Skip to main content

Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points)

 


The shock of using VR devices for the first time is still unforgettable. It’s still a little closer to the virtual side than to the real one, but it was still amazing. Since then, I have been interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, and have started to read related articles and books. It was difficult to fully understand, but I was convinced that the technology would gradually focus on making virtual realities more realistic.


VR appeared in the mid-2010s, but there was someone who came up with this concept 20 years before this. It’s Neal Stephenson, the writer of ‘Snow Crash’, and the novel ’Snow Crash’ is a book that enables us to approach the world of virtual reality more easily. 


Considering this book was published in 1992, I’m really surprised that the story described in this novel is almost close to the world right now, where a lot of Internet-related technologies have made remarkable development.


‘Metaverse’ the virtual place that the computer made through the goggles and headsets is very brilliant. The writer even depicts ‘Avatar’, as another myself in the virtual places, that are familiar to us now but unfamiliar at that time when people lacked awareness of the Internet. It’s very surprising that the future society, drawn by the author’s imagination, has been realized to some extent now. 


Our real world doesn’t feel much different from the world that the writer described in the novel, so it feels like ’Snow Crash’ criticizes the problems of modern society while showing the future society. Although there will be a lot of changes in the future, It’s the environment that changes, not the human themselves. What is the fundamental solution to the problems that humans constantly create? 

Sometimes, a world that has become more convenient feels more uncomfortable. There are far more complex problems to solve, such as an invasion of privacy and dehumanization, and these are not easy to solve as removing a computer virus. Like the Tower of Babel, symbolized as a challenge to God, science challenges the impossible field. It was the book that made me think about what is the approaching future that we are going to see. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points)

   The main background of ‘Confessions’ is a normal school. The homeroom teacher, Yuko, says her four-year-old daughter is murdered by her class at the school where she works. The story begins with the teacher confessing this murder case like a speech in front of her students on the day of the closing ceremony. Yuko is the parent who lost her daughter and couldn’t protect her daughter, and at the same time, she is a teacher who has a duty to guide her students in the right way. She confesses about the law and order, ethics, and moral ideas in a calm and grim tone, in front of the criminals in her class who killed her daughter. Everyone is quietly holding their breath.  The incident begins with the death of Yuko's only four-year-old daughter, Manami. Manami was found drowned in the pool, but in fact, it was done by Yuko's students Naoki and Shuya. Shuya wanted to get his mother's attention by killing Manami, and Naoki pushed Manami into the pool to show Shuya, who i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points)

  A huge joke on a cosmic scale!  I think if I define Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one sentence, it seems like this can be said. The book is full of humor and jokes. The author is expressing his ingenious imagination regardless of any form and authority. In this book, things like the logical rationale and the probability of the story are not important. Unlike hard Science Fiction, which elaborately unfolds a story based on scientific theory, the charm of this book lies in the writer’s imagination and humor. As we can see from the setting that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by a super-intelligent race, the book shows the adventure of countless unique people and events between space and Earth, and prehistoric times and 5.6 trillion years later.    Even the most entertaining jokes can get tired after hours of listening. To keep laughing and induce fun, we need a narrative device that will arouse the readers’ curiosity and tension...
Post a Comment
Read more

Final Point Total

Week 1: Frankenstien by Mary Shelly (#6 points) Week 2: Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice (#6 points) Week 3: A Wild Sheep Chase (#6 points) Week 3_1: Confessions by Kanae Minato (#5 points) Week 4: Annihilation (#6 points) Week 6: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (#6 points) Week 7: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (#6 points) Week Eight: Contemporary Fantasy - Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clark (# 6 points) Week Nine: New Frontier - The Martian by Andrew Weir (# 5 points) Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn (# 5 points) Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (# 6 points) Week Thirteen: Literature and Speculation - Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (# 6 points) Week Fourteen: Speculative Satire - Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (# 6 points) Week Fifteen: Future Tense - Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (# 5 points)  Total Point from reading: 80 Attendance: 13 < 2 absence...
Post a Comment
Read more