Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Snow Crash

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

We have reached the end of Cyberpunk month and alas, the end of good cyberpunk books as well. We finished up by talking about Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. History, religion, psychology, and technology are all brought together in the story of Hiro Protagonist. It's...something.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69  patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding or not hiding in our genre fiction as always i am asha and with me is my co-host katho how's it going katho howdy uh today we are finishing up cyberpunk month with snow crash by neil stevenson a book which i didn't know how I felt about until I actually looked into Neil Stevenson after I finished it and all of my questions about this book were answered.

Yeah, I'm glad I went into this not knowing anything about who he was or the impact of this book other than it was popular. If I had known who he was and what he was about before I read it, I would not have been able to finish it. I'll be honest with you. I almost didn't finish it as it was. There were things about the book that I liked, obviously. But, ooh, the politics of this book aren't good. I mean, obviously, good is subjective or whatever but everyone who's listening to this podcast knows what our personal political persuasions are and therefore what we consider

good so just think the opposite of when you hear good just think of us and when you hear bad uh think of this book yeah so so we as we said neither one of us knew anything about this book? Yeah. So we, as we said, neither one of us knew anything about this book going into it. Not a damn thing. And I didn't look anything up because that would require doing prep, which I don't do. So I just read this book straight up. Number one, and as a literature podcast, it shouldn't really be a thing we complain about. But number one, this book is really long. And I only say that under the auspices of the fact that it is longer than it needs to be to tell the story it's trying to tell you. Yeah, my physical copy of the book is 559 pages long. And it's not me saying, ah, there's just too much stuff in here.

It's that there are whole chapters that you could cut from this story and the plot would be affected none at all. And the politics of the book would probably improve. Yeah. The politics of the book would improve and the plot would not be affected by removing at least eight chapters from this book. Mostly the chapters about Sumerian myth that are very not Sumerian. Yeah. So this book's a little all over the place. It's got, it's got cyberpunk.

It's got history of Sumerian myth and the evolution of human language. It's got psychology about the human brain it's got linguistics it's got philosophy it's got a lot of stuff and i'm gonna be honest with you most of it's that sound that sound sums it up i i don't know how much research he really did on sumerian myth I don't know how much research he really did on Sumerian myth. It's just not what he says it is here. I mean, there's some stories that are pretty close, but they're spun to fit his narrative quite neatly. He has an idea about how human society functions and just neatly rewrites most of Sumerian mythology to make it fit the narrative that he finds convenient. And now, don't get me wrong,

you're totally allowed to change myth or whatever for your fake story. But if your story- Hey, I love God of War. Yeah, but if your story is also purporting to be sort of grounded, you can't tie your rewriting of sumerian myth into your honest like diagnosis of how human linguistics works like if you're trying to make a

point about how actual linguistics and society work you can't like reinvent ancient myth and then say that that ancient myth supports your theory about how the brain works. That's not – that doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, he's real mixed on this where constantly you really couldn't – well, until we looked up who he was. We just could not tell whether or not he was being serious or not just because some of the assertions are kind of ludicrous. So when you start off the book, it hits you pretty heavy with the, like,

this is all really silly. Like right off the bat, that is the first thing you're like made aware of as the world is being described to you. Like the tone of the, like the tone of the narrative of the narration the way things are being described how super serious hardcore this guy is about delivering pizza and it's supposed to be this like you know he's the decimator and he drives fast and he owns the road and he delivers pizzas in 20 minutes or less. And it's this very, it's this very like, you know, it comes across sort of as this very like

sarcastic knowing tongue in cheek. This is all very stupid. Like, isn't it silly how seriously the society takes delivering pizzas on time? How, how much Uncle Enzo really hates it to get out of his house and fly a helicopter to someone's house just because their pizza arrived 30 minutes. 30 seconds. Yeah. Late.

Yeah, like two seconds later after 30 minutes have passed. 20 minutes. Oh yeah, you're right, it's 30 minutes. So it's like two seconds afterwards and and then of course that delivery driver is never seen again uncle enzo like makes you a celebrity and like gives you a bunch of money and then you have to basically sign an nda uh yeah but like it it it kind of hits smacks you across the face at first, how like, I don't know,

irreverent maybe is the right word about it. Like, oh, it's giving you all the cyberpunk stuff, like a super car that has all these wicked technological advances and it's all being used to deliver pizza. And you're like, okay,

this is pretty silly. Maybe this is going to be the tone of the story. But the more of it you read, the like actual intent of that tone gets murkier and murkier the more you read of the story. Is it knowing? Is it not knowing? It's really hard to tell. And you can't actually figure it out until you read his Wikipedia and figure out who he is. At the very least when when you open up that um you were mentioning to me that it's kind of difficult to know initially that this is just how hero thinks of himself while he's delivering pizza wait time out we should say the main character is name is hero protagonist

that if that doesn't give you a good indication of the tone of this book it's now it's h-i-r-o yeah hero because he's half korean half uh african-american however his last name is literally protagonist which he named himself that gives you an idea of the tone so sorry to interrupt you're talking about what you don't realize about the narration at the start yeah yeah initially you don't immediately realize it you might think that the whole book is going to have this same tone the whole time and it does in spurts like up and down have this same kind of irreverent lunatic tone but it's it's never quite as concentrated as it is in the first chapter during the during the whole sequence of delivering the pizza and because then he immediately gets

fired well he immediately crashes his fucking car into an empty pool yeah well that wasn't there before crash his car into pool you you kind of realize later on that this is this is hero narrating himself the book is written in present tense and essentially from the perspective of whichever character is the main focus of that section and so it sometimes lapses almost into stream of consciousness yeah it's like narrative stream and the the way the language is and the narration is done changes depending on which character you're following so like when it's a hero chapter some of the time you get this real i don't even know the right word sort of sarcastic like knowing it's cool but i'm too cool for that

like kind of tone it's very uh cool as ice type situation like he's the he's the world's best hacker and he calls himself a hacker all the time and he also rides a motorcycle and he's the number one swordsman in the world and you're like uh okay bud he's the number one swordsman in the world. And you're like, okay, bud. He's the number one swordsman in the metaverse because it's a program that he wrote. Yeah, he literally wrote the program on how to do sword fighting in The Black Sun. So of course he's the best swordsman in The Black Sun.

But anyway, like the tone also changes when you have a YT perspective. YT is the other main character. It stands for yours truly. She's a 15 year old girl who is a YT perspective. YT is the other main character. It stands for yours truly. She's a 15 year old girl who is a courier professionally. The fact that she's a 15 year old girl will become important. Unfortunately, as I worried throughout the entirety of this story and unfortunately it is true in the way I was worried it would be. I'm going to call this Chekhov's Dentata because it's mentioned about seven times before it becomes important. Like she literally brings it up multiple times.

So yeah, her chapters are written with this more like teenage, man, this all sucks, man. Y'all are lame. You're that cool skateboarder like me. Yeah, it's using lingo. It uses lingo, but it does kind of come off like Steve Buscemi saying how you do fellow kids a little bit. And look, as we said, if you cut out the weird stuff about Sumerian religion and you cut out some of

the, some of the editorializing about certain things, this book could actually just kind of be a fun adventure romp about a hacker ninja and his skateboarding friend who team up with the mob to take down the world's worst televangelist.

That is effectively what the book is. And that story could be really fun. And the other stuff that's tacked onto it is like dead weight. It's stuff that doesn't need to be there, that doesn't actually make the story any better, and that says some really stupid shit like hero being a delivery driver who's important online but not in real life who then crashes his car owes the mob this girl helps him out and then the two of them together get tangled up in a mystery and in the

end end up serving the mob and the mob serving them together to take down a televangelist that wants to like control the world. Plenty of fun, plenty of fun action story. You get sword fights, you get hacking, you get the, the mafia, you get the boss of the mafia learning how to skateboard. Like, you know, you get like people going out onto a raft to do hijinks. Like that could be, that's fun. But interspersed throughout it are all these chapters, like philosophizing on how human brains are just like computers and how language is just a binary system that our brains are blank slates until we learn our deep language at birth, which can then be written by words of power,

which are like computer viruses. And you're like, what are you? He, he uses the language of like dualism constantly, constantly at which without actually knowing what dualism is, the way he's using it has to be extremely offensive to both daoists and zoroastrians worldwide um i mean i i think you and i both did find this offensive it's like like how to just miss the point um and you know what he's not the first one

to point out the similarity between dualism in, say, like the yin-yang as a concept and binary language being all zeros and ones. You know, the language of opposites and dichotomies. The language of being and not being. Yeah, it's like, I get it. My guy. My guy. My guy. My guy. The problem is when he goes on these tangents about linguistics or philosophy or history or civilization, that's when his implicit politics begin to come out. And that's when this book gets kind of hairy.

Because for a lot of the book, it's kind of unclear. He does make criticisms of the society he presents, which we need to be specific. The society presented in Snow Crash is ANCAP paradise. This is Hoppian style ANCAPism. If Hoppian ANCAPs had their way and built the world in their image it would be the america presented in snow crash now just just keep in mind they do not think that this is what it would be like no but this is unironically what it would be like what it would be like but so where you have new south africa where you let have new south africa enclaves where they just get to be racist and it's fine. You get all sorts of burb claves, which is extant countries that have their own laws.

There's no real cops. There's only security services. Every road is part of a private corporation. Like there's two competing highways based on which like private corporation you're using at the time. And the characters in the story make criticisms of the world that they live in. a cyberpunk novel is the fact that i would argue the author himself does not follow through on those criticisms the he pulls his punches before he actually criticizes this sort of capitalist hellscape he pulls up a big sign that says isn't this a bit silly and then just moves on it is it is it's almost uh now he's not but it's it's almost very uh very british of him having this big sign it's like isn't that just a bit silly and just very dryly being ironic it's all sarcastic the whole book is sarcastic the whole book is ironic the only time it's earnest is when

he's doing his weird philosophy i i honestly that's when it's at its worst and i and i honestly don't know if this is like i know it's considered to be post cyberpunk and for the listeners we need to clear that post cyberpunk is the idea that you're essentially that you're no longer doing the incisive critique of early cyberpunk, where all the capitalism and all of the technology is bad. And we're explaining why post-cyberpunk says, yeah, but maybe these corporations have some redeeming ideas, or maybe the technology isn't all necessarily evil. Yeah. Which, which kind of leads into the fact, like the thing that makes this post cyberpunk is the fact that the core technology being presented, at least in my opinion, the metaverse is not portrayed as a bad thing.

In any way. In any way. It is purely a cool thing that people can do. Yeah. The main tech of this novel is the metaverse. And in case, in case you were like me and you didn't know, yes,

this is where Zuckerberg got the name metaverse from. And almost the entire idea for how the metaverse should work. He lifted it entirely from this novel. And this should go just in hand with the fact that Stevenson has not just influenced someone like Zuckerberg. It's not the first extremely wealthy billionaire who likes Neil Stevenson. We will get to some of the other people that like Neil Stevenson a little bit later. I want to save that for a little bit. But so yes, Mark Zuckerberg's meta and the metaverse is lifted directly from Snow Crash and in a bit of foreshadowing,

not lifted in the way we've talked about before, which is billionaire builds the torture device from don't build this torture device. Yeah. This is Zuckerberg is building a thing that Neil Stevenson thinks is cool. Yeah. It's a futurist vision style thing. It's a this is what cool thing could exist in the future because and here's the technological

linguistic justification for it. And so like now some people might say we're being real negative nancies and that maybe we should appreciate a sort of a cyber punky novel that has some positive connotations or at least is slightly more optimistic about the future my contention would be that the world stevenson has created in snow crash though he may view it positively, still objectively sucks in every conceivable way. It's pretty horrendous. Like they're living in the goddamn storage unit.

He literally lives at a storage unit. Every five blocks is a sovereign state. You can just be arrested for no reason at any time. You can be murdered for basically no reason at any time you can be murdered for basically no reason at any time and it's fine nobody cares people are segregated into like racial enclaves which we will get to there's like it is literally just like a they're literally they say net several times that there are no laws which is weird because if you're inside a burb clave, there are definitively laws.

Yeah. So it's that end cap idea of anarchism where they're like, uh, laws can still exist in anarchism. Within our community, we've decided that we want to enforce this law, which even in snow crass leads to new South Africa existing, where you can just have an enclave that is just explicitly apartheid and racist.

And George just be like, this is a good thing. Me, me smart man. Now, does Neil Stevenson portray the new South Africans as like ignorant idiots? Sure. Yeah. I was about to say he comes across more as a liberal billionaire type. Sure. Yeah.

I was about to say he comes across more as a liberal billionaire type. We're like, yeah, if he, as he imagined himself, lived in this world, he'd be just fine. Yeah, it's it's the it's the Mark Zuckerberg style of thinking. It's this technically probably socially progressive in certain ways. Like Zuckerberg probably supports gay marriage. Or like doesn't explicitly have like – has probably never said slurs about like racial slurs. He's probably not going out in blackface. He's not – he's definitively a liberal. He's not particularly evangelically conservative or something, but at the same time also does immeasurable harm to every living thing on planet Earth. And his ideas are still absolutely abhorrent. But he has like this measure of complete lack of guilt because he thinks he's not a bad person.

but he has like this measure of complete lack of guilt because he thinks he's not a bad person. He thinks he himself is not bad, despite the fact that he supports the creation of a world that is explicitly horrible. It's there's, there's a layer of criticism in here, but in here, it feels more like a liberal pointing at Ronald Reagan and saying he's bad and then turning to Bill Clinton and saying he's good. Yes. That's what I mean when I say he pulls his punches of his criticisms because he'll criticize like the stupid people that live in their burb, burb, clave and eat pizza. But like also in this story, all those people are happy, sort of, sort of, but like he like, but he'll also talk about how people in other like other sovereign states are cool. Like every like most of the people that live in Nouveau, Sicilia, like he's not against the idea of burb claims. He's against the he presents that some burb claims exist and they're bad, but other burb claves exist and they might be fine.

Also he's fine because you know, he's hero protagonist. And so the world isn't, nothing's that big of a deal to him because he's cool. He's cool. And I, he's cool. Hero protagonist is cool,

but he's cool in the way that he knows he's cool, which I think isn't that cool. It's it's just the 15 year old weeb in me. That's like dude with a katana. And then 20, you know, 25 year old me is like dude with a katana. like dude with a katana like the idea of hero protagonist is that like hero grew up watching akira and was like i could be a cool guy on a motorcycle with a sword and then just is and he thinks he's cool and you're like that's and the fact that he created he helped create the black sun we are told constantly how hero is like one of the best hackers and he uses hacker interchangeably with like programmer

they're the same to neil stevenson which i found a bit confusing because those aren't like hackers can program and programmers can hack but that's not like an interchangeable i feel like in reality the world the word hacking is not used by anyone who does what someone would actually call hacking no like i i feel like every time i hear the word hacker in real life it's being said by some 60 year old person on the news who's out of touch with how reality works and gets their impression of how technology works from a guy who, from like CSI where it's like, I'm in like on the mechanical keyboard. It's fucking swordfish hacking.

Like you're sitting there, you've got like, I think in binary code and in powers of two. Yeah. Hero, like all the time where no hero thinks in powers of two and hero can like basically read the code guys he's a programmer two is just it's just dualism it's just dualism and like hero is such a good hacker that like he can just see binary code and kind of figure it out like he's

fucking neo in the matrix and like we're told all the time where he actually program was like one of the beginning programmers of metaverse and so like actually a lot of the cool shit in the metaverse was actually him really but like he just didn't invest wisely so he's not rich but he doesn't care and you're like i get it he's cool man you're you're it is kind of funny that he that he lost everything that's not funny it's actually kind of sad um that he lost everything. That's not funny. It's actually kind of sad that he, because he gave his money to his family. I mean, he sold his shares

so his mom could retire comfortably. Yeah, which is really nice. And he gets punished for it. This is just, it's a shame. But like, he's fucking cool. Everything Hiro does is cool. Hiro experiences setbacks, but not because he's fucking cool everything hero does is cool hero experiences setbacks but not because he's lacking it's because some extant force but hero can overcome it because of how cool he is

also if he if he's running short of anything he can just go to this computer program called the librarian which will explain everything to him in extreme detail extremely unnecessary detail usually incredibly whack detail i i appreciate the moments the only time i actually really like anything the librarian says is when we get to our villain here, the evangelical weird mishmash of L. Ron Hubbard, a Southern Baptist evangelical televangelist. It's like a combination of L. Ron Hubbard, Jerry Falwell, and Rupert Murdoch. That's a good combo.

And by good, I mean horrifying. Because he starts off as like an oil guy and then moves into telecommunications and then moves into television into evangelism so like he's essentially like an l ron hubbard like jerry falwell rupert murdoch and he talks like foghorn leghorn he does it's i if foghorn leghorn had a had like a sunday morning televangelist show that's l bob rife rife right stupidity you gotta get yeah i get those you gotta get the holy spirit in you my boy and you're like oh jesus fucking christ he's using snow crash to to reprogram people with the sumerian language they can be hijacked to the true language we can use the he can use the m job of enki to now the thing about that that i find most uh fucked is this

sumerian language thing i know it's supposed to be like metaphorical and not like, but at the same time, uh, language did not evolve because of civilization. No. And Sumerian also wasn't the first language. Yeah. It's like language evolved.

Honestly, you could probably say the other way around civilization likely evolved because of language. Gats. He makes. So we're going to get into his pot. Okay. I'm sorry.

I'll come back for one second before I fly off the handle again. The story is L. Bob Reif. Basically discovered that via some magical words in Sumerian, you could reprogram people's brains to speak Sumerian, which is a magical language. Then he can like control the world or something. He also has this like assassin who kind of works from and kind of doesn't named Raven,

who's got some weird racial hangups left over from World War II. And our heroes team up with a few other people, including the mafia, to eventually take down El Bob Rife, which ends in a fucking knife fight between Uncle Enzo, the head of the whole world mafia, and Raven, this illusion hunter mutant assassin. Big guy. Biggest guy you've ever seen.

Trump would love him. He's a big guy. He's a big guy. Real big. He's a big guy. Anyway, that's like the plot. All right. So as we were saying, I, throughout this whole story as I was reading it, had weird feelings about the politics of the book.

And I didn't know if that was just because it was being presented through our characters or if it was supposed to be very sarcastic or what. it was supposed to be very sarcastic or what, but through some discussion and a little research, it's weird because Neil Stevenson is weird. And let's talk now about why his politics are weird. I'm here for this. Let's start with Sumerian. As we said, number one, not the world's first language. Not even close. Not even close. Number two, civilization did not, like you didn't create civilization and ergo get the first language. Number three, Babel was not a real thing that ever happened. There was never a moment when all people spoke the same language and then suddenly

they did not. That is not a thing. That is simply a tale told in multiple religious or historical traditions to explain why there are multiple languages. Number four, that's not how Sumerian religion works. Number five, it wasn't the first written language either. Number six, it's super weirdly in a way feels sort of Eurocentric. weirdly, in a way, feels sort of Eurocentric. The fact that, like, Sumerian was the first language and the prime language and all languages came afterwards and are broken from or something. That's not how any of this works.

I was about to say, even just Indo-European as a language group existed before Sumer did. as a language group existed before Sumer did. So I, it's, I, I don't really know how he came to the conclusions he came to. He just came to some wild conclusions and I'm sure someone's going to be like,

well, he didn't actually believe these things. And I'm like, well, he, he's doing a really bad job convincing me he doesn't. I think that's the main thing is even if you argue that he makes this, he does this, invents this solely for the purposes of his story. The rest, he spends the rest of the story honestly trying to convince you that this is how human brains work.

And this man is has convinced your boy mark zuckerberg so to make the metaverse to make the metaverse so aside from the weird things about sumer and about how basically he makes a lot of weird claims about the beginnings of other religions too, about like early Judaism, which I'm not, I'm not a Jewish scholar, but I feel like would be heretical, uh, to Judaism.

Some of the claims he makes about early Judaism, uh, claims about other sort of ancient religious cults, which is not like you can make up cults for your book, but if you're trying to claim, like you try to present your book as being kind of real, like I said at the beginning, you can't you can't just like invent a whole new thing and just say that that explains why our brains work the way they do. One of one of the more touchy things, in my opinion, is I mean, I know a very bare minimum of sumerian mythology i mean whatever little we do know i can't imagine this very much but uh at least not much left for us to to know but he makes out just because he has like enki being this pretty all positive being he makes a few mistakes

i guess but never portrayed as being like bad in any way and ashura is almost universally presented as a bad thing being his antithesis yeah dualism of the dualism ashura which just was not a dual it was not a binary in Sumer, but whatever. Yeah, it wasn't. And that's really the issue here is he you're kind of almost enki who's extremely masculine and you know embodies all these extremely masculine things and even in sumerian mythology is pretty much the man dude man and ashura is like the female version of that and dark and evil and conniving and destructive it's it's like okay are you not noticing how and again this is the sort of thing you don't know if he believes

anything he's saying so you're like did he really intend for this subtext to be here but the subtext is pretty sexist so it and in a way that's flat out i think disrespectful to historical interpretations of sumerian mythology moving on from being you know sumer defenders we can talk about some of the other weird politics in this book despite being two people who probably think that the first planting of the grain was a massive mistake. We are defending Sumer. I will defend Sumer on this count. Also, they weren't the first people to ever develop farming.

They weren't the only people to develop farming. David Graeber is coming back from the dead to beat Neal Stephenson to death for this. Like, that's not. And what I wouldn't give just to know his thoughts. Graber thought about Snow Crash. Just if he had even read it, just his thoughts about Stephenson in general. Yeah. Because he has to have heard of him. He had to have.

So there's the weird Sumer stuff, which bleeds into other religious stuff, which he just represents horribly. Again, as people who have vested interests in the idea of dualism, he doesn't do a very good job. stuff he's talking about here in this world is created. Everyone lives in these either enclaves or burb claves or whatever. Now, a lot of these sovereign state enclaves, they're basically all racially segregated. You have enclaves of in good ways and bad ways. Yeah. So you've got Neo-Sicilia, which is literally just the American Sicilian mafia. You have enclaves that are run by Colombian drug cartels.

You have enclaves that are run by, it's called Mr. Lee's Hong Kong, which is a weird mishmash of lots of people from asia but also is claiming has to put a disclaimer that they're not actually affiliated with communist china it's weird it definitely has this hong kong feel where it's all about it's actually sort of like a free trade state that uses a lot of technology. Like he just transplanted like colonial Hong Kong slash Singapore into America as weird racial enclave. And in these enclaves, everyone is their racial stereotype. Pretty much. And that comes with all of the problematic things you would expect. Now, I'll forestall the first defense, which would be, ah, but everyone is stereotyped.

Everyone in, you know, Neo-Cecilia talks about the gabagool and is on steroids and talks about the woman. Gabagool. Not all racial stereotypes are created equal. If the stereotype for the Neo-Sicilians is that they love their families, they eat gabagool,

and they do organized crime, but the racial stereotype for, say, the Colombian zones is that they simply shoot everyone that moves. That's not the same as the zone run by the crips is full of drugs and murder this book was written in the 90s he like characters within the book are explicit about the fact that the zone's controlled by

like black gangs everything is full of bullet holes. Everything is shit. And it's dangerous to literally even be in there like a white person, like thinking they're going to have to drive through South central in the nineties. And meanwhile, when the Sicilian mafia moves in, their whole thing is that they make it family friendly. Mafia moves in, their whole thing is that they make it family friendly. Grandmas and children can walk down the street again. That's not equal stereotyping of racial groups, my guy. Yeah, that's just objectively portraying certain groups as good and certain groups as bad.

Which he does. Let's not even begin to talk about how he portrays all the Southeast Asian people that get caught up on L Bob Rife's raft. Yeesh. The fact that it's just the raft in general, just the raft full of impoverished people from Bangladesh who just like glom onto his raft as their only escape from a country destroyed, not by climate change, but by geological warfare by India, are only there to be exploited by El Bob Rife because they're not smart enough to avoid it.

Like all the Americans get controlled by El Bob Rife via the distribution of a drug. All the Southeast Asians get abused by L. Bob Reif because they do. And they see him as a savior. Damn. It just gets worse and worse, don't it? Now, you could argue that L. Bob Reif is a villain. And we're supposed to see his behavior of exploiting these poor Southeast Asians as villainous, which is true. But Neal Stephenson doesn't go out of his way to give us any Southeast Asian characters that have any input on the story, does he? Not to my knowledge.

And it's at this point you start to get the feeling that making the main character, feeling that making the main character hero protagonist half Korean and half African American was less an inclusivity decision and more a, if I do this, my book seems more inclusive. Hey, it's the white billionaire liberal mindset. If I put a picture of a black person on my new hire pamphlet, my business will look more diverse. Yeah. Also, it's less problematic to have your hero

running around with katanas if you just make him half Asian. And I say that because he's half Korean. He's not even Japanese. Also throughout the whole book, he calls the Japanese Nipponese instead of Japanese. I get that Nippon is what is Japan in Japanese. It just felt like a weird one to throw in there to always refer to them as Nipponese. Yeah. And let's we do a throwback to a couple

pods, a couple of pods past here. Let's talk about how the Japanese are portrayed in this story. Honorable, investors, polite, reserved, secretive, business-like. Where have I heard all this before? Hmm. I think there was maybe another cyberpunk novel. There were other just other novels. This is all more just Japan is scary tech business place. This time, I think we can definitively say it is just an aesthetic. And I think at the end, that is the main

critique of this story as a cyberpunk story is that it's not a cyberpunk story cyberpunk is literally just set dressing for a for a different story it's the aesthetic of cyberpunk without the substance of cyberpunk um pretending as though it has substance and this is this is the thing i feel like about so many books that, I mean, it's definitely just because we're fundamentally anti-capitalist. But when books like this try, they always fall flat. They fall so flat just because of a lack of ability to actually punch anything. actually punch anything if you can't actually critique capitalism then then your then your incision will never go that deep and and he's very clearly not able to cut that he can't because he's fundamentally someone who believes in and agrees with the core ideas of capitalism which it is kind of obvious with some foresight

uh well hindsight um so and this is the difference between this and something like ghost in the shell or akira it's there's nothing of substance really being said that makes any sense. And it is of any real use. That's really, that's, that's really it. Like I'm coming to terms with this as we're talking really. That there's no actual critique.

There's no actual critique. There's no substance. There's no point. It's just a story. I mean, and if it were just a story that wasn't trying to have a point if it was a story like about a young this would probably do better as a young adult novel yeah if you hear this young adult novel about the two protagonists teaming up to take down an evil

televangelist that's great that's a great young adult novel but i feel like this occupy but but that that being said that's almost unfair to young adult novels because there are plenty of young adult novels that are hard-hitting and know what they're talking about. They also don't always, they can be deep and incisive, but they don't always have to be.

And this book presents itself as if it is a treatise on philosophy, history, society, and the mind. But it's coming from someone who just fundamentally doesn't understand how reality works. Like, they just don't get it. Or thinks that the way reality works now is fine, actually. Yeah.

I mean, and that's the problem. It's an unwillingness to critique certain aspects of society because it does not want to because it's inconvenient and it makes the very flashy pretty thing being presented less flashy and pretty because at the end of the day i get the idea of post-cyberpunk wanting to maybe look at it in a prettier way and you know what maybe maybe somebody fucked up in the artistic design of cyberpunk stories by making the neon look super cool because the fact that anyone could look at a future even vaguely like something like neuromancer or ghost in the shell and think there's a way to make this good is thinking about the universe the wrong way

just like flat out just thinking about everything wrong it's it's like how how dare you think that this is that this could be a good thing even if it's just an aesthetic like aesthetically it's still not a good thing there's too many implications that the aesthetic still has. Like the aesthetic has implications. Aesthetics aren't just set dressing. If your aesthetic is massive apartment towers covered in neon full of advertising, that implies a whole lot. It does. It implies so much about the world that it's in and this one

is kind of saying yeah there's some bad things but also some good things and also and and you're like you can't you can't do that you can't this shit. Well, I think part of it is that I just thought of this now is that even if the bits of society that are bad, none of his characters ever really suffer because of them. It's like why he gets arrested by a burve clave cops, but then just like effortlessly breaks out of jail. Yeah, it's just a thing that she can do because technology so like you have all these burb claves that are brimming with unaccountable power hungry cops we know in real life that would mean that anyone that doesn't look quite right goes into that burb clave gets thrown in jail and killed or beaten or tortured or left to rot and there's not a single goddamn thing they can do about it because there is no justice system that's just not a thing but for the characters we see yt just gets to like escape via yeah it's like if those that she that she just has on her person if those cops acted

like actual cops she would be dead yes and actual cops in that situation in that situation where they do not have even the vaguest kind of accountability even it's like even a pretend accountability it's like if it random killings by police in they already happen like crazy in america imagine how often they happen in a country where there's where no one sees them you know like where there's even less accountability like in this world if they had just shot yt dead that's that's that's the end of it. Who would have gotten in trouble? No one. No one.

Her mom might not even have ever found out. So there's no reason that her mom would ever find out. Like that just not a thing that would happen. If, if, if hero got murked by those new South Africans in that bar and in like, you know, Canada or wherever he was,

no repercussions, zero. In fact, the enforcers try to stop him after he defends himself, but he gets away because he's hero. So like the negative aspects of this world that Stevenson built feel flat because nobody actually suffers except for nameless people that are our our protagonists go by all the poor people who are like the poor people who live in like the exclusion zones or the people that live in these neighborhoods that have no services but we don't actually get to talk to those people because our heroes are too busy being cool not suffering consequences

compare the fact even if you're talking about just the core technology, compare how the metaverse compared to the Matrix in Neuromancer. Because they're really not that different in essence. But in Neuromancer, the main character has a chemical dependency on being in the Matrix, being in cyberspace. So he has an unhealthy relationship with the thing. And that's the point. It's like, Hiro does not have, well, he does have an unhealthy relationship with the Metaverse, but it's not presented as an unhealthy relationship. Yeah, no, it's presented as just, it's not presented as an unhealthy relationship yeah it's presented it's just it's fine like he gets light pushback from yt calling him a gargoyle when he is able to do

the metaverse on the go like yt kind of calls him a loser but like that's the end of it and it becomes integral to the story that he's permanently online going forward. Yeah, this thing just kind of like completely fucks with cyberpunk at like a core way that makes it A, not cyberpunk anymore and makes it B, the most co-opted bullshit thing to take cyberpunk and make it popular to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.

I think now is the time to talk about. Which, yeah, well, just say which which would actually end up with the universe looking a lot more like Neuromancer than it would like Snow Crash. There we go. No. Yeah, it's going to look more like Neuromancer. When I talk about co-option is the right word, co-opting the cyberpunk aesthetic and idea and making it palatable to the type, to the worst people on earth. Just now, before we started recording,

we were like, hey, we should actually look up Neil Stevenson and kind of see what he's about, right? We should look him up, like personally, because I try not to do that with authors because I want to try and intuit their beliefs via their work. That's kind of the purpose of the podcast, right? So we're like, well, it's time. Let's look up. Let's look him up. I'm going to talk about his early work, like his early stuff or whatever. I want to talk about, I'm just going to list off five names of people who are fans of his work, who consider his work to be influential in a positive fashion. Here we go. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. All those people read Snow Crash and went, this is fucking cool.

This is insightful. I want to make this happen. It's literally the delusion of the billionaire. The belief of the Bill Gates type, that they want to move towards a beautiful hyper futuristic future. It's the tech bro thinking that they're doing something awesome. When in reality, they're doing something horrendous. It's this is what the tech bros think they're going to be doing in the future. It's like, what's really funny is that somebody like Gates or Zuckerberg is more like a rife than they are a hero and

they they don't get that apparently they just think they're one of the good ones it's like you can't be one of the good ones or else you'd fundamentally misunderstand your position in the world and how you got there and that's how it fails as a cyberpunk novel because if it was a good one you would not be able to view themselves as a good one and just be like well i'm not l bob rife like i'm not him if peter teal is reading your book and being like damn this is good you your book is bad yeah yeah it's like have you seen elon's like top five book list no oh dear god it's embarrassing uh but it's it's that sort of shit it's like as soon as you see that your book is liked by Elon Musk, you should probably drop everything you've done and like maybe commit seppuku. So like outside of writing, Neil Stevenson worked at Blue Origin,

Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company for seven years, focusing on novel alternate approaches to space alternate propulsion and business models he was he was a chief futurist at an augmented reality company for like six years if that isn't the dumbest fucking title i have ever heard in my life and he we forgot to mention that one of his other books called the cryptonomicon from 1999 is credited as being one of the foundational building blocks of the idea of cryptocurrency. Wow, this man is Satan. In 2022, he launched some sort of company to build an open source metaverse that would utilize smart contracts and the blockchain. So he's trying to build utilize smart contracts and the blockchain. So he's trying to build the metaverse on the blockchain.

That is who Neil Stevenson is. He is a crypto tech bro who wrote this pseudo cyberpunk novel where when you get to the bottom of it, probably actually thinks that world is cool. This man saw Blade Runner and thought the aesthetic was awesome. This guy was like, yeah, but what if I lived in Blade Runner and it was fun, actually? For me, personally,

because I wrote the program about how to do sword fighting in the Black Sun, so I'm actually the world's best sword fighter. That's this whole thing in a nutshell that is it is a a want to a wannabe cyberpunk story written by a man who fundamentally disagrees with the premise of cyberpunk which is that the future sucks the future if we maintain our current course sucks sucks and he looked at and said yeah but what if it didn't and it's like but but it it's going to suck though it's going to suck if you're not a rich guy a rich white guy rich white guy in the world of snow crash life is fucking terrible it's awful obviously no hero you know, Hero's special.

He's the world's greatest hacker. YT is special because, well, she's really good at skateboarding or something. But like, if you're just a normal person

in this world, life is bad. It's not good. It's not good. And that's true for most cyberpunk novels. The difference is Stevenson doesn't agree that that's a bad thing. Well, he doesn't agree hard enough.

He half asses the whole thing. And he half asses it. He half asses it so well that Jeff Bezos will hire him. And also, he doesn't agree enough that he accepts that job working for Jeff Bezos. That he will take a job being a chief futurist for an augmented reality company. Yeah, it's like he wants a cyberpunk-y future. He wants something to look that cool and futuristic without the implications. But the implications are the purpose.

And at the end of the day, the aesthetic would not exist without the intent are the purpose and at the end of the day the aesthetic would not exist without the intent of the implication and that means it's it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy if you chase the aesthetic without understanding the implications of the aesthetic you're just going to get the implications not the aesthetic so you know he can chase this futurist thing only once at the end of the day he's going to get blade runner he's not going to get snow crash or we might kind of get snow crash but as we just pointed out for most people it's it's bad yeah you're living in an exclusion zone burning food over a tire fire and it only superficially points out the fact that this stuff is terrible and absurd

purely because that's what the aesthetic does yeah like he has to point out that it's absurd because that's the the set dressing he's chosen requires you to say that it's absurd yeah but he doesn't his heart's not in it and when you're still doing... He's almost mocking it. He is. When you're still doing stuff like the white person doesn't get off the interstate at this exit because you'll immediately be shot and mugged and that just happens to be the exit

that's where black people live. That's not... You're not doing it. Oy. Oy, oy, oy. Oy, oy, oy, oy. And if I may, as is required, I have to do my you're not doing it oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi and if I may as is required I have to do my final thing which I think is one of the other

nails in the coffin for Stevenson and his actual political beliefs I'm going to refer back now to Chekhov's vagina dentata YT is 15 years old. I'll let you kind of go off on this one.

I'm sorry. You know this is a specific, dare I say- This man, a libertarian. Dare I say, specific trigger for me in a story. Stevenson is a libertarian. And I had a suspicion of such as soon as he introduced YT and told us that YT

was 15 and then in that same chapter told us that she had a dentata in. If you don't know what a dentata is, it's a device a woman puts in her vagina which basically stabs a dude's dick if they get raped.

Chekhov's dentata. A lot of them are like literally physical. They just have like fucking barbs on the insides. If your dick goes in, your dick gets stabbed full of needles and you can't get it off without going to a doctor. When he points out that she's 15 and has a dentata in, like from the beginning, I was scared of where this was going to go and then he mentioned it at least four or five more times and every time you mentioned it you were like this is going to come up he also repeatedly mentions that she's 15 he also repeatedly has dudes staring at her ass and talking about how hot she is and how fine she is.

Now, at first, at first, I thought, ah, he's pointing out how overtly sexual and disgusting men are. But like all of his other critiques, it's not genuine because you also have her being horny for Hero, who thankfully is the one kind of good person in the story and is like, nah, thanks. I'm good. He's like, nah, thanks. I'm good. I got the and is like nah thanks i'm good he's like nah thanks i'm good i got the hots for like what for juanita for juanita but every other adult male in this story is like you're hot yt you're sexy as shit even have people tell her she's a fine woman Or whatever. She's 15. And then I almost thought I made it. I thought I almost made it. But then, for I think no reason, YT gets obsessed, just instantly, mind-breakingly horny

for our radiation- crazed assassin Raven, who is generously what? Late twenties? Generously. Early thirties? At least. Because his dad was in World War II with Hero's dad. Cause you find out later their dads were in like a prison camp together or

something for some reason so he is at he is at his youngest in his late 20s and yt gets just overwhelmingly horny for raven and he is horny for her. And of course, they have sex. Now, they get so worked up and YT is so young and foolish. She forgets she has her Dantana in, which is full of a weird brain poison, which then knocks out Raven like the second they start to fuck. But they still did oopsies there would have been no real change to this story

to make YT an adult none he's a libertarian she still could have lived with her mom the world sucks there's no way she could afford to live on her own like she could still live with her mom and be 18 or 19

but no she's 15 She could still live with her mom and be 18 or 19. But no, she's 15. And all the men are horny for her. They talk about how great her ass is. And there's no rules. And there's no laws. I'm trying my hardest not to make the one joke you make about libertarian societies every single fucking time because stevenson sees that rake coming and just steps right on it the rake is there the rake is unnecessary

there's a very easy path around the rake but he steps right on the rake it's's the, it's that, it's that meme of the guy doing like the 15 point, like rail grind with a rake to land at the end and slam himself in the face with it. Again, on the one hand, you could, you could try with a better story to say that there is a critique going on here of the sort of values of a society functioning without laws, but that's not the critique Stevenson is making. He doesn't believe in it. His heart's not in it. And you can say, well, Raven gets punished for hooking up with a 15 year old. Not really. His punishment is that she forgot to take out her dentata. If she hadn't forgot to take it out, there would have been no punishment at all.

At one point, YT talks about how hot she thinks Uncle Enzo is. And Uncle Enzo was old enough to be a nom. Yeah. This is very much an old white dude writing a teenage girl. Like, this is what a teenage girl would think about a strong paternal figure like Uncle Enzo. No! Ooh, do you want to know something funny? This is what a teenage girl would think about a strong paternal figure like Uncle Enzo. No.

Ooh. Do you want to know something funny? Probably not, but tell me. I'll find him in here. Is he in Epstein's Little Black Book? No. No, there's a website that I just found because I looked up Neil Stevenson in quotes and then hop. Oh, God. I found the Libertarian Futurist

Society. And the Prometheus Award for Best Novel. I mean, it does say on here that he has the Prometheus Award. Yeah. Which is an award for libertarian science fiction given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society. He was nominated for Fall or Dodge and Hell. He won for Seven Neves, Read Me, and Anathem, System of the World he won, Quicksilver. He's won it twice.

Cryptonomicon. He's won the award for best novel twice. Yeah. Weirdly, on this list for the Prometheus Award, Cory Doctorow has won it three times. Really? Then I guess it's not necessarily. But also other authors that have won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award more than once. Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.

Ebes. Libertarian Futurist Society. How do you get any Cory Doctorow book and nominate it for a Libertarian Futurist Society Award? Because they actually don't understand what they're reading. They don't read. They don't understand what they don't read they don't understand what they're fucking reading terry pratchett won in 2015 for raising steam what the fuck this has got to be a joke right orson scott card won in 2010 for hidden empire michael crichton won in 2005 for state of You know, the one about how climate change is fake?

Are you a fan of freedom-loving fiction by writers like these? Robert Heinlein, who has never written anything freedom-loving in ever. Paul Anderson, Werner Winge, F. Paul Wilson, Louise McMaster, Ken MacLeod, Corey Doctorow, what the fuck, Joe Walton, George Orwell, Sarah Hoyt, Neil Stevenson, and Ayn Rand. These fucking people have nothing, nothing to do with one another.

Half of them aren't libertarians. Whatever. I mean, Heinlein wasn't. No, he was a fascist. Well, the line is very thin. These people seem completely, note, note,

a fan of freedom loving fiction writers, and one of them is not Le Guin. Hmm. Weird. I wonder how, why that's the case. Hmm. So,

this should tell you what you need to know about Neal Stephenson. I think. It was, okay, this should tell you what you need to know about neil stevenson i think it was okay so the dispossessed was a hall of fame award winner so just won the hall of fame award cool an appreciation award yeah yeah an appreciation award i don't like this i didn't like this book it would actually be better if you removed any fake attempt at social critique and simply made it an adventure novel about a televangelist and the mafia. It would be a better book. But because he had to put on airs of social critique and politics, he, at his, at its inception, made it not

good. Yeah, I agree, but you're gonna laugh at this next bit. This is the last thing I'm gonna say. Special award winner for Prometheus Award, Joss Whedon as writer and director of Serenity. My fucking nemesis he's he has returned and you know what i'm sure now with my personal philosophy and political ideology having changed

so much that um i mean a story about since i watched serenity you made a story about ex-confederates yeah so it i don't know if firefly will hold up if i watched it now i have a secret for you i probably won't hey don't tell me that listen i will i will remain with fond memories look if you want fond memories go back and watch buffy i can't that is so hard yeah it can't be a shit all right it's so hard it's too hard and there's more than one season yeah at least the camp isn't politically awful yeah that's true at least from what i remember maybe buffy's bad too i don't think so though I don't think he has time for that. Too busy being weird in other words.

Listen, it's OK. I just I'll just pretend. I'll pretend. So I think that's all I have to say about Snow Crash. Yeah, it's pseudo intellectual. Definitely. It's politics. It's politics are bad.

It's history. Historiography is awful. Definitely. Its politics are bad. Definitely. Its historiography is awful. Definitely. Its grasp of mythology and religion is bad. Its grasp of how human linguistics works is bad. Horrible. It's kind of racist. A little, yeah.

It's kind of sexist. A little, yeah. And Mark Zuckerberg likes it. That explains a lot about Mark Zuckerberg. And not in the way where it's like, this is such a good piece of work that people from all across the spectrum likes it. That explains a lot about Mark Zuckerberg. And not in the way where it's like, this is such a good piece of work that people from all across the spectrum like it. This is Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel

like it in the way that they're like, I'm going to pattern my work off of this. If that doesn't upset you, you probably are listening to the wrong podcast. Probably. I mean, you can still subscribe to the Patreon and give us money if you want but yeah you can totally do that but i feel like this is a letdown for the end of cyberpunk month

hey but listen this is post cyberpunk this is poo-pooing on everything that came before it which is true it's the fact that what came before it was good. And this isn't. Yeah. But that is the end of the off delayed. Cyberpunk month. Thank you all for sticking with us. We really do appreciate it. We do intend to continue doing themed months. You think should we announce?

Should we tell them what the upcoming months are? I think. What do you think? Let's give them the themes. Yeah, let's give them a couple. Yeah. So for February, we will be honoring Black History Month by doing black, African-American, or African authors for Sapphire Fantasy. I don't know what all of them are going to be, but I can pretty much guarantee you we're going to read Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. Yeah, that's probably going to have to happen. So that's going to be February.

March, we're going to do a month on the theme of hope versus despair, because it's the beginning of spring, and it's a good time to talk about it. It's hope versus despair because it's beginning of spring and it's a good time to talk about it. It's hope versus despair. April is going to be a very special month. Oh, April. It's going to be a special month. Easter is in April.

And as such, we are going to do a month long discussion of one of Christianity's most ardent supporters in the fantasy community. C.S. Lewis. We're doing the Chronicles of Narnia, baby. We are going to cover the entire Chronicles of Narnia across three or four episodes. We are going to cover the entire Chronicles along with a couple special guests, particularly for the last battle, because, oh baby, if you haven't read it in a long time,

save yourself for it. It is something. Yeah, we don't know how we're going to split it up yet, but we know that the last battle is probably going to be by itself. Yeah, it's going to need it. We're doing that for April because it seems like fun. So, keep a look out on our Twitter if you want to know specifically which books we will be reading i will be tweeting well one of us will be tweeting out the list of books for february soon enough and then possibly march as well uh if you enjoy what we do here you can subscribe to us on patreon where we do episodes about non-book stuff such as movies or video games, stuff like that. We talked about Akira.

We talked about Blade. We talked about, you know, everything everywhere. Star Wars, everything everywhere in Star Wars, stuff like that. We give about one episode a month.

You know, write us on whatever podcasting platform you listen to, because ratings are good. I guess it helps people find us so other people can find out how much I don't like libertarians. But no, thank you all so much for sticking with us through Cyberpunk month and we will be back at the beginning of February for Black History Month.

Thank you all for listening and we'll talk to you next time. Goodbye! Bye-bye. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. man come on