tsktsk. pulled into my own comment box, i find it akin to viewing what i ate earlier in the most flexible (and sphinctic of fashions..) blogger's being a bit of a snot, so i'll lurk in my semicolon for a while...
i read Snow Crash finally, and felt it feel good. there's a bit of death-by-analogy feel to his speculation, that while overwrought, is also a mean anthropic theme. the locus of the novel is the concept of Babel. translatable (not that i ever check others' sources) to 'gateway' [bab] of 'God' [el]. he shoehorns the allegory to fit into a parable of a programmer's (pre-grammar's?) language. the language of Sumeria was so closely intertwined with the primary form of consciousness, that a keeper of knowledge (Enki, if i remember) recognized how determinate it was for human behavour and how easily it could be subverted by a linguistic 'virus', so he created a 'meme' or root virus that broke the common language of Sumer into the disparate forms of language we have today. almost omitted is the extension this recreation has on the original legend of Babel: that this separates Heaven from Earth and actually CAUSES God to exist... and so the kingdom becomes binary. assisted some by a biological agent that makes the uninoculated susceptible to mind-control (some religious efforts propounded insular activities in order to immunize cultures from infection), this reawakened linguistic virus threatens the day-after-tomorrow planet. only a motley hi-tech alliance congealed around a dude with a katana can save the future!
the action is quick, the concepts, though technologically tired (this book's nearly 18 years old), astound in terms of their synthetic potential, and the writing casual and sharp. this tripped-out prognosticator, neal stephenson, is a bit of a psy-phi umberto eco and i couldn't put him down.
3 comments:
stupid blogspot... all this to say: amon tobin is back! www.myspace.com/tobinamon
tsktsk. pulled into my own comment box, i find it akin to viewing what i ate earlier in the most flexible (and sphinctic of fashions..)
blogger's being a bit of a snot, so i'll lurk in my semicolon for a while...
i read Snow Crash finally, and felt it feel good. there's a bit of death-by-analogy feel to his speculation, that while overwrought, is also a mean anthropic theme. the locus of the novel is the concept of Babel. translatable (not that i ever check others' sources) to 'gateway' [bab] of 'God' [el]. he shoehorns the allegory to fit into a parable of a programmer's (pre-grammar's?) language. the language of Sumeria was so closely intertwined with the primary form of consciousness, that a keeper of knowledge (Enki, if i remember) recognized how determinate it was for human behavour and how easily it could be subverted by a linguistic 'virus', so he created a 'meme' or root virus that broke the common language of Sumer into the disparate forms of language we have today. almost omitted is the extension this recreation has on the original legend of Babel: that this separates Heaven from Earth and actually CAUSES God to exist... and so the kingdom becomes binary. assisted some by a biological agent that makes the uninoculated susceptible to mind-control (some religious efforts propounded insular activities in order to immunize cultures from infection), this reawakened linguistic virus threatens the day-after-tomorrow planet. only a motley hi-tech alliance congealed around a dude with a katana can save the future!
the action is quick, the concepts, though technologically tired (this book's nearly 18 years old), astound in terms of their synthetic potential, and the writing casual and sharp. this tripped-out prognosticator, neal stephenson, is a bit of a psy-phi umberto eco and i couldn't put him down.
That sounds a fancy read. Something that might just be a bit above my already short head. : P
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