I didn't actually think Saturn's Children was that good, but it's not BAD. I don't think Anathem deserves a Hugo, but that's because it shat me to tears from a philosophical point of view, as much as from an Adam-Roberts'-review point of view...
Hm well, I haven't written about it although I fully intended to. Look, I guess I've always found Neal Stephenson a bit dodgy in philosophical terms. Snow Crash was basically predicated on there being a Gödel sentence for the human brain, or something similar. And yet he has this determination that AI is impossible, to the extent that one protagonist in The Diamond Age works out that there's a real person behind the Young Lady's Primer or whatever that book was called because a Turing Machine couldn't possibly do the job...
That certainly appears in Anathem, but it's woven in amongst the stuff that really irritates me, which is the totally weirdass Platonism - and the way in which the parody-anti-Platonists (who want everything to flow from syntax or something?) are caricatured (and yet near the end they seem to be part of the whole big hidden game that's going on or something
( ... )
I just feel that Stephenson is a very bright fellow who has never been adequately challenged by someone brighter than himself. So his views are glib and shallow, because they haven't been tested against a really challenging opponent. And then the mere fact of them being glib and shallow means that the intellectual challengers he needs, let us say from academic philosophy, won't engage with him now.
It's difficult because I only have dark suspicions until I read the book, and my suspicions make me feel nauseous about tackling it.
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I don't think Anathem deserves a Hugo, but that's because it shat me to tears from a philosophical point of view, as much as from an Adam-Roberts'-review point of view...
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Look, I guess I've always found Neal Stephenson a bit dodgy in philosophical terms. Snow Crash was basically predicated on there being a Gödel sentence for the human brain, or something similar. And yet he has this determination that AI is impossible, to the extent that one protagonist in The Diamond Age works out that there's a real person behind the Young Lady's Primer or whatever that book was called because a Turing Machine couldn't possibly do the job...
That certainly appears in Anathem, but it's woven in amongst the stuff that really irritates me, which is the totally weirdass Platonism - and the way in which the parody-anti-Platonists (who want everything to flow from syntax or something?) are caricatured (and yet near the end they seem to be part of the whole big hidden game that's going on or something ( ... )
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It's difficult because I only have dark suspicions until I read the book, and my suspicions make me feel nauseous about tackling it.
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