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Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
Preferred Pronoun?:
She
Relationship Status:
Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
Posts: 1,733
Thanks: 1,132
Thanked 6,845 Times in 1,493 Posts
Rep Power: 21474852
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Linus
Ah, yes. Gibson is a classic. I've read that one and still have the rest of his books on my list of To-Read. I did become very enchanted with Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Have you read that one yet? It is a massive read but interesting (IMO) if you like cyberpunk stuff.
Add to those ones are the likes of Gaiman and Niven (my favourite general SciFi author).
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Oh yeah I read Cryptonomicon! Went out and bought it the day it hit the shelves. Don't know if I ever told you this but I was a cryptographer during my stint in the Army so, yeah, it was right up my alley!
I don't like it as much as I liked his earlier work but I love the way he introduces one of his main characters.
For those that have not had the pleasure of this sublime passage here it is, in all of its rambling glory:
Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in someway, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregationalist preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. LIke every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet."
That is the best summation of neo-Darwinian theory I have ever read and my favorite character introduction ever.
Cheers
Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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