbre was on the brink of collapse thousands of years ago. The new intellectuals, the avotos, met in monasteries to start a new type of cenobitic life without any religious element. The rate of evolution and change of the avotos is slow, while the planet undergoes all kinds of transformations.
Now, almost four thousand years after the Reconstruction and the founding of the cenobiotic system, the Secular Power seems to hide that there is an alien ship orbiting the planet. Discovering it, establishing contact and understanding these strange beings from another place is the great work that awaits the protagonist Fra Erasmas, a disciple of the heterodox Orolo.
Snow crash
Maybe he has better novels than this one. But it is imperative today to rescue her. Because here all that of the metaverse and its infinite possibilities are interwoven every time the proximity between the human and the artificial is gaining more shared spaces. Machines may never think, but algorithms are capable of arousing the most precise emotions and from there learning to tune in to what it means to achieve what is essentially human...
30 years of the Metaverse, and counting. In the near future, Americans only excel at doing four things: music, movies, shows... and pizza delivery in less than thirty minutes. In the real world, Hiro Protagonist works as a delivery boy for Pizzas Cosa Nostra, Inc., but in the Metaverse he is a warrior prince.
And in the Metaverse he is faced with something even more terrifying than the possibility of being late for a delivery: the enigma of a virus that threatens to cause the infocalypse. The novel that revolutionized the genre and the networks returns with more relevance than ever. Snow Crash is a hilarious literary artifact packed with memorable characters that jumped into the future and staged the crudest metaphor for ultra-liberalism.
Other Recommended Books by Neal Stephenson
Reamde
The dystopian currently appears as an undeniable scenario that could only be combated from the virtual. Lock ourselves in metaverses or assume that the air we breathe out there will one day be more toxic than the worst of smoke. But the human being is capable of destroying even the virtual, of jumping through the air metaverses and everything that is put in front of him.
In this novel, the friend Neal combines his usual narrative power with the strategies of a hacker now transferred to a virtual setting, where the protagonist is a virus called REAMDE. Dystopia and fast-paced action characterize this speculative novel that presents the most sophisticated Stephenson in his purest form.
Neal stephenson come back with REAMDE, his most intense novel to date, in the characteristic style that he already demonstrated in his legendary Cryptonomicon. REAMDE is an action-packed technot-thriller in which the reader will find himself trapped in a new scenario: the macabre and dystopian world of online war games.
