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I don’t actually have a good handle on the main diffs between Gibsonian and Stephensonian futures. I’ve read 1 G and 2 S. What are the key diffs? Is it like Orwell vs Huxley?
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a subreddit pummeling a hedge fund into the ground is yet more proof that we got the stephenson cyberpunk future instead of the gibson cyberpunk future
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In Neuromancer (and the bit of Peripheral I read before abandoning it) I got a sense of high-tech-low-life protagonists. DevOps types who might also care about tattoos and punk hairstyles for eg. In Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age otoh I mostly got “unpleasant middle-class types”
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I'd say Gibson's characters take themselves a bit more seriously than Stephenson's. Stephenson's universes are, at some level, consciously aware they're crazy, but are good natured enough to go along with it anyway.
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