Renny > Recent Status Updates

Picking up again, getting invested.

I'm appreciating the accuracy beneath the contempt. This is a book that knows what a miserable waste of life war is, and how stupid everything surrounding the industry is, likewise. Unlike other "war is hell" stories, BtGH doesn't even show you the battle. People are tortured by training, then assigned to a pointless job where they die for unseen reasons.

At least there was a gay chapter.

I'm thinking too much while reading, trying to come up with a unified theory of what this book is. I want it to be over. Feels like I got bait-and-switched at about the 30% mark and that this guy is just free-associating a novel. All the commentary and prescience is gone, replaced by a half-remembered film adaptation of a Dan Brown novel.

You can tell he came up with the actual plot halfway through writing the book and felt the need to infodump via lecture.

I see this building towards a thesis where Stephenson proposes that communications technology will make us vulnerable to a kind of sickness, rather than that technology itself being the sickness. He does not anticipate a Metaverse run by eyeball-extractors even in a world where meatspace is totally colonized by feudalists, which is surprisingly optimistic.

It's so sad how much of this book is Stephenson trying to come up with the dumbest, worst version of the future and accurately describing both the technological and social trends America would spend the next 30 years chasing. Of all the dystopian media, I think this is the most "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" piece I've found.

This is a really hard book to read straight through, by design. By chapter 7, you've pretty much seen every gag.