Some Remarks: Essays And Other Writing (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
At this point, I think it's fair to classify myself as a serious Neal Stephenson fan. That being said, not everything in this collection appealed to me. However the forward to Everything and More, Arsebestos, the Salon Interview, Metaphysics in the Royal Society and the Slashdot Interview were well worth the effort and more than made up for the weaknesses found elsewhere. I'd confidently recommend those sections, even to non-fans. I've been a big Neal Stephenson fan since high school; his particular blend of sci-fi, history, politics, and action - all classic nerd interests - is right up my alley, even if I haven't always agreed with him on every particular pronouncement or ideological point. I used to hunt down his non-novel writings, and this particular collection of 18 odds and ends - a mix of his short fiction, magazine articles, interviews, essays, and rants all together - should just about do it for the hardcore Stephensoniac. There's some minor omissions, as well as some retroactive editing, but I doubt most will miss stuff like the questionable short story "Jipi and the Paranoid Chip", or the more dated parts of "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" that got excised.One irritating feature of Short Remarks (a deliberately ironic title as several of these pieces are fairly lengthy) is that the pieces have no discernible organizing principle, either chronologically, stylistically, or typologically. Thus a 2004 interview with Salon runs right before a 1993 meditation on the relationship between believers and secular folk, a 2012 Time magazine bit about attention span and Anathem, his 2003 Foreword to David Foster Wallace's math book Everything and More, a 1995 short story, and so on. This being a collection of miscellany, it's not like there's a narrative to miss, but it would have been helpful to organize this a little; even in scrapbooks one picture usually comes before another.The pieces that are here fall into a few categories for me: thought-provoking history (like "Metaphysics in the Royal Society", a great outline of some of the modern implications of the still-fascinating Newton-Leibniz debate about the nature of space and time), questionable rants (I agree with "It's All Geek to Me" that there were a lot of dumb articles about the movie "300", but I also didn't think it was that interesting of a movie), and forgettable short stories (the cryptography/micro-advertising "Spew", for instance). Stephenson is unapologetically nerdy in his tastes, and uncommonly eloquent in his defense of the merits of sci-fi literature, as in his Gresham College Lecture, which has a lot of good insights on the nature of genres, and how some lend themselves to some mediums and some don't (as in the gravitation of the crime genre to TV, whereas romance is more of a movie genre). He's at his best when discussing the appeal of ideas, whether delivered through books, childhood experimentation, or self-discovery, and if you had to try and come up with a "theme" for most of the works here, it would be "respect and encourage new ideas".The only places where he loses me are the times where his minor reactionary streak gets the better of him, like when he goes off on postmodernism. He certainly has more experience with that sort of thing than I do, and I would probably agree with him that overall literary deconstructionism and things like that are not helpful or useful; I just don't think articles on what postmodernism does or doesn't do to literature are very interesting in general. Also, it's sometimes hard to tell if his interest in religion is sincere admiration, simple contrarianism, honest experimentation, or what - pieces like "Blind Secularism" have weird Straussian overtones that don't mesh well with his better moments.In any case, while only a few of these pieces are truly outstanding ("Metaphysics in the Royal Society", "Mother Earth, Mother Board", "Gresham College Lecture", "Innovation Starvation"), there's enough good stuff to make this a worthwhile stop for the Stephenson fan.
What do You think about Some Remarks: Essays And Other Writing (2012)?
Good stuff, if you like Stephenson you'll like this.
—savva2003
Worth it just for "Mother Earth, Mother Board."
—Kate
