Actual product placement definitely bugs me, especially when it’s super obvious (“let’s drive really slowly past this Coca-Cola truck! Gosh I’m thirsty!”) but the stuff in RP1 made sense in context – stuff like “I watched the Back to the Future movies, because I knew Halliday loved them and there might be a clue there,” or “I knew his favorite band was Rush, so I tried listening to their music, but it wasn’t my thing.”
Exactly, the little I read made it clear that he was writing a love letter to his childhood and concocting a narrative around it, in a way.
My issue was mainly with the writing; you can skip over it if you’re just reading it to yourself, but I read it out loud to my husband and it’s a textbook example of “telling, not showing.” Every action is narrated. “I stood up from my chair. I walked to the door and turned the knob. Opening the door, I peered out into the hallway.”
I sometimes want to ask Wil Wheaton if it bugged him when he was doing the audibook.
The female characterization didn’t bug me, because this was so clearly an adolescent male wish-fulfillment fantasy from the start that I didn’t expect more of it. In that respect, it’s not really any different than Snow Crash. Fight me.
Snow Crash is in many ways a parody of cyberpunk. I mean it stars a mercenary pizza delivery man named Hiro Protagonist. It’s loud and dumb in all the right ways to make fun of how loud and dumb cyberpunk had gotten.
I feel like Stephenson wanted to write this thought experiment about cyberpunk and linguistics and archaeology and whatnot, and then someone was like “Neal, this needs, like, some characters to be a book.” So he said “Okay here they are, Main Character and The Girl He Gets*.”
*I don’t actually remember if he gets the girl, but her name is Yours Truly, I mean come on.
I…was not a fan. Way to much exposition for my taste. YMMV.
Diamond Age was my favorite of his works. It has by far the most interesting plot without being the rambling sprawl that is his post Cryptonomicon novels. If those later books were broken into a dozen smaller novels with the intersecting plots tightened up and isolated, it would be much more readable, sort of how the Laundry Files books read… As it is, Stephenson misses no opportunity to take off on some geeky tangent and he winds up drowning out the backbone of the story.
I really liked Snow Crash, which I read as a loving but semi-satirical ribbing of the cyberpunk genre up to that point. Really it marked the tipping point in the transition to post-cyberpunk. Y.T. was a pretty well-developed character IMHO. She presented as a cyberpunk stereotype to Hiro Protagonist because he was nothing more than a stereotype. But the scenes in which she is the POV character show a depth of personality he never sees. Or so I recall, I have not read it in many years, so grain of salt. Hiro, on the other hand is, quite deliberately I think, a parody of his stereotype. HP is really a second-person voice presented in third person with a healthy dose of side-eye to the reader’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. Just my 2¢.
It’s been a while since I read this book. I remember it being kinda fun, but I also remember being a little put off by it. I mean, the whole idea is that there is a massive MMO that anyone can use… and then the test to see who is a true fan of the game involves encyclopedia knowledge of 80s trivia, because that’s what the guy who made the thing happened to like. It’s not horrible or anything, but the plot does kind of revolve around some guy deciding to gatekeeper the future because… he has money, so he can, I guess? (Like I said, it’s been a while, maybe it was explained better and I just forgot)
