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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (26115)	4/16/2004 11:47:06 AM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

I had a lot of problem with that, even as a child, for I could never understand HOW and WHY so many seemingly rational people believe in something they have never seen. This is simply another sign that you lack sufficient faith. Something nobody that is remotely credible to them has ever seen. Well, mo, IT IS WRITTEN that you can't see God and live. But people credible to them have HEARD from God. Something never proven. This is not a matter of proof. That is for silly scientists and mathematicians. This is a matter of FAITH. Really. Is that why it sounds like gibberish? :-) God invented all those languages at Babel. Why should he not speak a combination? Or none? Who are you to tell the Master of the Universe what he can and cannot say? Aah. One of my favourite subjects. I will try to keep myself from launching into a mile-long monologue :-) Suffice it to say that Gibson is to be appreciated from the way he changed the course of science-fiction from space ships to Mars and wars with green spacemen to internet, virtual reality etc. He did, after all, invent the term "cyberspace" and used it for the first time in Neuromancer in 1980s, before there even was "www" website addresses. However... I read all his books, and they give you a taste for what that particular future will FEEL like, but the stories are just not interesting. They go nowhere. You read and read and are sometimes intrigued about the virtual personality that lives in the machine or the idea of being a data courier with a stack of storage in your brain, but they are not very interesting books overall. Enter Stephenson... His vision of the future is not much different from that of Gibson (darkish, corporations openly running the world, etc) but he has a story to tell. A very interesting one. In Snow Crash for example, the story takes you from a drug that apparently makes the brain of the user "crash", even when "seen" in virtuality as a picture, to ancient Sumerian legends (ex: tower of Babel), and a way to "hack the brain". He has invented a story so detailed, so consistent with the little archeological details (some of which he shows with diagrams), and so overall brilliant that he has by far passed Gibson. And that was before he wrote Cryptonomicon, which I can only compare with Foucault's Pendulum in the mix of intellectual pleasure and sheer pain of difficulty of reading :-) There, the story runs on two levels - on one, there is a guy who works to decypher Germans' Enigma code during WWII and meanwhile invents the first magnetic computer, and on another, there is his grandson, a computer hacker in today's world, building a data haven on some island principality, kind of like Switzerland is a money haven... I will shut up now :-) ALL RIGHT, ALL READY, I put it on reserve at the library!