/lit/ - Literature

welp, after reading Seveneves Ina whim and then spending the last year reading almost every word Neal Stephenson has ever written, I'm at a loss what to read next. Does anything else in Cyberpunk capture the light-hearted tone of Diamond Age and Snow Crash?

I know Stephenson gets some shit for having poor endings (Seveneves really bad apparently), but how is The Diamond Age? So far I have LOVED Anathem, and really enjoyed Snow Crash. Sure - he starts very strong and peters out a bit, but it's fine.

>>12596390
Land has tweeted about this one in the past, he's a big fan. i haven't read it myself, so i can't comment on it, but it's interesting that cyberpunk-ish writers (or at least writers who are capable of writing really good cyberpunk, as well as other things, which is even better!) don't always just end with cyberpunk alone, and the rain-slicked streets of Neo-Tokyo. Stephenson, Gibson, Sterling, PKD, lots of other guys can write cyberpunk and sci-fi. and there's Ballard, Liu...Banks also. i'd obviously prefer an outcome like the Culture to any horrible dystopia, but it's possible that we don't get to anything like a world of that kind without crawling through the various hells of Marxism and Landian /acc stuff, Shawshank-style.

that a guy like Hickman, who is no stranger to the gloom and doom that comes from reading the long story that winds through Hegel and Marx, to D&G, Lovecraft, Negarestani, Land, all of these guys would ask himself if Enlightenment ideas and values were a good look isn't all that surprising, and kind of lights up a few Christmas bulbs in me as well. the real hell of postmodernity has always been that sense of blindness: that the blowback from absolute deconstruction (the deconstruction singularity, if you like) would be *far worse* than anyone could expect, like marching off to World War 1 and expecting it to be over by Christmas - that's always been my feeling too. and how one goes about restoring some kind of order, or maintaining balance, or anything like this - well, this is i suppose where i realize that looking to postmodernity rather than perennial philosophy was where i was in error. in perennial philosophy there *is* a unifying and underlying substrate, a kind of union where all of the esoterics and mystics are on the same page. postmodern philosophy was never there to give you (read: me) some kind of meaning or purpose or direction in life, or to say What It All Meant. that wasn't its job, any more than it is the job of one's analyst to tell you what to do about your own symptom...their job is to help you not be mastered by your own symptom, to have the power to ask questions about it, rationally, rather than it always asking questions about you, and then causing you to take out your anger, pain and grief on the world...

(cont'd)

Reading this right now just got to Hackworth's adventure in Vancouver and the Drummer society what the fuck is this why is there an orgy and human sacrifice and dick lightsabers

Do I need to read Snow Crash before this?