The internet and the modern novel
Jan. 17th, 2011 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylInteresting piece by Laura Miller in Saturday's Guardian Review on how novels deal with the existence of the internet. The article is good as far as it goes but, apart from token mentions of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, Miller limits herself to lit-fic and is then surprised to find that most novels seem to treat the computer and the internet as if they don't exist.
Which is a shame, because had the piece extended its horizons just a little further, just far enough to take in the works of Neal Stephenson, it would have found all its questions answered. In Snow Crash, it would have found a vision of the virtual world of the future, complete with proto-Google Earth. In Diamond Age, it would have found a description of some of the ways that people might group together and interact and learn and build common cultures despite their geographical separation. And finally, in Cryptonomicon it would have found one of the very best accounts of hacker culture, from its early beginnings in among the code breakers of WWII to Randy Waterhouse's attempts to add covert output channels to his laptop whilst in jail in the Far East.
So perhaps it's not the case that there aren't books out there that provide accurate accounts of how modern life has been shaped by the internet. Rather, if you start searching in the wrong place, you're never going to find what you're looking for...
Which is a shame, because had the piece extended its horizons just a little further, just far enough to take in the works of Neal Stephenson, it would have found all its questions answered. In Snow Crash, it would have found a vision of the virtual world of the future, complete with proto-Google Earth. In Diamond Age, it would have found a description of some of the ways that people might group together and interact and learn and build common cultures despite their geographical separation. And finally, in Cryptonomicon it would have found one of the very best accounts of hacker culture, from its early beginnings in among the code breakers of WWII to Randy Waterhouse's attempts to add covert output channels to his laptop whilst in jail in the Far East.
So perhaps it's not the case that there aren't books out there that provide accurate accounts of how modern life has been shaped by the internet. Rather, if you start searching in the wrong place, you're never going to find what you're looking for...
