ITT: Writing so cringe in the first 10 pages you want to put it down
ITT: Writing so cringe in the first 10 pages you want to put it down
Falling into your wing while paragliding is called 'gift wrapping' and turns you into a dirt torpedo pic.twitter.com/oQFKsVISkI
— Mental Videos (@MentalVids) March 15, 2023
Expand.
And waiting. The Deliverator honks his horn. This is not a nominal outcome. Window slides open. That should never happen . You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University, cross-reference the citation for window, chute, dispatcher's , and it will give you all the procedures for that window -- and it should never be opened. Unless something has gone wrong.
The window slides open and -- you sitting down? -- smoke comes out of it. The Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm, coming from inside the franchise.
What am I reading?
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they 're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator ' s report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
Are you making this up this is fucking terrible.
I’m not making it up. This is chapter 1 of Snow Crash.
Gotta realize it was first written as a graphic novel and then he changed it. Makes it make way more sense
So that's why we've got a highly sexualised 15 year old being raped by a massive eastern european.
So in one paragraph Stephenson explicates on how the technological equipment of a futuristic pizza delivery boy is sociologically determined by American individualism, and, in extension, elaborates on how America has also been economically outcompeted and defanged (intellectually & resource-wise) by globalism with several real-world-synchronous concrete examples, terminating in an intriguing metaphor of inequities 'smeared out', with a final nod to the various markets the country has, historically, enjoyed dominance in (media, tech, fast-food) -- displaying, in other words, a marvel of lexical condensation and scholarly rigour -- expressed in a streamlined Post-Gibsonian rat-a-tat-tat style that replaces techno-romanticism with a sort of expository-casual twang characteristic of thrillerspeak satirically-bent......and the only 'critique' you can muster is a lazy excerption of the text, which does little other than prove how much you, and other dimwits in this thread, have been, ahem, Filtered, naturally, as is characteristic LULZ-frequenting braindead hogscum turdbaths with little to bring to the table other than proofs of your own illiteracy and, perhaps, all of you might want to slow down, scan those alphabetic symbols which coagulate together into things called 'words', since, maybe, y'all might actually imprint something of value upon the smooth palimpsest that is housed in the sconce, fucking retards.
I just don’t like the writing style and I don’t like the sentence structures. Just because the paragraph holds meaning doesn’t mean I didn’t have a visceral reaction of cringe. I feel what I feel.
Indeed, 'feel' is the correct word. What you possess will only be, and forever be, feeling, since you lack the linguistic expertise to elaborate upon what constitutes your distaste to picoscopic levels of precision. That, really, is the greater sin than 'disliking' a book. To dislike something vaguely, without knowing the contours of that dislike, without being able to communicate it to others except in vague intersections of bluster and memery, without being able to, thus, enact one's own creative correction of those dislikes in the form of a counter-work. To be forever obliviated; all words, all legacies lost. Alas, such is the fate of the mass of men.
How do you not pass out from sniffing your own farts?
KWAB
Imagine writing all that to justify this garbage
. Lmao seethe, pseud homosexual.
TLDR: lolberts realy thought that after the final Ancapocalypse cheese pizza will be delivered to their gated communities by leather wearing, katana equipped, lamborghini driving, pod living half-japanese warrior-poet cyberhackers amusing themselves with saving the world between doing microjobs to pay for the rent and goyslop in gig oriented economy.
Uh, it's fiction sweetie. People tend to write about cool things that they don't necessarily believe is actually going to happen (like the name Hiro Protagonist should have tipped you off?). And it's made very clear that the mafia-run pizza place is not, in fact, an ideal way to do a business.
It’s satire. The same people have difficulty finding this entertaining are of the same ilk as those who were horrified and clutching pearls at the prospect of eating babies. Protein is protein
Anon Snowcrash is a highly comedic parody.
>It’s satire.
It can hardly count as satire even, due to how utterly flippant and in your face it is.
>due to how utterly flippant and in your face it is
Anon, you had to be there. Sorry you missed it
Did you not catch my eating babies reference (fedora tip to Swift’s A Modest Proposal)? Satire can be pretty bold my guy
Who wrote this wtf LMAO
some dweeb trying to make fun of cyberpunk and now all the YA fans treat it as the epitome of cyberpunk
>The window slides open and -- you sitting down? -- smoke comes out of it.
Gayest sentence
>Expand.
Enhance 224 to 176.
You win.
I’ve actually really wanted to read this one as an intro to cyberpunk after playing Cyberpunk 2077.
It’s a fun read. Better than Neuromancer
NTA but I've had Neuromancer in my hands like 3 times saying "I'm going to read it this time" but never did. Am I missing out? I spent $9 for it at an airport bookshop
Nah, it's quite dated. You've probably come across all the tropes. The space jamaicans are ok but its a boring read
It’s good but I suggest treating it as an expressionist work. Basically don’t try to understand anything, just cruise through it.
Jesus christ it can be read in like a day or two. Just read it you dumb fuck.
>Just read it you dumb fuck.
B-but this is LULZ. We don't read.
Even 300 pages can feel like a slog when I know the author is an ass blasting homosexual every page
Blitzed the whole Sprawl trilogy after watching the show. Loved it, highly recommend. It’s more focused on intertwining narratives that lead up to these big heists, and the cyberpunk world building is sort of done in the background. It really comes together by the end. You don’t HAVE to read them in order but it’s pretty cool when the collective background information builds up.
Dude it’s sucks. I appreciate the ideas and stuff for their time but his prose are like untangling nots and not n a good way. Just janky writing. Ide say it’s worth reading just so you can see how things have progressed within scifi.
You have not internalized enough styles to see how good Gibson is as a prose writer. Take any paragraph in Neuromancer and deconstruct what skills you need to hone to write in such a manner and you will realize how singular Gibson' s style is.
>and you will realize how singular Gibson' s style is.
Yeah, most LA Noir detective novel writers could write.
It's not exactly noirish but a sublimation of it, and Gibson was more inspired by Ballard. And the descriptions of data structures and architectures are beyond noir:
"A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…;The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there."
And his style in The Peripheral is further evolved into leanness.
Heard it described somewhere that Gibson is like Don Delillo but better the same way McCarthy is like Faulkner but better and I agree with that take
That’s straight noir heroin mate.
Also JG Ballard understands alienation as the inversion of Eros. Gibson doesn’t understand Eros to invert it: see Fokker vs spad for this failing.
Idk man I’ve read some great writers. McCarthy, Hesse, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Gaddis, Tolkien, Herbert, Huxley, Plato, Homer…who else should I read to appreciate Gibson? Not like he’s some sort of writing genius or anything the book is a slog with horrible prose. If we are talking about sciFi even Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is better. Gibson is terrible.
De gustibus. Quit being a baby
Neuromancer is a novel that should come with a glossary, like: https://old.reddit.com/r/Neuromancer/comments/pn7l5w/neuromancer_terms_and_definitions/
Shakesphere was also said to have made up words we know use commonly. I guess people of his day might've had the same response to his works.
* we now use commonly
Most of it's pretty self explanatory. I remember being confused about what ICE was when I first read it, but then I realised it's basically a firewall, and it all fell together.
If you need a glossary for neuromancer you are stupid.
I think his writing is just not very clear. He has bad prose
Ahh nice, I still wonder about neuromancer. Does it tie in with Cyberpunk 2077 neatly in the way Witcher does with W3? Does it have swords? That’s what’s drawing me to snow crash, cyberpunk+swords, that’s a combo I’m really into.
The video game is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game, which was pretty unambiguously inspired by Gibson's work, but isn't officially attached to it in any way.
It is. Neuromancer is straight garbo
kys nagger
i got you bro
Bruce Sterling
The Artificial Kid
Schismatrix
Islands in the Net
Heavy Weather
Holy Fire
Distraction
Zeitgeist
The Zenith Angle
The Caryatids
Crystal Express (Short Stories)
Globalhead (Short Stories)
A Good Old Fashioned Future (Short Stories)
Visionary in Residence (Short Stories)
Gothic High Tech (Short Stories)
Transreal Cyberpunk (Short Stories, written with Rudy Rucker)
Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Software
Wetware
Freeware
Realware
The Hacker and the Ants
Complete Short Stories
Transreal Cyberpunk (Short Stories, written with Bruce Sterling)
John Shirley
The only really actual "punk" guy of the original group.
City Come A' Walkin'
Black Glass
Eclipse
Eclipse Penumbra
Eclipse Corona
Heatseeker (short stories)
Lewis Shiner
Frontera
Deserted Cities of the Heart
Slam
Walter Jon Williams
Hardwired
Solip:System
The Voice of the Whirlwind
Angel Station
Metropolitan
City on Fire
This is Not a Game
Deep State
George Alec Effinger
When Gravity Fails
A Fire in the Sun
The Exile Kiss
Budayeen Nights (Short stories)
Richard Kadrey
Metrophage
Kamikaze L'Amour
Angel Scene
Pat Cadigan
Dervish is Digital
Fools
Mindplayers
Synners
Tea from an Empty Cup
Patterns (short stories)
Jack Womack
Ambient
Elvissey
Going, Going, Gone
Heathern
Let's Put the Future Behind Us
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
Terraplane
Steven Barnes
Street Lethal
Gorgon Child
Firedance
Richard Paul Russo
Destroying Angel
Carlucci's Edge
Carlucci's Heart
Subterranean Gallery
Melissa Scott
Trouble & Her Friends
Night Sky Mine
Dreaming Metal
The Jazz
Wilhelmina Baird
Crash Course
Clip Joint
Psykosis by Wilhelmina Baird
Shariann Lewitt
Memento Mori
Interface Mask
Short Story Anthologies
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology ed. Bruce Sterling
The Ultimate Cyberpunk ed. Pat Cadigan
Semiotext SF ed. Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson
Hackers by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
Storming the Reality Studio ed. Larry McCaffrey
Miscellaneous Cyberpunk Fiction
Blood Music by Greg Bear
Halo by Tom Maddox
In the Drift by Michael Swanwick
Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad
Dad's Nuke by Mark Laidlaw
Green Eyes by Lucius Shepard
Life during Wartime by Lucius Shepard
Dome City Blues by Jeff Edwards
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Cypulchre by Joseph MacKinnon
Archetypal (Cypulchre Vol. II) by Joseph MacKinnon
The Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden
Proto-Cyberpunk Fiction
Works of fiction written before cyberpunk was a thing, but have stylistic similarities and heavily influenced the genre.
Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Dr. Bloodmoney
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
A Maze of Death
Martian Time-Slip
Now Wait for Last Year
A Scanner Darkly
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Ubik
VALIS
William S. Burroughs
Exterminator!
Interzone
Naked Lunch
The Nova Trilogy:
Nova Express
The Soft Machine
The Ticket that Exploded
J.G. Ballard
The Atrocity Exhibition
Concrete Island
Crash
High Rise
Complete Short Stories
RE/Search: J.G. Ballard
Alfred Bester
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Virtual Unrealities (short stories)
Michael Moorcock
The Jerry Cornelius Chronicles:
The Final Programme
A Cure for Cancer
The English Assassin
The Condition of Muzak
Others
The Cold Cash War by Robert Asprin
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Altered States by Paddy Chayefsky
Triton by Samuel Delaney
Dahlgren by Samuel Delaney
Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter
Noir by K.W. Jeter
Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad
The Girl who was Plugged in by James Triptree Jr.
True Names by Vernor Vinge
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
The Schrodringer's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
The Dream Master by Roger Zelazn
Post-Cyberpunk Fiction
Works written after the initial cyberpunk boom of the 1980s, a lot of them specifically address issues raised by critics of the original cyberpunk movement and deal with a different kind of future
Madeline Ashby
Company Town
vN (The Machine Dynasty 1)
iD (The Machine Dynasty 2)
reV (The Machine Dynasty 3)
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Windup Girl
Ship Breaker
The Drowned Cities
Pump Six and Other Stories (short stories)
Lauren Beukes
Broken Monsters
Moxyland
The Shining Girls
Zoo City
Christopher Brown
Tropic of Kansas
Rule of Capture
Richard Calder
Dead Girls
Dead Boys
Dead Things
Cythera
Cory Doctorow
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Eastern Standard Tribe
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Little Brother
Makers
For The Win
The Rapture of the Nerds
Pirate Cinema
Homeland
Radicalized
A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short stories)
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (short stories)
Greg Egan
Diaspora
Permutation City
Quarantine
Distress
Warren Hammond
KOP
Ex KOP
KOP Killer
William Hertling
Avogadro Corp (Singularity 1)
A.I. Apocalypse (Singularity 2)
The Last Firewall (Singularity 3)
The Turing Exception (Singularity 4)
Kill Process
Sean Kennedy
Immersion 2086
Ambient Reports 2087
Hardwired Faith (The Exoskeleton Codex Book 1)
Kaizen Sanctuary (The Exoskeleton Codex Book 2)
Rhiannon Lassiter
Hex
Hex (Shadows)
Hex (Ghosts)
Tim Maughan
Paintwork (short stories)
Infinite Detail
Ian McDonald
Brasyl
River of Gods
Cyberabad Days
The Dervish House
Richard Morgan
Altered Carbon
Broken Angels
Woken Furies
Black Man (aka Thirteen)
Market Forces
Thin Air
Ramez Naam
Nexus
Cruz
Apex
Jeff Noon
Vurt
Pollen
Automated Alice
Nymphomation
Pixel Juice (short stories)
Needle in the Groove
Falling out of Cars
Cobralingus
Channel SK1N
Malka Older
Infomocracy
Null States
State Tectonics
Eliot Peper
Cumulus
Neon Fever Dream
Bandwidth (Analog 1)
Borderless (Analog 2)
Hannu Rajaniemi
The Quantum Thief
The Fractal Prince
The Causal Angel
Collected Fiction (short stories)
Karl Schroeder
Stealing Worlds
Jeff Somers
The Electric Church
The Digital Plague
The Eternal Prison
The Terminal State
The Final Evolution
Kieran Shea
Koko Takes a Holiday
Koko the Mighty
Koko Uncaged
Charles Stross
Accelerando
Singularity Sky
Glasshouse
Halting State
Rule 34
The Rapture of the Nerds (co-written with Cory Doctorow)
Toast: And Other Rusted Futures (short stories)
Wireless: The Essential Charles Stross (short stories)
Daniel Suarez
Daemon
Freedom
ignore the guy who gave you the long list
read Neuromancer by William Gibson and you're halfway there
Watch Blade Runner for the other half
Test
What's your complaint?
Are you too young to remember when your pizza had to be delivered in 30 minutes or it was free?
That totally cracked me up.
The rest of the book is awesome too.
I also really enjoyed "The Diamond Age".
Although Stephenson never really learned how to write an ending.
Kill yourself homosexual.
i remember reading it a few times when i was young and liking it
>filtered
The Diamond Age is also pretty ok
He's a genre fiction writer and Luther Blisset destroys him anally.
Never heard of him but I’ll read him. Give me your best rec
_Q_. It is Anathem versus Name of the Rose done correctly.
Added to my list, but my fuck do I have a backlog. Cheers anon.
The original redditor book
I read this like two months ago. I thought it was a fun read, for kids. I was surprised at how people talk about this book. I didn't think it was really that funny, or insightful, but I have the series that I haven't got to yet. I'm reading Shelby Foote's Civil War series now along with meme Gravity's Rainbow, so maybe I'll get it to soon. I dunno. I've read influential and important books which I understood why, but I didn't really get the hype behind this one, even though it was still good for an eight year old.
If you'd like to read the original, proto-cyberpunk novel, check out "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick.
One of its 4 plot lines was used for the movie "Blade Runner".
Dick isn't really very cyberpunk at all, despite Blade Runner. Burroughs is proto-cyberpunk.
WS Burroughs believes in a lib com revolution as immanently possible through sufficiently gay sex. Transforming rot into the future is the opposite of cyberpunk.
>Writing so good in the first 10 pages you don't want to put it down
Kino
You hate it cause it hits too close to home
I actually don't understand why people here like Stephenson, he seems to me like *the* Reddit sci-fi writer. I tried reading Snow Crash and it's not funny or clever with it's satire, reading his prose makes me wanna shove him in a locker and call him a dork.
Let me guess...you got bullied horribly in middle school, and now you try to talk like one of them, because it makes you feel like a big man.
Give it up, phony. You're fooling no one.
>I actually don't understand why people here like Stephenson, he seems to me like *the* Reddit sci-fi writer.
He's the Silicon Valley sci-fi writer. They love him. He has meetings with Mark Zuckerburg and shit.
It seems to me that they like him for the Cryptonomicon and System of the World more than Snow Crash - which has been Seinfeld’d to hell and isn’t particularly worth reading at this point.
Stevenson isn’t the world’s best mechanical writer but he has pretty incredible breadth of style and a lot of good ideas. Even Homer’s hand wanders.
I liked it but I didn’t laugh once and didn’t realize it was supposed to be funny.
If you like cyberpunk (as did I) you will probably did SnowCrash.
>Metaverse
Pic related was mixed; some good humour and excitement but also some giga-cringe segments like when he's screaming on the rooftop after shooting some guy. He describes it as a "bestial warcry"
I tried reading this but it has the problem alot of 90s liberal shit has now that the libs have become authoritarian. Yes I'm a chud
If you choose to view it through that lens of course you’re going to hate it. Try and temporarily let that shit go, equivalent to suspending disbelief, and just have fun with it
t. fellow chud
The Expanse
Moby Dick
every Shakespeare play
>Moby Dick
I'm not into Maōri/black bdsm.
What did you expect when the main character is named Hiro Portagonist? It's supposed to be a fun book, which is it. Worth reading.
Cyberpunk started and ended with nueromancer
Cyberpunk is too close to reality to be fun anymore.
Infinite Jest
Funnily enough, the first book (just titled Yukikaze) is one of my favorites even if the English translation was a bit rough at times, but the translation in this one is so bad that I didn't even last five pages. It was apparently done by the same guy who translated the first book so I have no idea what happened
Neuromancer is one hundred times worse
Hey Billy at least you're eating pig shit not dog shit.
>try to "read" The Martian by Andy Weir, an ostensible "book"
>300 pages of a scientist's internal monologue as imagined by a dumb guy
>ZERO description of ANYTHING ELSE
>begin to lose my grip on reality and go insane like a redditor
>open up Lord of the Rings
>so many comfy description of the environment
>reads like a travel guide to Middle Earth, like the world itself is its own character
>characters feel emotions to the world itself
>i start to feel sane and healthy again
Thank you J.R.R.R.R. Tolkien
+
That's PROFESSOR Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien to you
>2023
>Still bitching about YA novels on LULZ