Neal Stephenson’s Past, Present, and Future

I completed reading Neal Stephenson's enjoyable and epigrammatic Cryptonomicon six years ago, glorifying in its plenitude of wonders. The novel is chockablock with interesting asides that never slows its narrative thrust. (Although you do pause repeatedly to read aloud to another person this or that scintillating passage. I also recall laughing uproariously at the Cap'n Crunch milk:cereal ratio, the redistribution of heirloom furniture via a manifest Cartesian plot, etc.) Cryptonomicon is not the first novel by Neal I have read, but since reading it I have recommended publicly and repeatedly to everyone to enjoy all his novels.

But Neal is more than merely a great storyteller; he also is an autodidact with intriguing ideas about the world, society, and our place in it. For example, this essay is supposed to be about his Baroque Cycle of novels, but instead transmutes into a discussion of ideas...

• Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

• The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil. For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering. It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this.

This too-brief essay makes for compelling reading.
--David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist