My main problem with Snow Crash is its manifestation of what
I once called the Fundamental Cyberpunk Error: the FreeCiv-ish idea
that civilization consists of a Fisher-Price hammer-and-peg playset
with a bunch of discrete technologies and social constructs sticking
up, and that you can tap on one with a hammer and push it down without
it having any effect on any of the others. "Of course there will be
sports in the future... [tap, tap, tap] DEATH SPORTS!" And you
have Rollerball.
Example: setting completely aside the usability problems of virtual
reality, how can a fully immersive high-bandwidth world-wide virtual
reality universe continue to exist in a world without the rule of law
or the sanctity of contract? Who mantains the servers (or other
electronics)? Who manufactures the servers (or other
electronics)? Who mines the raw materials and how do the raw materials
get to the fabrication plant without being stolen by bandits? Who
grows enough food to feed all these people working on assembly lines
instead of hunting and gathering? Who maintains the microwave stations
and transatlantic fiber optic cable, or launches new sattelites into
space to replace broken ones? How does each party to this operation
afford the cost of the private army required to avoid getting ripped
off or blown up by rivals? It's to solve these problems that people
form states[0], but once you've tapped down the little "State" peg
with your little cyberpunk hammer you don't have that option.
Anyway. My point here is not to carp on particular problems, but to
discuss this sort of inconsistency in general. I carp not on
particular problems because Sumana convinced me that microlevel
inconsistencies can happen in a cultural artifact even if the
long-term cultural shift in that artifact's universe is in a
particular direction ("The market can stay irrational longer than you
can stay solvent."), so it's not prima facie evidence of poor
craftsmanship to include such inconsistencies. I find myself much more
favorably disposed towards Snow Crash, and I think it does the
book more justice, when it's regarded as a snapshot of a civilization
seventy-five years into a four-hundred-year decline into tribalism and
anarchy rather than (as I regarded it until recently) as a
picture of a civilization already completely collapsed into tribalism
and anarchy.
The thing is that this exact same sort of inconsistency happens in
cultural artifacts which are generally agreed to be awful: for
instance, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which nobody except Jake
thinks is great.[1] (Paraphrase: Jake: "all my friends think mad max
beyond thunderdome is a terrible movie." Leonard: "Has it ever
occured to you that there might be an empirical basis for such a
belief?" Jake: "that is impossible.") It happens in Signal to
Noise, a book which may well have merit (though I didn't like it)
but in which all the characters act as though the American government
still has power, even though voters stupidly passed a poorly-written
Constitutional amendment which has as a trivial side effect the total
emasculation of government (perhaps the case that will establish this
is still awaiting certiorari).
I am ill-disposed towards inconsistency in general (I once rewrote a song because it
contained an inaccurate statement about evolution), but I think I can
now distinguish the good kind of inconsistency (forms of archaic
rituals from the modern era preserved through inertia and other
microlevel eddies flowing against the macrolevel, enhancing the
richness of a story) from the bad kind (consequences of authorial
decisions not properly thought out, causing gaping plot holes and
annoying me). It comes down, I think, to judging an inconsistency
against the gestalt of the book. For instance, A Canticle for
Leibowitz has some of these inconsistencies, but they seem to me
like the good kind, and I really like A Canticle for
Leibowitz. I haven't read The Postman, but from what I've
read about it it seems the very embodiment of the good kind of
inconsistency, and I've a feeling I would like it as well (though
apparently the movie is horrible).
[0] I know, Locke was wrong, people don't 'decide' to form states to
solve particular problems--but once you have states, it's things like the
rule of law that distinguish states whose citizens can create things like
the Internet from states whose citizens can't. And any cyberpunk-esque
mutual defense venture created to get around the lack of a state is in
fact a Lockean state of the sort that people don't decide to form. This is
actually one of the premises of Snow Crash, which means I'm arguing
in circles--wheels within wheels, Jeeves. My point is that to mantain the
civilizational infrastructure neccessary for an reliable virtual reality
Internet, your de facto state must have power and agreements with other de
facto states consumnate with the power of and mutual agreements between
today's nation-states, so why not put the microstate idea in another book
so as to do it justice?
[1] In British radio programmes this is known as "the sort of
statement that gets us letters".
Wed Mar 13 2002 09:44:
A couple days ago Sumana and I discussed Snow Crash, which has for
some time been a bit of a sticking point between us. She really enjoys
it, and I really unenjoy
it. (Throughout this discussion, keep in mind that I could never
bring myself to finish Snow Crash, which of course is unfair to
Snow Crash.)