https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee...
>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”
>[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...]
moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.
Here come the punchline!
...
"the book has been out for 30 years and anyone can spin ideas out of it."
start with Player of Games. The various books have no common plot thread, can be read completely out of order; Player is by far the most accessible.
1. William Gibson - Neuromancer, 'nuff said. The rest of the Sprawl Trilogy is great as well.
2. Rudy Rucker - I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but he is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
3. Richard K. Morgan - wrote the books that were the basis for the Altered Carbon series on Netflix if you're familiar with that at all.
4. John Brunner - not really "cyberpunk" but some of his work is often described as "proto-cyberpunk". The Shockwave Rider is one of his most famous works, and it is really good IMO. I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar yet, but it is also highly regarded.
5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
6. Daniel Suarez - Daemon and Freedom were really good.
7. Vernor Vinge - I'm only part of the way through A Fire Upon the Deep now, but so far so good. His works are also usually highly recommended amongst HN'ers.
8. Bruce Sterling - I know of him from his non-fiction work The Hacker Crackdown, but he has also written some well-regarded science fiction.
9. S.L. Huang - The "Cas Russell" series is excellent, as techno-thriller / sci-fi stuff goes. I won't say it's anything real deep but the books are fun to read.
10. K.C. Alexander - The "SINless" series is.. um... well, I enjoyed the first two books (not sure how many there even are, that might be it). They probably aren't for everyone, but if you like them, you'll probably really like them. I'll just try to illustrate with one example line from one of the books: "You haven't lived until you've fisted a nun under the cheap light of a neon Jesus".
11. Charles Stross - fellow HN'er and famous author! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross Writes radically entertaining stuff, including the Laundry Files series, Halting State, Glasshouse, etc. I'd say Glasshouse is an absolute "must read".
12. Greg Egan - I especially recommend Permutation City.
13. China Miéville - Check out Perdido Street Station
Brunner's work is sometimes a bit of a downer, Stand on Zanzibar is matched or exceeded in that regard by The Sheep Look Up.
However, if that's your thing I can suggest George Turner and Paolo Bacigalupi, and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room! (which was turned into the movie Soylent Green).
> 5. Pat Cadigan - I haven't read any of her stuff yet, but she is on my short-list of authors to start reading. Gets recommended a lot in these circles.
Cadigan is great, but her ouvre isn't all that large. Linda Nagata is a similar author well worth reading.
BTW, from my perspective Stephenson's real contribution in Snow Crash wasn't the Metaverse per-se but the huge dose of irony and insider humor, which reinvigorated a subgenre that was starting to take itself and it's RainyGrimDarkness a bit too seriously.
Then again, others have since explored similar territory (Tad Williams' Otherland series, Diane Duane's Omnitopia Dawn, etc.), but Stephenson's return to these stomping grounds in Reamde was a bit... turgid, by comparison.
- Octavia Butler (Everything)
- Becky Chambers (Wayfarers)
- Martha Wells (Murderbot)
- Liu Cixin (3 body problem/ dark forest)
- N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth & and cities we became)
- Dennis E. Taylor (Bobiverse)
Also relevant to this particular thread, his book Rainbow's End features AR/wearable technology.
Iain M. Banks is also a lot of fun.
Look to Alastair Reynolds.
Look to 'Mote in God's Eye.'
Can someone fill in the specifics? I guess the trouble is that for Facebook, you're the product, and advertisers are the clients - but, what is the revenue model of the metaverse from Snow Crash?
I think there is some sort of main street with some reserved space but it's akin to a url.
There's also an IP licensing model going on too-- selling avatars, video games, amusement parks.
Just putting this out in case anybody else feels the same pressure.
It took me a few read-throughs of Neuromancer until I felt like I got everything.
I'd have expected Axios to be a bit more bland about it.
Tons of visualization through art, and ways and means defined through story.
Of course tend to need to be very literal about these things.
Frankly a computer meta verse isn’t that interesting
I’d rather figure out how to grow neuron structures that let me believe or have skills in anything and just babysit this stupid fleshy husk literally
So there's certainly precedent for Stephenson to claim the moral rights to a "metaverse," whatever that is.
He’s right that compensation isn’t legally due—but he should be proud!
Personally, I loved Vinge’s “True Names” short story, which I believe may be the first “virtual reality” story. I also loved Snow Crash for its in-your-face gonzo attitude.
"If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."
https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...
How about he does exactly the same thing, with exactly the same outcome in the real world, just without making any NFTs, burning any coal, or shilling any get rich quick pyramid schemes?
What tangible difference would there be?
None whatsoever.
...Except for no bullshit, no proof of wasted energy, no precious GPUs buried in landfills, no contribution to climate change, no carcinogenic smoke, no lung disease, no cancer, etc...
Did you know: rocks used to be perfectly good companions and construction materials aeons before and decades after the Pet Rock craze came and went.
The cardboard box and the $4 price tag were just a gimmick. So are NFTs.
Did you you really think the former president's manner of speech was just him acting retarded?
He was casting memetic spells across all channels. They're still zapping around as we speak.
I love the passage that introduces "the Street", and it's the last sentence of it that gave me the impression of an advertising business model.
In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
And any person receiving some random amount of money donation from Facebook in exchange for NOT making an NFT probably cares.
Or is your whole point "who cares about the environment"?