From: s1018954@aix2.uottawa.ca
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 08:16:55 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: The Diamond Age (was Re: E$: Neal...)
Message-ID: <Pine.A32.3.91.960315161509.85587A-100000@aix2.uottawa.ca>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


*Mild spoiler warning*


   Asgaard wrote:
 
   >No. From this excerpt, I draw two conclusions:
   
   >1) The author is keeping up with some well known (at least
   >to longtime readers of the cp list) concepts of future
   >consequencies of information technology.
   
   He is. Stephenson's an occasional programmer and mentions a few cpunks 
   from Communities.com at the end of Snow Crash. He also throws in tasteful 
   renditions of old hat stuff like Turing machines (hardly the pinacle 
   of high tech processing power), and does a great job with an example 
   of parallel processing stolen from A Fire Upon the Deep (but *so* 
   much spicier!). Who would have thought sex orgies would be a model 
   for computation? Or ritual drumming as IPC...? I can just imagine a 
   unix kernel for such a machine...(or beast?)
   
   >2) Around these, he weaves a boring, artless plot.

   Actually the plot is rather well done and does not focus nearly as 
   much on tech Snow Crash did. It's more of a story-telling novel with some
   very cute literary devices. It's got to be the only children's book 
   I'd recommend to anyone, especially people you'd like to interest in 
   basic CS concepts or crypto-anonymity issues and who wouldn't be  
   caught dead reading sci-fi, much less cyberpunk. I don't consider it 
   to be a thriller (though it has more sex and violence than your average
   kid's book.). It was even a bit sentimental.

   Those of you who enjoy conclusive story resolution, will not like 
   Stephenson's open-ended finale (though *I* think he got it right 
   this time, unlike in Snow Crash).

   It has me wondering was what a real "Young Lady's Primer" complete with 
   gentle cartoonesque intros to CS, crypto (recreational crypto maybe?) 
   and chaumian concepts would invlolve. I do remember Phil Z. mentioning on 
   the list that his original exposure to crypto was as a child by just 
   such a book (he announced this the day the author died). I have heard of the 
   occasional video game that teaches assembler or typing, it might be 
   interesting to create and release such a thing on the net for the topics
   discussed among us (for all age groups). Anyone for a crypto-anarchy game 
   .wad?