Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

by Neal Stephenson

#1 New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson is, quite simply, one of the best and most respected writers alive. He’s taken sf to places it’s never been ( Snow Crash , Anathem ). He’s reinvented the historical novel (The Baroque Cycle), the international thriller ( Reamde ), and both at the same time ( Cryptonomicon ). Now he treats his legion of fans to Some Remarks , an enthralling collection of essays—Stephenson’s first nonfiction work since his long essay on technology, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line , more than a decade ago—as well as new and previously published short writings both fiction and non. Some Remarks is a magnificent showcase of a brilliantly inventive mind and talent, as he discourses on everything from Sir Isaac Newton to Star Wars .

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Science, Short Stories, Writing, Technology, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2012

About the author

Neal Stephenson is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no other way to put this:

It's a grab-bag.

You have no choice what has been put in it and sometimes it's a few truly awesome short stories and sometimes it's an interview or two and sometimes it's light, almost spur of the moment ramblings and sometimes it's an in-depth essay (through Wired) the delves (or dives) deep into the history, present, and future of undersea data cables.

For some reason I can't quite fathom, my mind keeps swimming around the traveling hacker bits. On the one hand, I thought a great deal of it was delightfully quirky and it gives us a real backbone to the internet at large, from a physical perspective, but on the other hand, I thought it was JUST TOO LONG.

Not everyone is going to have the same mileage with it. I'm generally quite patient with tech stuff and it fascinated me to a certain point until I was just -- okay already, I'd love to have a story now. ;)

Here are some freaking fantastic highlights tho:

The fight between Neal Stephenson and William Gibson! Epic!

The debate between Vegging-out and Geeking-out.

Genre talk, book talk, book talk, and more book talk. :)

But those short stories? Damn... they got me going. And the unpublished book he said he would never finish? GAAAAHHHH!

I WANT MY SERIAL MURDERER IN THE SHIRE!

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leave it to Neal Stephenson to publish a collection of essays that cover everything from office furniture to the metaphysical theories of Gottfried Leibniz. (I found the office furniture one more enjoyable.)

The thing about Stephenson is that once he gets interested in a subject, he is going to write the shit out of it and leave no idea unexplored. It’s what makes him unique and his skill is usually enough to get the reader to go along for the ride. But even a fan like myself started getting seriously bored with the loooooooooonnnnnnngggggggggg essay that is Stephenson’s account from the ‘90s of following the laying of a new fiber optic cable around the world mixed in with the history of undersea cables and a look at the technical, economic and political factors that go into such a project. There were points where it was interesting and very funny (Stephenson comes up with one of the most creative ways to call someone an asshole that I’ve ever read.), but after a while it’s just too much to absorb.

There was still a lot I liked in this. The stuff he does about science fiction and genre labeling brought up a lot of great points I hadn’t considered. There’s a hilarious bit in answer to the question of who would win in a fight between himself and William Gibson that begins with Stephenson’s assertion that he and Gibson have fought three times and then goes into descriptions of their on-going battles that would make for a pretty good comic book.

Like all of his recent books, Stephenson fans will like it, and people who get bored with his digressions will find plenty to yawn over.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun book of essays by one of my favorite authors. The essays cover the gamut of topics; some short, some very long. One of the essays is about trans-oceanic cables, the people and companies involved laying the cables.

Very interesting; I was particularly struck by the cables' arch-enemy--fishing trawlers. I can completely empathize, as I was on an ocean experiment where an experimental cable was being placed on the ocean floor in shallow water. A fishing trawler came along on autopilot, about a mile or so from the cable ship, and got caught on the cable. The trawler's captain was clueless, as hails by radio and megaphone failed to get his attention. After some time elapsed, the captain on the trawler brought the cable to the surface and cut the enormous cable, and continued on, oblivious to what he had just done!

Some of the essays were humorous, such as the essay about writers such as himself, caught at a writers' convention. The attitudes of some academics toward him blew me over!

Another essay was about the tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The ignorance of some people is just astounding. A colleague of mine was on the local sheriff's negotiating team. He told me about the crass approach of the feds, after they arrived "to help".

Such a wide range of topics surely leads to some great--and some not-so-great essays. All in all, it's worth the read.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a collection of essays by the novelest Neal Stephenson. There are a few that are worthwhile, but not enough to make this more than a 3* book for me. I would like him to develop his crazy Shire idea though....

[Bryan]

Would I read a collection of Neal Stephenson's best grocery lists? I think perhaps I would!

[ambyr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once upon a time, in the 90s and early 2000s, I was heavily involved in geek subculture as Stephenson defines it. I taught myself HTML in middle school and read Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C for fun in high school, I got my news from Slashdot (not just tech news but news in general; I first learned about 9/11 when it was splashed across Slashdot's front page), I interned at the EFF because I believed passionately that technology was what would save and transform our world. I was so passionate about the cause that it took me years of trudging through the sexism endemic to the subculture, hoping to find high ground, before I realized that it was unending and inescapable unless I abandoned the field entirely.

I think things are better now--I hope they are. (I keep writing anecdotes of what I went through, studying computer science in the early 2000s, and then deleting them. That's an essay all on its own.) Maybe I just feel that things have improved because I left California and its particularly poisonous tech culture behind me. I don't know. What I do know is that this book--which includes essays from 1993-2012--felt like a dive back into that part of my past. It was not an entirely unwelcome dive; it turns out I still am passionate about technology, still find things like the details of undersea cable construction fascinating. But the complete invisibility of women in this book pains me. There were women working in tech then. I know. I knew them. I was trying to be one of them. Finding none of them on these pages--hearing things I cared about summarized, again and again, as boy stuff--is like reading a book with every other sentence redacted in black ink.

[Clouds · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really long article - I read it in 4 sittings on my lunch breaks - available online in the Wired archives.

It's dated - it's about laying submarine cables in the mid-nineties - but it's fascinating in the same vein as Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle (if you're a fan of Stephenson's novels, you'll like it).

I'm a fan of both Stephenson and Wired, so I liked it :-)

[Kasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm very forgiving of essay collections by my favorite authors. Even though in some ways it feels like cheating, I've often not read the essays, so what do I care if they get the cheap revenue? The Stephenson is not the best essay collection I've read, many of the stories are old and feel dated, but there is enough here by a great writer that it is worth reading for any fan. The vast majority of the book is from Mother Earth, Motherboard. A huge article he wrote for Wired in 1996. Don't be scared off by either it's length or it's subject matter (it is a treatise on submarine cables). This is a very interesting piece for a couple of reasons. First and foremost it is a fascinating topic covered by someone who has a gift for making wonky hacker topics interesting. Second, it was written in a much different time. Before the internet bubble popped and 9/11. The internet was still bright and shiny and people all over the world were generally more optimistic. Finally, this essay is clearly a practice run for Cryptonomicon. The real world characters Stephenson encounters in this essay appear as fictional folks in that novel, and the tone of the piece feels like an early experiment in what would become the signature tone of the modern parts of Crypto. Well worth picking up.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read only two of Neal Stephenson's novels ( Snow Crash and The Diamond Age ) but I loved them both immensely. I would consider them both to be five-star novels. They are, in fact, two of the best science-fiction novels I've ever read. The ideas within them (which even Stephenson acknowledges--in the book I'm commenting on now--is what really counts) are mind-blowing, but the characters are not your average sci-fi novel characters. They're real people, like the kind you'd find in "literary" works. Which is to say that Stephenson writes literary sci-fi (or, if that makes me sound too book-snobby, he writes really, really good sci-fi).

His nonfiction, on the other hand, does not appeal to me. I can say that now that I've read Some Remarks, because this book contains pretty much all of it. The opening essay, "Arsebestos," about the health benefits of a treadmill desk, which he wrote specifically for the book, is interesting, but it reminds me of Susan Orlean's article on the exact same topic in the New Yorker. Granted, Orlean's article was published after Stephenson's book came out, but I enjoyed her article more. (Perhaps this is unfair of me--if I'd read Stephenson's first, perhaps I'd like his more.)

His Slashdot "interview" (in which he responds to questions from his readers) from 2004 is about one-half interesting, one-half fluff. I probably would have responded more positively to it in its original format online (which is to say that it belongs online, not in a book).

"Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715-2010" reads like a section of Stephenson's research notes for his Baroque Cycle trilogy, spruced up a bit for publication, but not spruced up enough for my tastes. (Though perhaps I feel this way only because I've not yet read his Baroque Cycle trilogy.)

"It's All Geek to Me" is a response to (though not a review of) the awful movie 300, which Stephenson, apparently, kind of liked? Or in any case he didn't hate it, the point (I think) of this very short article being that genre geeks don't care about "mainstream" validation of genre material like 300. Or something like that. The article was not particularly focused, despite being only a few pages long.

"Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out," like the essay before it, is a response to (but not a review of) a different movie--this time Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Here, Stephenson makes a distinction between "geeking out" (caring about something and engaging deeply with it) and "vegging out" (just watching something and letting it wash over you without caring much about it at all), in the service of a rambling sort of point about how the second Star Wars trilogy struck most viewers as complete nonsense, unless they had previously immersed themselves in the ancillary material that filled in the story's gaps, such as the Clone Wars cartoon, the Dark Horse comic books, etc. (in which case the trilogy would be only partial nonsense, apparently). Then he goes on to compare contemporary scientists with Jedi knights for a single paragraph, in service of I'm not sure what.

His Gresham College lecture is a brief cultural history of speculative fiction (i.e., fantasy and sci-fi), its place in the critical landscape and in our modern culture as a whole, and then he delves into his "geeking out"/"vegging out" dichotomy again. (He also discusses 300 again.) His points here seem a bit belabored and obvious, but perhaps this is because he gave the lecture in 2008, and it's now six years later--an eternity in the realm of pop-culture studies.

"Spew" is a short story he wrote in 1994, and was probably quite cutting-edge back then, but reads pretty dated now.

"In the Kingdom of Mao Bell," also from 1994, is a first-hand report on China's entry into the Information Age. This section is actually excerpts from the original article, because, as Stephenson writes in his introduction, remarks that he originally thought of as insights are now either "bromides or [have] simply been proven wrong" (2).

"Under-Constable Proudfoot" is just a sentence long. Stephenson bills it as the first sentence of a thriller that he will never write, the unspoken reason being that it would have to take place in Tolkien's Middle-Earth--which he would, obviously, never obtain permission to use. The inclusion of this sentence contains no value (as it is not a very clever sentence) beyond putting the idea in one's head that Middle-Earth could be an interesting setting for all kinds of novels that aren't straight-up fantasy. But as an intriguing thought experiment, it's a very brief one.

"Mother Earth, Mother Board" is a 118-page essay on the subject of laying undersea fiber-optic cables, circa 1996. This interminable article surely has a much better, shorter version of itself hiding in all this rambling verbiage. It struck me, about halfway through this section, that what Stephenson needs is a strong editor for his nonfiction work. Even his short pieces ramble too much. But this one takes the cake. Just two days after having read it, most of this article is lost to me.

In contrast, his Salon interview from 2004 had a handful of interesting nuggets within it. His explanation for why Isaac Newton didn't publish one of his most important discoveries was a revelation to me (see pp. 241-242). His take on Puritanism is also quite interesting. I totally disagree with him on DeLillo, however (i.e., that DeLillo is no longer an idea-oriented writer).

"Blind Secularism" is about the Waco tragedy, published shortly after it occurred in 1993. Once again, this article brought to mind a New Yorker article from earlier this year, this one by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell had twenty years to look back on the event (not to mention several more pages to devote to it), so it's no surprise that, once again, I found the New Yorker article to be far better, but Stephenson's was serviceable as a document of the moment. Then again, twenty years later, perhaps it does not belong in a book, but rather online.

His Time Magazine article about Anathem seems to be about the attention span of our society. Or so he claims near the middle of this very short essay. But as with his earlier short pieces, this one rambles in a way that I find baffling, considering how short it is (just two pages).

His foreword to the second(?) edition of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More is not bad. It is primarily a defense of the book, written after its author had died and could no longer defend it himself. Though I find Stephenson's thesis to be a bit of a stretch. His assertion that children of Midwestern college professors (or at any rate children of PhDs)--which he claims are legion in Midwest college towns--are all uniformly easy going, extremely intelligent, open-minded, and entirely magnanimous is, quite frankly, bullshit. I grew up in a lovely, liberal Midwestern college town (proudly dubbed, for a while in the mid- to late '80s, the "Gay Capital of the Midwest"), and many of my friends (though by no means even half of them) were sons and daughters of either professors or PhDs, and I can say with certainty that very few of them were this Platonic ideal of a highly intelligent, big-hearted human being that Stephenson has invented. We weren't all a$$holes or anything like that, but we were primarily obsessed with sex, music, and other let's say non-school-sanctioned extracurricular activities, just like the rest of America's teenagers. We didn't spend all our time debating life, the universe, and everything like Stephenson and his high-minded friends apparently did. Anyway, despite this, I did enjoy this section--perhaps most of all the sections in the book. (Though an essay about DFW is doomed to be compared to that writer's own sparkling essays, to which no other author's nonfiction work can compare favorably.)

"The Great Simoleon Caper" is the other short story in this collection, and it's better than "Spew." Not that that's saying much.

"Locked In" is about all the various disparate events in history that had to take place in order to get the human race into space--and how disappointing it is that the space program is such a flaccid mess now.

"Innovation Starvation" is another short article with a flawed premise; this being that scientists rely (almost completely, it would seem) on science-fiction writers to provide them with all the big ideas that need to be pursued in order to keep science and technology moving forward. I'm guessing that although many scientists were initially inspired by things like Star Trek to get interested in science, they aren't just sitting around waiting for sci-fi writers to write something so that they have something to invent. That's ridiculous.

And the last section, "Why I Am a Bad Correspondent," is a somewhat patronizing message to his fans that explains the obvious: namely, that if he tried to reply to all his fan mail he'd never get anything else written. Well, no kidding. Are there really thousands, or even hundreds, of Neal Stephenson fans out there who are actually waiting for a reply from him, which necessitated this essay? It bothered me, to say the least.

Overall, a disappointing collection. In the introduction, Stephenson implies that this book wasn't really his idea (one might reasonably infer that it was his publisher's, or possibly his agent's, suggestion). Personally, I think he would have been better off waiting a few more years, once he had some pieces really worth putting together into a collection. The book would have been stronger for it.

[Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks is a highly stimulating read from my favorite living author. This collection of essays and short fiction sheds light on Stephenson’s personal background, writing methods, and modes of information synthesis. As always, we are treated to a very special version of the world––one seen through the eyes of an author who has carefully surrounded himself with some of the most intelligent, curious and capable humans on Earth (and who happens to be one of them himself).

Spanning roughly two decades (early 1990s––present), these writings never come together into a coherent whole, but that is clearly not Stephenson’s goal. By his own admission, Stephenson sets out to “conduct a shameless whitewashing of that historical record, picking only the good stuff, and editing even that to make it look better” (1-2). The result is a verbal sausage wrapped in the delectable sheath of Stephenson’s hallmark pith and perspicacity.

With the exception of an obnoxious yarn that seemed to glorify tax-dodging through the manipulation of virtual currencies, I didn’t have a strong reaction to the smatterings of fiction in this collection. I’ll focus my comments on the nonfiction pieces, which cover a range of topics and vary considerably in quality. Some essays contain fully fleshed out ideas and arguments, whereas others end before they even get going. One of the difficulties of writing about technology is that an article may already be outdated by the time it reaches the general public, and the danger of obsolescence grows with each passing month and year. New technologies are always in motion, so it’s often impossible to make concrete judgments about their effects on society, which can be permanent, ephemeral or anywhere in between. Fortunately, Stephenson’s writing is so adroit that even his outdated or underdeveloped pieces are still fun and engaging.

By far the most impressive offering here is an article Stephenson wrote for Wired in 1996 called “Mother Earth, Mother Board”. It’s a tour de force of innovative “hacker tourism” that outlines the technical, political and economic challenges of running fiber-optic cables across continents and oceans. Stephenson provides an engrossing and cosmopolitan portrait of the individuals and organizations, both current and historical, that gave us a world that “has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half” (235).

In an era when wireless logistics dominate most laypeople’s interactions with advanced technology and social media, it’s critical to remember that all wireless systems are predicated on a vast infrastructure of physical wires that transmit data almost instantaneously. Stephenson aptly appropriates the image of a wormhole to describe this phenomenon:

"Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world." (121).

Although my lack of technical chops prevented me from understanding the finer points of “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” I could still recognize it as a powerful and unique piece of expository writing. I was awestruck by the technical achievements of globalization and unnerved by the amoral force with which our most powerful technologies embed themselves in our lives and landscapes. It also left me curious about how fiber-optic technologies have changed and/or stayed the same in the two decades since this piece was first published.

Another gem in this collection is Stephenson’s “Gresham College Lecture” from 2008. It highlights Stephenson’s views on geek culture and speculative fiction (SF), including an interesting if not particularly novel theory of modern knowledge:

"Choose any person in the world at random, no matter how non-geeky they might seem, and talk to them long enough, and in most cases you will eventually hit on some topic about which they are exorbitantly knowledgeable and, if you express interest, on which they are willing to talk, enthusiastically, for hours. You have found their inner geek…This is how knowledge works today, and how it’s going to work in the future. No more Heinleinian polymaths. Instead, a web of geeks, each of whom knows a lot about something. Twenty years ago, we called them nerds, and we despised them; we didn’t like the power that they seemed to have over the rest of us, and we identified them as something different from normal society. Now, we call them geeks, and we like them just fine, because they are us…We’re all geeks now." (78-9)

Stephenson echoed this last sentiment in his most recent novel, Seveneves. As much as I’m drawn to Robert Heinlein’s romantic notion that “specialization is for insects,” history has favored Stephenson’s view. The world is far too vast for even the smartest individuals to grasp more than a tiny sliver of available input, and new information is being created and disseminated constantly. But even if we have to give up on the brainy übermensch who will single-handedly lead the way to a new enlightenment, we gain something much more valuable: the concrete, irrefutable reality of our own interdependence, not just with other humans, but with the rest of the natural and physical world.

A world where smart folks think they have to get good at everything? That’s stifling. But a world where people excel within their niche of geekdom while using technology to access and utilize the knowledge of others? That’s a recipe for personal contentment and societal progress.

Speculative fiction plays a huge role in helping people discover and cultivate their inner geek. Even though I still think the best SF resides in books by Stephenson and his ilk, I’ve been delighted by the recent trend of “competence porn” narratives that have invaded Hollywood (think Interstellar, The Martian, and even films like Spotlight). It’s encouraging to think that the desires of SF fans are becoming mainstream:

"SF fans…want to see intelligence at work…they want ideas. They want to learn something or to join with the author in speculating about a future or about a fantastical other world…SF thrives because it is idea porn." (82-3).

Speculative fiction is a much more dignified term than “competence porn” or “idea porn,” so I hope it continues to grow in popularity. As a start, bookstores could begin dealing with “the problem that Science Fiction is mysteriously, inextricably conjoined with the seemingly unrelated literature of Fantasy” (68). Separating these two sections, and even creating a separate one for speculative fiction, would help get the word out to geeks-in-waiting that there is a special kind of literature out there for them.

Despite the tendency of Stephenson’s enormous brain to keep readers at arm’s length, acolytes like me have nevertheless developed a strong emotional attachment to the man and his writings. Some Remarks reveals interesting details about Stephenson’s background, hinting at the experiences that shaped his brilliance and distinct brand of techno-libertarianism (a perspective I find both legitimate and repellent, depending on the issue/circumstances).

I’d no idea that Stephenson had much in common with David Foster Wallace, so his foreword to DFW’s Everything and More was a pleasant discovery. I have an ambivalent relationship with DFW, but loved Stephenson’s appraisal of him:

"DFW’s writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect…[it's] a way of saying here is something cool that I want to share with you for no reason other than making the spark jump between minds. If that is how you have been raised, then to explain anything to anyone is a pleasure. To explain difficult things is a challenge. And to explain the infamously difficult ideas that were spawned in chiliastic profusion during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Infinities, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Hilbert’s problems, Gödel’s Proof) is Mount Everest." (285-6)

Not only did these passages help me better understand my own difficulties with DFW’s Infinite Jest but they also describe with preternatural accuracy how I’ve come to feel about Stephenson’s work, which has played an indispensable role in my early adulthood.

Some Remarks closes with two essays about why modern humanity has trouble tackling big problems, and a third essay conveying a touching explanation of why Stephenson doesn’t usually write back to fans who contact him. Taken together, they capture precisely what is so appealing about Stephenson’s literary approach: He wants to take the long view on history and societal development, and then stuff it into the moment-to-moment experience of characters that are extraordinary but also deeply human. The result is that it’s impossible to read his work without becoming fascinated by what’s gone before, what’s possible now, and what might be just around the corner.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven and mixed genre, with at least one short story, but had some good pieces. My favorite was a few pages of hand-to-hand combat between the author and William Gibson. Skip the boring parts, unless you want to know everything there was to know about undersea cable in 1996.

[kye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I printed this "magazine article" out; it's novella-length (55 pages). I really enjoyed it. It was filled with intensely delightful stories and intensely fascinating and obscure information. Any infrastructure nerd will love it.

On time and place:

Internet technology moves fast, so this piece is aware of its coming obsolescence. This is good, because it was written twenty years ago. I would really like to see an update on how various cables described (especially FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 3 (what a name!)) have changed today. FLAG was in fact planned before people knew about the Internet (!); what is today's state of the art in cables?

I realized that understanding the system is a matter of *geography* and the corresponding politics. Stephenson emphasizes how certain islands or countries have become cable nexuses (Egypt) simply because they are more convenient than going through Russia, or because neighboring countries have arbitrarily refused to land the cable. (As he mentions, this is similar to the Suez Canal's chokehold over shipping routes.) To that end, it's a shame that there are no maps or diagrams in the piece. (Maybe because the only available version is the printer-friendly version from Wired's archives?)

Last, I'm convinced that I want to go on an infrastructure world tour. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy seems like a good place to start. I'm also curious about this mysterious, expensive "Worldwide Summary of Fiberoptic Submarine Systems" document that is a "must-read for anyone wanting to operate in that business."

On science:

After reading this, I know some basic questions to ask about infrastructure around me. What are its routes? Through which countries and oceans does it pass? How much information can it carry per second? Which carriers use it? Where are its redundant routes? How thick is the cable and out of what material is it made? Has it been cut lately? If so, how much money does it lose per minute? Which clubs and monopolies own it? Why was it built? Who are its competitors? What is its significance; i.e. does it open new markets to someone, or pilot a new technology?

I also realized that I know so little about the various layers of engineering needed to build this system: fiber optics, lasers, seafaring, oceanography, networks, analog vs. digital, telephony, slack control.... Especially analog vs. digital, a divide on which Stephenson spends three pages. I gather that we had been digital with the telegraph, then regressed somehow with the analog telephone, but returned to digital with cables, but also invented some awkward analog/digital interfaces like modems? What's the significance?

Stephenson writes detailed and engaging descriptions of various early and "modern" (1996) mechanisms involved in cables. However, there are no diagrams. Also, these mechanisms often involve Lord Kelvin's work, whose life is highly entertaining and is worth reading about on its own.

On the malignant:

I loved reading about all the many ways cable laying can go wrong or be sabotaged, both in the early days (the 1800s) and "today" (1996). His coverage of cable cutting and the concept of slack was my favorite part of the piece. Sidenote: I was curious about Doug Barnes, a cypherpunk he mentioned was covering cable cutting. Upon a cursory Googling, it seems that Doug Barnes is a professional cypherpunk.

Some things I disliked:

Stephenson uses the phrase "hacker tourist" on every page. The phrase "supreme ninja hacker mage lord" (used to describe two scientists) is especially immature.

I hated the constant assumption of the male default. For example, he starts a great characterization of nerds through the ages by calling them people who are drawn to light and information, in the form of the Lighthouse and Library of Alexandria. Then he ruins it by calling them "hairy smart guys." Women don't appear often, but when they do, they're "whores" and "adaptable wives" wearing "demure outfits."

How I found this piece: Recommended via Zulip. Thanks Recurse!

[Christopher Hellstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect for a fan like me (but you can get most of this material online.)I love "Why I am a bad correspondent" "The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can't do both; the first one obliterates the second."

[Bogdan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este fix genul de carte unde întâi trebuie să dai date despre autor și de abia prin această prismă să expui conceptul din spatele ei. Pe scurt, NS este un scriitor american, faimos pentru "proza sa de anticipație" - fiind printre primii care au popularizat conceptele actuale de avatar, metavers, cryptomonede și rețele sociale - mai ales în scrierile sale (post)cyberpunk. A mai activat și ca "futurist", advisor pentru companii aerospațiale și a scris chiar și ficțiune istorică (care ar fi practic opusul science-fiction-ului, nu?). Este, de asemenea, cunoscut pentru prevalența sa de a se lansa în mini/micro/mega/ultra discursuri descriptive în mijlocul operelor sale doar pentru a explica mai pe larg un anumit concept - fenomen care are fanii și detractorii săi, bineînțeles.
Iar colecția aceasta de eseuri și alte scrieri poate acționa ca un bun rezumat al carierei sale literare - avem transcrieri ale unor articole din diverse reviste (despre consecințele negative ale statului îndelungat pe scaun, despre metafizică și rivalitatea dintre Newton și Leibniz, despre diferențele dintre geeks și nerzi șamd), o prefață adusă din altă carte, interviuri acordate altor publicații de gen, un roman polițist pe care nu-l va termina niciodată alcătuit momentan dintr-o singură propoziție și a cărei acțiune se petrece în Comitatul hobbiților lui Tolkien, două scurte povestiri cyberpunk excelente (și doar pentru care ar merita achiziționată cartea) - una dintre acestea fiind "genial" tradusă și la noi în revistele de anticipare ca "Măţăraie" (Spew). Iar piesa de rezistență, probabil cea mai bună expresie a geniului său care se pierde în detalii: un articol de peste 45 de mii de cuvinte scris în anii 90 pentru Wired, despre cum se instalează cablurile suboceanice.
Deci, practic, avem o shawrma cu de toate, un adevărat maglavais literar care poate pica cu ușurință greu (:-) oricărui stomac de cititor prea "lacom".

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how I let this slip by in 2012. Only my favorite author, who, though still in his fifties and as productive as ever, will only write a finite number of books, and reading any of them is one of the top 5-10 things I can be doing at any given time. I guess my excuse is that it's not a novel, it's a compilation of essays, short stories, and magazine columns, some of which are 20+ years old. So like, if I was a true completist I'd have already hunted down all of this stuff.

Mostly interesting and enjoyable, definitely recommended for Stephenson fans. Loved some of his thoughts on SF and organizational culture. I keep thinking about "Locked In", his discussion of path dependence. In this example, how the development of rockets for warfare (in both WWII and the Cold War) and the particular geography of the nations involved has locked us into a local maxima of rocket design which is too expensive and impractical to escape. On the other hand, not sure what to think of "The Great Simoleon Caper", a mid-90s story about a then-future VR internet (per Snow Crash, also referred to as the Metaverse) in which hackers and the virtues of digital currency save the day. I loved Snow Crash, but if it had been about bitcoin I would've chucked it in the trash and written him off indefinitely (path dependence!).

Also it has a 118-page deep dive into the world of telecommunications cabling. And he made it fascinating. Yep, officially Neal Stephenson.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephenson's essays are easy to read, flow well and are always thought provoking. His essay on deep sea cable laying is an excellent piece of technical writing which incorporates historical insight which shows just how far global communication has come

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably mostly/only interesting for Stephenson devotees, but I enjoyed it a lot.

[Narantsogt Baatarkhuu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happy to have found the concept of a hacker tourist

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Best Essay Collection from 2012 Courtesy of Neal Stephenson

Without a doubt, Neal Stephenson may be the most pensive, most expansive, writer of my generation, and these are traits he shows abundantly in his recent essay collection, “Some Remarks”, that also include several terse short stories he has written over the years. Stephenson’s writing is expansive in the sense that it covers many topics at once, which is why, for example, his “Baroque Cycle” trilogy is a compelling fictional exploration of the emerging science and personal rivalry of Leibniz and Newton during this period, as well as a most memorable action-adventure yarn whose main protagonists are the ancestors of those in his earlier post-cyberpunk novel “Cryptonomicon”. In “Some Remarks” his essay on the construction of FLAG (Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe) “Mother Earth, Mother Board” compares and contrasts its construction with the successful laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in the 1860s, but is also discusses the life of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, especially with regards to his design of the first successful undersea cable, as well as series of travel guide vignettes aimed at the “hacker tourist”. His early cyberpunk short story “Spew” anticipates much of the same literary style Stephenson would use in “Cryptonomicon” and the “Baroque Cycle”. Other writings discuss the relevance of the films “300” and “Star Wars” to contemporary culture, the still uneasy relationship between science fiction and fantasy with mainstream literary fiction, why scientists are distrusted by those in the far Left and the far Right, and discussing the life and literary career of David Foster Wallace. “Some Remarks” may be the finest collection of short writing by a notable contemporary writer writing in English that I have read in years, not only recently. For those who are long-time admirers of his writing as well as those who are unfamiliar with it, “Some Remarks” should be viewed as essential reading, simply as a guide to a most memorable polymath, one Neal Stephenson.

[Paul Gleason · Rating 2 out of 5]

From its bland title to what Stephenson admits in his "Introduction," Some Remarks is a very weak collection of Stephenson's short writings.

The collection covers Stephenson's entire career as a writer, and some of its material goes back roughly twenty years. This means that many of the essays are out of date.

Stephenson also makes the mistake of including what I think is an unpublished introduction to David Foster Wallace's book on infinity, Everything and More. (I own the first edition hardback of the DFW book, so I don't know whether Stephenson's intro appeared in the paperback edition or editions published after DFW's death). The essay itself is tidy and interesting, but it won't change your reading of DFW and actually reminds you of Stephenson's weakness as an essayist. DFW is one of the all-time great essayist (see every essay collection that he ever published), and an inclusion of an essay about him as an essayist makes Stephenson's work seem lazy and almost shoddy.

In other words, the essays, with two or three notable exceptions ("Arsebestos," the one on geeking out, and the one on Dante and Beowulf writers) are boring. The Salon interview rehashed what everyone who's read The Baroque Cycle already knows. The piece on Anathem also rehashes what readers of that brilliant novel already know.

This time around at least, Stephenson isn't a compelling essayist. Heck, he's not even a compelling writer. And it hurts me to say this because of the overall brilliance of his novels from Snow Crash to Anathem. When I read his latest - the cliched techno-thriller, Reamde - I began to get worried. Maybe the master had run out of gas. Some Remarks intensifies my feeling. I hope that Stephenson picks up the pace again with his next book. But, to paraphrase KRS-One, he's slippin'.

[Serena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson is a collection of essays, one sentence from a novel that he never finished, and a few short stories. I’m not the typical audience for this book as I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, nor science-y essays. As a result, I read a bit of the most recent essays in the collection, the introduction, and the short fiction pieces, plus the one sentence to the novel. I can say that I see why he never went further with his novel; it wasn’t very attention grabbing for me, but hey, it might have been a sentence from a future chapter and not the book opener for all I know.

To say this collection is weird is an understatement; readers only need to check out “Spew” with its tech-babble and sci-fi tongue-in-cheek feel as Profile Auditor 1 skulks around the big brother system that watches everyone’s lives for a living, looking for anomalies. I found the overwrought tech language and mysteriousness too much; I was kept too much in the dark for the beginning part of the short story. However, by the end, I was intrigued by the hotel clerk and her suspicious profile and wondered what the profiler’s interest in her was, but it is clear by the end of the story that she’s got more gumption than he does. While Stephenson brings up issues of big brother and what it could mean from a marketing perspective, the story also gave me pause about my own buying habits and whether I’m that gullible in my purchases — seeing it on television or the Internet is enough to make me buy it — but I also realized that is not all that he is highlighting, but also the factors that play into buying decisions from friends, recommendations, advertisements, and finances.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/08/t...

[James Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neal Stephenson has a large vocabulary, but apparently the word brevity does not appear in it. He is the author of such forest destroying novels as Anathem and Seveneves, each of which flirt with having the page number hit four digits. Some asshole thought it would be a good idea to hire him to write a magazine article, and that's why we have a magazine article listed on Goodreads. Seriously, don't think you will get through this on your lunch break.

On the other hand, there is a reason why Neal gets away with writing novels thicker than dictionaries; he is a damn fine writer. What's more, his particular gift in writing is something that couldn't be more useful in our increasingly knowledge driven society. Neal Stephenson can describe and explain complex and technical subjects in a way that is completely understandable and thorough, while also somehow being entertaining. His novels contain lengthy discourses on orbital mechanics, robotics, programming, physics, philosophy, and pizza delivery. So it should not be surprising when I say that he held my attention riveted while he wrote the equivalent of a short novel about a submarine fiber-optic cable.

Neal frames his topic by looking back into Victorian history, relating often ironic anecdotes, both from history and form his own personal adventures trotting around the globe doing research for this article and following the construction of FLAG (Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe), exploring the business behind wiring to world together, explaining some of the many difficulties of stretching a cable between continents (and some of the many ways people have failed in this endeavor), and doing all of this and more in lively and clever prose.

Don't let the size intimidate you. Read "Mother Earth Mother Board", mother fucker.

[Jukka Särkijärvi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some Remarks was, to be honest, a disappointment. As the foreword implies, it feels like it was published because "it's the thing to do" at this point during an author's career to put out a compilation of their shorter works. The result is an uneven mix of interviews, short stories and some essays.

The problem with tech journalism is that it does not age well, and a full third of the volume is taken up by "Mother Board, Mother Earth", a long article about undersea cable. While I figure that the business of cable laying is still more or less the same as it was in 1996 when the article was first written, we're still talking about information technology, where 16 years is an aeon. At the very least, stuff like this could be annotated to note which parts of them no longer apply.

In addition, there's not one but two different interviews. I am also not fond of mixing fiction and nonfiction pieces.

Among the bright spots are a short story fragment one sentence long, and Stephenson's foreword to David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which is clever and long enough to let Stephenson's meandering style really shine. Let's face it, the man is not at his best when he has to watch the wordcount. Another good one is his essay on Gottfried Leibniz's metaphysics.

All in all, there are a few gems in here, and the first one of the interviews is amusing, but taken as a whole, it is very uneven and sometimes painfully dated. For completionists only.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Mother Earth , Mother Board a longread from 1996 about data cable infrastructure which is at points tedious but i am being rewarded by paragraphs like these

During the 1980s, when Americans started to get freaked out about Japan again, we heard a great deal about Japanese corporations’ patient, long-term approach to R&D and how vastly superior it was to American companies’ stupid, short-term approach. Since American news media are at least as stupid and short-term as the big corporations they like to bitch about, we have heard very little follow-up to such stories in recent years, which is kind of disappointing because I was sort of wondering how it was all going to turn out. But now the formerly long-term is about to come due.


The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that the Alfonse D’Amatos of our time can only dream of. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer. In any case, Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse fancied himself something of an expert on electricity. His rival was William Thomson, 10 years younger, a professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow University who was infatuated with Fourier analysis, a new and extremely powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables.

also found here http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

[Luciano Zorzetto · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can read this rather enjoyable collection
- if you're a fan of Mr Stephenson: you'll be curious to hear him ponder about many an issue, mostly technological. Some older material will be meh, some will be well-rounded and pleasant. He talks with an admiration you can feel about the world of the Baroque Cycle; he sheds a light on his vision of science fiction, or rather speculative fiction as he names it one speech. He edited some of the meh stuff because he cares.
- if you're a geek: Mr Stephenson loves geeking out and he is an authority in geekdom, mostly of the science-fiction and technology type. You will then appreciate the essays about geeking out vs vegging out and his massive tale about long-distance underwater cables.

I really, really like Mr Stephenson's writing in general, so I was game for this one anyway. Two moments I appreciated in particular:
- the descriptions of technologies from the early long-distance communication era. I read them with fascination with which I used to leaf through books explaining the world when I was a kid. I can't help picturing him watching them with the same kind of excitement, albeit with plenty more years of education and a sober technical eye.
- his introduction to a book by the late D.F. Wallace: I liked the insight into a specific type of Mid-Western environment where they both grew up. I've always been fascinated by such stories, as they scratch beneath the superficial vanilla image of the US that we easily have on the other side of the pond (the fact that the opposite happens all the time is out of scope).

[Geoffrey Benn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Some Remarks,” by Neil Stephenson, is a collection of the author’s short writings and interviews. It is also a bit of an odd starting place for someone who has never read a Neil Stephenson novel – collected works generally being what people turn to after having exhausted all of the novels by a particular author. I read this on the recommendation of a friend, who particularly recommended “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” by far the longest essay in the book. I can now pass on that recommendation – “Mother Earth, Mother Board” is a an essay about submarine telecommunications cables that delves into the history of such cables, the practice of actually installing them, and the vagaries of the telecom industry that funds them. It sounds like a horrifically boring topic, but Stephenson actually makes highly enjoyable. The rest of the material is somewhat hit or miss – I enjoyed some of the short fiction as well as parts of the interviews. Some of the material in this book, particularly the interviews, is likely to only be of interest to Stephenson fans, who are more familiar than I with his novels. Overall I was impressed with the clarity of the writing and with the author’s intelligence. It will be interesting to look back on “Some Remarks” after reading Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, which I’ve now added to my “Want to Read List.”

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife asked me what I was reading at one point when I was in the midst of this book, and I said, An essay collection, and then I explained that I was halfway through a 120-page-long piece about fiber optic cable and what's involved with laying it across oceans. That sounded to her like the most boring topic imaginable, but I loved reading about, and mostly because it was written by Neal Stephenson.

He is the supreme leader of finding the fascinating minutiae of technology and conveying his interest to readers. Before this, I would have said I didn't care about fiber optic cable. And for the most part, I would have been right. It's Stephenson's take on the subject that interests me.

And yet this volume is even more of a mixed bag than most by-the-way essay collections. In his foreword, NS states that these are the pieces that he feels held up over time, and that he's ditched the lesser pieces, but this is a pretty slim volume, and there are still a few duds: There are two short stories that I could have lived without. A tedious introduction to Foster Wallace's Everything and More. A few other bits that wear out their welcomes.

But these kinds of books are self-selecting. The parts I didn't care for, I went into hyper-skim mode and felt I'd missed nothing. And the parts I enjoyed, I loved.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of articles, essays, interviews, reviews and short stories showing the range of the author's interests. I enjoyed Stephenson's 'Anathem' which I found reminiscent of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'. I slogged through 'Cryptonomicon' which I found interesting but less engaging. Some Remarks is eclectic. I found Stephenson's ideas on two main kinds of writers intelligible. The essay on Leibnitz was thoroughly engaging for me -- a geek out experience. I found the series on the FLAG (fiber link around the globe) fascinating. Stephenson's forward / review of David Foster Wallace's 'Everything and More' struck me as a beautiful reflective piece on the experience of growing up in a Midwestern American college town. All in all worth reading or listening to.

As a consequence of hearing this collection I look forward to reading David Foster Wallace's 'Everything and More' and I may even come round to reading or listening to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels despite their daunting length and my disappointment with Cryptonomicon.

[Regina Nunley]

I just saw Mr. Stephenson at Skylight Books in Los Fe, he is a marvelous commentator on our unreal reality and technology and being a (now cool) nerd/geek...I related to his view of people like myself who used to be despised and now are cool, because FINALLY smart is good...plan to read it after I finish plowing through the last 2 novels I purchased to read over the summer...can't wait...he is very astute and hilarious!! I am a teacher, and find I love being read to by talented authors such as he, not only to relate to my students the breadth of what a write can do/say, but to inspire me to write as well..I write daily..and look forward to see how reading his book will color my technicolor world!

[Scotchneat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of some previously published articles by Stephenson, essays, lectures and a few fiction pieces as well.

It's a trek through the Stephenson mind, where one is never sure what's around the corner. He touches on politics, writing, sci fi as mainstream, and the future of literature and publishing. I particularly enjoyed his mini-fascination with an prolonged disagreement between Newton and Leibniz.

One of the longer pieces describes his adventures following several companies busy laying the new Internet pipes under the oceans and up onto land. He does a good job of getting at the science and the human bits of how it all works.

If you're a Stephenson reader, you probably have read this already, but if you haven't, there'll be at least something in there for you.