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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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Which is funny because I think that Stephenson is much better at portraying how the people who live in his futures rhyme with people we know but are profoundly different than the people of our world because of the circumstances in which they live
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Gibson is much better at writing a world which completely overwhelms the characters we meet. They experience a rich and textured slice of the world but you can feel that there is much more beyond the edges. Stephenson’s characters get the grand tour.
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This is true, but also funny, because ‘Snow Crash’ + ‘Cryptonomicon’ are an attempt to deliver an accessible version of Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. And it SUCCEEDS. 😲 If you have not been able to get through ‘Rainbow’, read ‘Snow Crash’ then ‘Rainbow’ right after.
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Gibson is also more literary where Stephenson is more genre, so hard to compare
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Before ‘Snow Crash’ was famous, a lot of reviewers noted how much it owed to Pynchon. And if you read a few chapters of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, then read ‘Snow Crash’ immediately after, then go back to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ immediately after that, it is *unmistakable*.
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