Tag Archives: Neal Stephenson

Language as a tool of power, control, and transformation

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I’m about halfway through Christopher Summerfield’s These Strange News Minds (How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means). Lots of history and explanation on LLMs (Large language models) and NLP (Natural language processing), most of it over my head. But reading about the role of language in AI research and development reminded me of the role of language in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction classic, Snow Crash.

[GPT 4o] In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson explores language as a tool of power, control, and transformation, blending cyberpunk themes with linguistic theory and mythology.

1. Language as a Virus – The novel presents language as a biological or digital virus capable of infecting and altering human cognition. “Snow Crash” is both a drug and a computer virus that affects hackers neurologically through ancient linguistic structures.

2. Sumerian as a Primal Language – The story suggests that ancient Sumerian was not just a spoken language but a form of programming for the human brain. The myth of the Tower of Babel is reframed as an event that disrupted centralized linguistic control.

3. Hacker Culture and Code as Language – The protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, is both a hacker and a swordsman, symbolizing the dual power of coding and physical combat. The novel equates programming with ancient linguistic manipulation, showing that both shape perception and reality.

4. Linguistic Control and Subjugation – The antagonist, L. Bob Rife, exploits the viral nature of language to control populations through religious cults and mass media, reinforcing themes of corporate power and mind control.

5. Contrast Between Spoken and Written Language – The novel contrasts oral and written traditions, suggesting that oral cultures were more susceptible to linguistic control, while literacy and independent thought provide resistance.

Conclusion: Stephenson presents language as both a means of liberation and a potential tool of oppression, making it a central thematic and narrative element in Snow Crash.

  • “a form of programming for the human brain.”
  • “…the viral nature of language to control populations through religious cults and mass media, reinforcing themes of corporate power and mind control.”
  • “…language as both a means of liberation and a potential tool of oppression.”

Sounds all too familiar.

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

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I’ve read most of Neal Stephenson‘s novels and really enjoyed them. At least the early ones: Snow Crash (1992); Cryptonomicon (1999); The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver (2003); The Confusion (2004); The System of the World (2004); Anathem (2008); REAMDE (2011)

His latest novel, Polostan, arrived this morning.

(Amazon) “The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.

Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.

I’d definitely call The Baroque Cycle historical novels. Same for much of Cryptonomicon. The Amazon description above reminds me of REAMDE, perhaps my favorite Stephenson novel.

When I opened the Amazon box, the first thing I noticed was how much smaller (number of pages) this new novel is. NS had no trouble cranking out thousand page books. I hope he has recaptured his earlier mojo.

Excerpts from his novels here.

Termination Shock

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Set in the near-ish future, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel (Termination Shock) charts a world gone haywire with the aftereffects of human-driven climate calamity. Like the last couple of novels I’ve read, it incorporated COVID into the storyline as well as the January 6th insurrection.

“…before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian-style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments.

This excerpt reminded me of some of his descriptions in Snow Crash.

Video

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“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speelycaptor (video recorder) at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”

— ANATHEM (Neal Stephenson)

Ten years before the iPad

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Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. Does the following excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon (punished in 1999) sound familiar?

“Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”

The franchise virus

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“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.”

— Snow Crash

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book but discover something new each time I pick it up. I like Stephenson’s female characters. Always smart and strong. Y.T. the skateboard courier in Snow Crash; Eliza in The Baroque Cycle; and Zula in REAMDE.

Same goes for William Gibson: Molly Millions (Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive); Angie Mitchell (Count Zero); Chevette Washington (Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition); Hollis Henry (Spook Country and Zero History); and Flynne Fisher (The Peripheral).

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash coming to Amazon Prime

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“Snow Crash will be a one-hour drama. A product of the early 1990s, it’s set in a failed state that used to be America, where the corporations run everything. It too has a vast artificial location, but this time it’s the Metaverse, Stephenson’s extrapolation of a VR-enabled Internet. Hiro Protagonist—an on-the-nose name if ever there was—is a hacker and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia who comes into possession of dangerous file, Snow Crash, which sends him on a rabbit chase.”

Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

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I really wanted to like this book. Neal Stephenson has written some of the best stories I’ve ever read and I’ve read most of them two or three times. And how can I say I read 740 pages and didn’t enjoy the book? At least a little.

But it just did not work for me. Maybe it was the witches and time travel. Maybe it was writing with a co-author (Nicole Galland). I don’t think I’ve ever read a book written by two people that I really enjoyed. Wait! Not true! James S. A. Corey, the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. I love the Expanse series. But I can’t think of any others off the top of my head.

I struggle with the paradoxes inherent in stories about time travel. I appreciated the premise of Memento and Loopers but my mind kept drifting as I tried to work out the time stuff. No such problem, however, with William Gibson’s The Peripheral.

On a scale of 1 to 5 (with Cryptonomicon and REAMDE being 5’s), I’d rate this latest book a 3. Maybe. I do hope you enjoy(ed) it more than I.