Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Neal Stephenson existed to me entirely through his novels before, since he doesn't have any of the modern authorial infrastructure – no twitter, no blog, no Goodreads, etc. And apparently I had come to a number of conclusions about him based entirely on his books, which is one of those things we like to pretend we don't do, but, I mean, come on. I figured this out when I was trudging through the opening salvos of this book and thought, ug, what a fucking asshole, with a complete lack of surprise. So I ran an informal poll of some of my friends who have also read and greatly enjoyed his books (all women, come to think of it) along the not at all respondent-biasing lines of "Neal Stephenson, gut check, asshole or not asshole?" and got 100% "asshole" back without hesitation. Yeah. We all do it. It's just funny when we come to the same conclusion.

Anyway, this was really rocky. I dug the fiction, because even when he's writing about stuff I'm tired of hearing about (monetary systems) he's just so damn snappy and hilarious. And the (excerpts?) from the long piece on the fiendishly mad engineering endeavor of laying transoceanic cables were fascinating.

But the shorter nonfiction pieces. Save me. In the intro he puts an "I own this" stamp on everything by explaining it's a curated collection, it's the stuff he basically still stands by. So okay. He stands by the reductionist and defensive and obnoxious commentary on geek culture. I could write 500 more words on this, but suffice it to say he uses a lot of "we geeks all know" and "we geeks all feel," type of rhetorical gestures, and I? Yeah, I'm a queer disabled geek and I am really, really not in his "we all." And he stands by the way he never met a criticism rooted in the portrayal of people of color (or the lack thereof) in art that he actually understood and didn't have something snide to say about. And he stands by all the rhetorical us versus them cultural game-playing and the lecturing and the general obnoxiousness laid thick enough to make me want to argue with him when I totally agreed with something he was saying.

So basically I will never ever read his nonfiction again, and on the bizarre chance he ever gets a twitter, I'm blocking it instantly. But the fiction and I will still probably get on like gangbusters.




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