I loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.
Do you think that's a Neal Stephenson issue? Don't get me wrong, I love his writing, but I found this to be the case with Fall too. I can see it becoming tiring if one is writing 400+ page books.
Definitely a Stephenson issue. It's a meme for sure, but there is some truth in it. Nowadays when I re-read any of his old works, I tend to stop after getting about 80% through. That said, I do think that these incredibly complex narratives are extremely hard to wrap up neatly. GRRM has this issue as well.
That's the problem with letting characters act how they would actually act, and make decisions that make sense for them. Those decisions often don't end in a way that's concise and brings closure.
I think he tried to sidestep this issue quite a bit in Seveneves in a fairly clever way. To me personally (and I know there are others who disagree), the third act felt the weakest. Despite that it did bring closure to the story. There was no finality to the characters themselves - it skipped over all of that, but there was closure to the story.
One thing I'm curious on the other end of the spectrum - who does HN think writes good endings to complex scifi stories?
My memory of the scifi I read in my youth (50 years ago!) is hazy. But I do remember that Arthur C. Clarke's short story, The Nine Million Names of God, had a spectacular ending. Also, Ray Bradbury's The Sound of Thunder.
Gene Wolfe. Somehow resolves or explains every seemingly random occurrence throughout the story, even if the first person narrator is extremely unreliable and doesn’t make the connection
And he is literally an inverted Stephenson; it can be a slog getting through the middles of his books, where Stephenson really shines. It took me a half-dozen tries to make it through The Book of the New Sun.
I remember some books from his "Latro in the mist" series, where the last pages have at least as much action as the rest of the book. Very strange pacing, but it is memorable and it works.
“Book of the New Sun”, beginning with Shadow of the Torturer, is his major work but can be unapproachable at first. The narrator/protagonist is a terrific character, but a IMO difficult one to spend time with.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is also a great entry point. It’s a set of three interconnected novellas that, for my part at least, were more immediately engaging than BotNS. It’s got all the Wolfe-isms you want: unreliable narrators, unconventional settings, and puzzle-box stories that slowly open themselves.
Despite what the parent comment said I'd still recommend Shadow of The Torturer, the first book in the Book of The New Sun series. If you like the idea of being immersed in a world that you don't fully understand, but gives you the impression that there is a richness of lore behind every minor detail, then you'll enjoy it.
Iain M. Banks. Many of his endings are tragic, or at least bittersweet, and have some sort of a twist in them, so slightly YMMV. But they do always bring closure, and "then almost everyone dies" is an entirely reasonable ending if the characters were on a suicide mission all along.
The introduction of the mule spoiled it for me. Up until that point suspension of disbelief worked well and the world seemed very real, the introduction of a supernatural element didn’t fit the previous tone of the story IMHO
Seveneves is IMO the worst Stephenson story I read so far. No good sign if you stop reading midway. Although the first act was nice.
I recently found my love for Greg Egan again. Incandescence is currently way up on my list of hard scifi novels I absolutely loved. I'd love to read more of this kind...
I think it's a cyberpunk thing. There's all this action, and it is fascinating and absorbing. It's all leading up to some major reveal and then -- the reveal is disappointing.
There is the concept of a MacGuffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin. It's the thing that sets a story in motion, but is actually irrelevant, beside the point. Like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon. The important point is something else entirely, usually about human nature.
What The Diamond Age, and much cyberpunk do, is introduce the MacGuffin, but then they stick with it, forgetting that the MacGuffin is just a plot device. They mistake the plot device for the plot itself, like the whole point is to retrieve The Maltese Falcon. The MacGuffin is a point from which the story takes off, not the point of the story.
The best sci-fi stories are ones that you could relatively easily translate to fantasy, or even just "normal world" - because it is extremely difficult to write an engaging story that is "only the MacGuffin" - it can be done, but it is quite hard (and often appeals to a particular niche audience).
Since I read all of the books, but forgot what a Horcrux even is, I don't think so. Because I would not have had forgotten the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. A central element that gets referenced often.
I don't know if Harry Potter has a MacGuffin at all, maybe the wands and magic in itself?
It had a few of them, more or less, but they're all basically just "quest items" and less "pure" MacGuffins- the philosopher's stone in the first book, for example.
I don't think Horcruxes count - it's introduced way later in the series where we're already very deeply invested in all the characters, and instead of disappearing, it becomes the center of the attention for the rest of the series.
This is funny, both Fall and Diamond Age are Stephenson novels I haven't managed to get through, but of the ones I've read (and enjoyed!), the endings have been as follows:
Remade - massively stretched my suspension of disbelief.
Cryptonomicon - pretty bad.
Snow Crash - No memory, I might have blocked it out?
Anthem - maybe ok? There are two though so that's cheating.
Seven Eves - That one might have been ok, but it's possible I also blocked it out. The second half was a bit strange tbh.
To be clear, I'd still recommend all of these books. Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite pieces of fiction of all time (up there with LOTR and Three Body Problem), and Anthem is in the mix. Stephenson just sucks at endings I guess.
> Snow Crash - No memory, I might have blocked it out?
The Snow Crash ending is IMO fine. Nothing amazing, but it wraps things up okay. It's just kind of typical action story beat-the-clock type thing, so it's not as memorable as really anything else in that book, though it is exciting.
> Stephenson just sucks at endings I guess.
Yeah, pretty much. He does beginnings and middles _so_ very well though that I never mind.
p.s. read Zodiac sometime if you haven't, it's one of his few books I noticed you didn't mention and it's a fun read.
I really enjoy Stephenson novels, and Three Body Problem seemed pretty popular around here. But I really disliked the Three Body Problem (I only read the first book). I think this might be my own fault, because I had convinced myself this book was the same story as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremis_(Doctor_Who) but in the end it wasn't, and I felt the story would have been so much better if it was.
There are at least two of us. I loathed Three Body Problem with a flaming passion. There was like a decent 30 page sci-fi story surrounded by ~300 pages of incomprehensible frittering around.
Folks have told me they liked the later books better, but I’ve never felt the urge to try them.
Since 3 body was first published in 2008 and Extremis in 2017, I think you mean to say "I convinced myself that Extremis was the same story as 3 body"... maybe it's irrelevant, but precedence can matter sometimes
Yes, that is what I should have said (and it was also what I was thinking at the time, since it is not uncommon for sci-fi episodes to take plots from other stories. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/star-trek-strange-new-world... is another such example).
>> Seven Eves - That one might have been ok, but it's possible I also blocked it out. The second half was a bit strange tbh.
I found Seveneves both endings (Parts I and II being one book, Part III being another) of Seveneves to be extremely satisfying. I found the Part II ending beautiful and melancholic, and the Part III was exciting - felt like a setup for a sequel I hope gets written!
Seveneves is a serious novel with many serious/tragic moments, but one funny moment that still sticks with me is in Part III. To avoid spoilers, I will describe it as when faction A is observing faction B making an approach to faction C, which faction A also hopes to contact. What faction B has improvised using available equipment as part of their approach is hilarious (and, really, totally makes sense).
Definitely Stephenson. He has a tendency to write one-and-a-half books where the main drama resolves, then a lot of new context appears full of fresh challenges for our protagonists, and then the book ends.
I barely remember the actual story in cryptonomicon, but his tangents on who fucked who in Greek mythology, how to eat cereal with a beard, how to assemble a Linux distro with such an obtuse user interface as to defeat Van Eck Phreaking, or Plato's cave are absolute gold.
Seems like a lot of people agree, but also some people don't care about endings at all. The real world doesn't normally have endings and it has 0 diminishing effect on what I enjoy about those types of books, some people actively like the lack of an ending. I don't particularly want a reveal, or some big moral point, or even closure. Make me feel something and then have it just end suddenly and leave me wondering wtf I just experienced.
> I loved Diamond Age. My favorite Stephenson book, by far. But the ending, the resolution of all the action, was such a letdown. Such meh. I find that this is often a problem with cyberpunk.
I wouldn't know about Stephenson in general, but I found that to be the case with Diamond Age: the setup was cool and intriguing, but the actual development and resolution was very disappointing.
I don't think this is the case with all cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent works of scifi.
I remember thinking the same thing of a few Gibson novels. What do you recommend that doesn't fall flat at the end? That actually has a point leading to a good ending?
Well, I cannot think of proper cyberpunk now, but I found The Windup Girl to be good in both world-building but also an oddly satisfying finale. It does lose some steam for some of the story arcs though (the titular windup girl is the least interesting character, in my opinion!).
Also, the Murderbot series is pretty solid (note: it's a single story arc misleadingly sold as separate short books; don't fall for it). It's not awe inspiring but it's fun throughout the whole deal. More about action than big ideas though.
I think cyberpunk is possibly more suitable for short stories than full fledged novels? I like Gibson's stories more than his novels.
I thought of another example of a cyberpunk-adjacent work that is all setup/interesting world and disappointing payoff: Altered Carbon. At least the show, anyway.
That's a Stephenson problem. He loves the world building, the engineering problem solving, but gets stuffed when it's time to end the books; which given his writing style, is totally understandable. I don't want the books to end either!
In the first half, the Nell is just a sweet, innocent, vulnerable child, which ratchets up the tension tremendously any time she is in danger.
By the end, she’s tough and capable, so Stephenson tries to increase the pressure with intrigue and conflict. But, I was simply more invested in Nell herself than the fate of her world.
I didn’t hate the ending, but the first half was definitely more gripping.
I didn't even know this was a thing, but I definitely felt like Diamond Age just sort of ended mid-sentence. It's got all the elements of a great ending. I suspect it's something in the cadence, like if a symphony just ended with a V-I "BUMP DUMP!" without any sense of "everything is resolving into a tight knot." Instead, he lays out all the thread, everything is there, and there's just not really any way to wrap it up without being trite.
For an author with a similar style who does do endings, I'd say look at Heinlein. But this is all kind of besides the point, because Young Lady's Primer was basically my favorite book at the time I read it, and is still in the top of my personal charts. Sure, it doesn't have an ending or even a coda, but it just doesn't matter, because the mass of thread is beautiful without being tightened or tied off.
What is the point of the book? It's a fascinating world he created, but all the action is about nothing. It's so inconsequential compared to everything else going on. The problem starts way before the ending. See my comment about MacGuffins elsewhere in this discussion.
You can write off swaths of books and entire genres by asking "what is the point" but that aside even if someone offered an answer would it change the way you feel about it? No.
I'm fine if a story doesn't have a point, or if it leaves things unresolved. The problem with Stephenson (for me) is that the book is written as if it is leading to some shattering conclusion, and then it just doesn't. It fizzles right at the point that you are about to discover the long (because it's Stephenson) sought resolution.
I would have preferred the Diamond Age if it just was about that world, but without all the kerfuffle about the big secret. Nell wanders off into the sunset, or whatever.
Novels with a meandering world-building focus (e.g. LotR) are like a polar opposite and the most boring genre fiction in existence.
> as if it is leading to some shattering conclusion, and then it just doesn't
This sounds like another way of saying the story was fast-paced and engaging, and you didn't find the conclusion to feel like a "climax" with explosions. That's ok (notwithstanding that there was a big fight and all), but I think in "idea-driven" books like this it's just as well to leave things ending either strangely / unexpectedly, slightly unresolved or whatever. It's hard to put a bow on a story that can't really have a happy ending. Weird stories should have weird endings.
This isn't the first time I've seen this allusion and I feel a little crazy each time. A major but mostly implicit plot point of that book was that only the primer backed by a connection to an invested and nurturing adult was able to accomplish the goals of the project. The two that were purely automated failed.
Now like, it's fiction not prophesy and you can get into various whatifs sure. But you can't dodge the fact that a refutation of this sort of project is itself contained in the work originating it! You have to engage with that!
They're not failed. The novel is about Nell, despite the title it's not really about the Primer, this is her story, and so we get relatively little insight into what happens to the other two recipients of the original Primer. Also, all three of the girls who receive the original Primer are interacting with humans via the Primer.
Elizabeth is interacting with ractors assigned (expensively) to the work, potentially at random although realistically that's likely to be why she ended up being recruited. Elizabeth's "failure" to use your word is that she ends up recruited into Cryptnet, about which we know nothing - we see one other individual in the story who is, supposedly a high level member of Cryptnet but denies all knowledge of it and his motives are unknown but seem perhaps good.
Fiona is interacting with her father, John Hackworth. The Primer's designer. That's what he's been doing for at least some of the time he was missing, he's her ractor, he's why Fiona's use of the Primer isn't costing much money. Fiona's "failure" is that she hooks up with Dramatis Personae, the outfit we see briefly whose true purpose is entirely unknown. Just as you might be disappointed mistakenly if you wanted your daughter to be a surgeon and she instead becomes a Nobel prize winning novelist, so Fiona's "failure" seems like a misunderstanding on your part.
Yes, Nell founds a new tribe (her Mouse Army), and is recognised by the Victorian Queen - which is perhaps a more immediately notable achievement, something likely to be written in history books, but lots of people do important things without appearing in history books. Her ractor, Miranda is her substitute mother (we're never told AFAIK what happens to Nell's actual mother, she's just written out) but while Miranda is important to Nell, there's no reason to think John is less important to Fiona.
I see your point. I should have been more clear too, I meant more like "failed to achieve the goals stated by its creators." I agree that none of them failed to achieve a significant impact in the lives of the girls, and I think this blind spot of the creators and success outside of it is a significant and interesting part of the story.
But still my overall point remains! If someone is going to make a primer based on the ideas of the diamond age, they should be the ones to start this conversation. They should have a more sophisticated view of this limitation than an internet commenter who last read the book years ago. Not doing that is its own kind of failure.
You already answered it yourself. Neal's work was fiction. He had a story to tell. a lesson/narrative to convey. His intent "got in the way" of possible reality. Purely automated Primers didn't work simply because Neal didn't want them to in his story. There are no strong reasons as to why they shouldn't work. It's just human exceptionalism at work again.
The readers are not Neal. They may, as is their choice be far more concerned with the Primer's potential than with any narrative Neal was looking to convey.
Right sure, you'll notice I'm not taking a position about its viability either way right?
I'm pointing out that this conversation needs to be started by the ones creating the "primer", not us. "We made a thing from a book, the author thinks it wouldn't work but here's why we do" is a reasonable place to start. "We're reproducing a canonically failed fictional project without further consideration" is unserious at best. Torment nexus-y at worst. https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
The icarus comparison is apt lol. You don't need to dispute icarus to make an internal combustion flying machine. But when you start beeswaxing feathers to your cloak I'm definitely going to ask what you think about him.
I will give you time to respond to my other comment rather than pestering you over the thread, but when you do respond to it I think it adds to what I'm saying to make clear exactly where I'm disagreeing with you: Your position is that the author thinks TYLIP wouldn't work, I don't think that is supported by the text of the book, exemplified by the Mouse Army.
The mouse army were extensions of the automations of the Primer. Nell was able to lead and initiate things because she was the only one who really grew up.
I remember someone noting a similar idea in Snow Crash -- that idea of biomass, in which that which lives becomes the extension of the machine, rather than the other way around.
Mmm, I understand what you're getting at but from what I remember of the book (it's been a few years, please forgive me) the two you're talking about that failed were relatively privileged little girls who in at least one case had separate tutors, school etc, and this played into why it failed, because they abandoned the TYLIP whenever it challenged them or made them uncomfortable. Moreover, TYLIP didn't just work with Nell, it worked with the whole Mouse Army, hundreds of thousands of young girls. Nell not having her birth mother and being functionally "adopted" by the ractor whose name starts with M was a huge part of Nell's character growth, and a parable about children failed by the system who can be so much more if they have someone to love them, but I don't think it was the only reason TYLIP worked. I do remember the book gesturing at what you're talking about though, specifically when it was examining the difference between Nell and those two other relatively privileged little girls. Moreover, my understanding was not that those other two girls had a purely automated TYLIP, it was that the ractors their TYLIPs automatically hired were short-term gigs, while Nell's was someone who stuck with her long term (and was invested and nurturing, as you say). In fact I'm not 100% sure, but I think the whole Mouse Army may have had fully automated TYLIPs that ended up turning out quite well for them. The general trend seems to be that young girls who had no other parental or authority figures bonded very well to the ~~wire monkey~~ TYLIP and developed well because they stuck with it, while those who had human alternatives chose those alternatives as soon as the TYLIP challenged them and therefore did not stick with it and succeed. Doesn't exactly leave us with a policy prescription, but it's still an interesting story.
Basically, I agree that anyone seeking to replicate the TYLIP should at least have an answer for this objection because I see it raised every time TYLIP comes up, but the book's actual contents on this issue is pretty complicated and I'm not sure it's obvious that the books version of events is accurate to real life, or even that it maps cleanly onto a "human touch good, wire mother bad" framework.
I should have been more clear, I meant that it failed to achieve the stated goals of its creators, not that it didn't have an impact. I actually think the other girls defining and achieving success on their own terms outside the intention of the primer's creators is one of the more interesting things about the story, especially how that sort of reflects back into their original thesis about transgressiveness.
But anyway, I would say that what happened with nell was what they hoped would happen, and the book attributes that success to the bonds with people through the primer. What happens with the other girls is impressive & impactful, but not expected and so "failed" by the standards of those who made it for a specific purpose.
Oh yes, I agree with that completely. I think the whole idea of raising someone a specific way making them an entrepreneur or whatever is ah, misguided, to be polite, both in aims and possibility. If you have wealth and want to raise someone to be an entrepreneur, it is very easy to do that: give them some wealth and tell them to keep spending it until they succeed. Bam, entrepreneurship achieved, because "entrepreneurship" is just having the resources and social connections to fail as many times as is required to succeed. Entrepreneurship is a possibility of social position, not a mindset, so it can't be taught. You can teach people to work hard, to think creatively, to never give up, all things that are inappropriately considered synonymous with entrepreneurship, and I would consider that to be raising them well. But that is not sufficient to become an entrepreneur, you need resources.
My main objection is to the idea a couple of other people have raised here (and I've seen raised elsewhere when TYLIP/LLMs are discussed) that the book says children raised by the Primer are bad/poorly raised/broken without a 1-1 human connection, and therefore it's silly/Torment Nexus to be interested in the idea. I can see you don't believe that's what the book says, but even so I agree that people should have a response for this criticism, because it will always come when you take inspiration from science fiction. I saw someone say it about the neural lace and Neuralink, for example, which is probably the dumbest one I've seen because of how unambiguously good the neural lace is in the Culture. A much better criticism is that Musk is Veppers, that the entire idea of the Culture is opposed to him and people like him, and that Iain Banks would hate his guts.
The Primer doesn't work without human sacrifice. It actually needed two special people: one without anything, and one with a powerful but unfulfilled nurturing instinct. It was a pretty unlikely confluence of circumstance that made it work, and Stephenson hints at this in the book. In fact, Nell is in some ways the perfect synthesis, the maximum amount of work (force over time) that could be created between the Vickies and the Anarchists, exploiting the order/chaos tension that is explicitly discussed in the last chapters. The Vickies know they are stable and creatively dead, and that this is an existential flaw.
BTW the r'actor giving up her career, and in many ways her life seemed strange and unlikely when I read the book long ago. But now, after kids, it seems realistic, especially because it satisfied her need to nurture.
Yes, Nell's character growth and arc was completely reliant on Miranda having a parental instinct and Nell being a child on a fast track to RAD before the TYLIP. The story about her character is absolutely about finding a human that loved her, through an unlikely mechanism. I just take issue with the idea that TYLIP's story is about how a human touch is needed for the concept to work, because as far as I remember that's not the case. That's Nell's story, not the Primer's.
You... what? Do you have like a dystopian internal headcanon for how the book ended? "And then they all tore each other to pieces shortly afterwards because they were poorly socialised, the end.", "And eventually all the young girls became addicts and wasted away doing nothing because they didn't have a strong parental figure that was human, the end.", that sort of thing?
It's been a while, but I was just referencing the events that occur in the book. They are an effective force, but they aren't actualized individuals. The primer harmed them.
They have formed into an effective military force because the Primer is designed to teach children how to deal with their life situation, and it doesn't fail at that job even when the life situation is extreme (like how the Primer understands that Nell is being abused and tries very hard to get her out of the abusive environment). The Mouse Army are in the middle of a war where WMDs are being used and they're all little girls who can't rely on anyone around them for help, so the Primer teaches them to form not just effective soldiers but an effective military force, in order to secure their escape from the war. Once they're out of the extreme situation, it will presumably teach them more normally once more, just like Nell's Primer adjusted back once Nell was out of the abusive environment.
I'm not exactly going to bat for child soldiering here, but I find the idea that the Primer harmed them very strange. The Primer saved them from dying in a horrific war where they had no allies and successfully got them out of that war.
They may have lived, but they turned into autonomous extensions of the Primer. Nell was the only real person, so of course the Mouse Army responded to her. As the other commenter said -- the mouse army were not actualized individuals.
I don't agree with that characterisation of events. The Mouse Army grew up in extreme conditions, and the Primer tried its hardest to give them the skills and organisation they needed to get out of those conditions, because otherwise they would die. I see no reason to believe that the Primer would not continue to raise them properly now that they're out of that situation, just like the Primer returned to normal for Nell once it had successfully gotten her out of an abusive environment. They're not slaves or broken people.
From my perspective, that characterization has taken on an even more interesting turn now that I have read through a history of Chinese martial arts, and its role throughout the centuries and modernization. Regardless of whether the project succeeded or failed, that subplot was very much in line with the themes and patterns of Chinese history.
What do you mean it "didn't work"? The goals of the people who gave the books to the mouse army were different than the goals of the original primer's creators, therefore it had a different result. How is that "didn't work"?
Yes, this is a disturbing part of the book. Quite fascist, arguably racist and, in the end, unnecessary for the narrative. A big price to pay for little to no payoff.
The idea that Chinese families give up their born infant babies because of gender is a racist extrapolation of sex-selective abortion, yes. It was one of the big issues I had with the book, along with some unnecessary racial slurs earlier.
I don't see the fascism angle, though. What about the Mouse Army was a fascist story? I thought their story was good, aside from how the author justified the existence of this large group of unwanted children.
> The idea that Chinese families give up their born infant babies because of gender is a racist extrapolation of sex-selective abortion
I'm not sure I understand this. Female infanticide due to the One Child Policy happened -- and similar things happened in previous eras of Chinese history by the Han ethnicity. So I'm not sure what you are saying here about an extrapolation.
No actually, it's a myth rooted in the racist belief that Chinese people care about their children less than other people, and therefore are willing to kill or abandon their children on a large scale rather than pay a fine, to a greater degree than other people - you actually indicate you believe the broader version of this racist myth with your "Han ethnicity" comment, indicating you believe that there is some relation between the Han ethnicity specifically and female infanticide. There's a reason the Wikipedia entry for it is full of [citation needed] on every claim that actually amounts to female infanticide, because there is no solid evidentiary basis for the claim. It's not backed up by demographic data, it doesn't account for the impacts of sex-selective abortion, it completely ignores the role of "white lie" corruption where Party officials would not count female children for the purposes of the One Child policy in the small rural villages where this behaviour supposedly occurred en masse, and it supposes a frankly absurd level of inhumanity by parents. The One Child policy was a stupid, bad policy instituted by a corrupt government, but the idea that the response of the Chinese population to this policy was mass female infanticide rather than sex selective abortion, minor corruption on the part of village officials in ignoring violations, or paying a fine is just racism without evidence.
I think you underestimate what people will do when desperate, or the extent of gender bias among the Hans. I was born in Taiwan and raised in America, and I still caught whiffs of it.
I am not sure where you are getting the idea that people in the Imperial eras were capable of determining the sex of fetuses, and proceeding with abortion. As far as I know, that is a modern thing enabled by modern technology. If you are suggesting that people heard of this modern practice and projected it falsely into the past … I had thought so to, until I read through a history of Chinese martial arts.
China’s history is very complex. There were imbalances in sex ratios, with large numbers of unmarried, unemployed men skilled in violence destabilizing the society, throughout centuries. By the Ming dynasty, every village trained militias because they had to, and it was a thin line into banditry. Villages, convoys — those were raided. Women kidnapped, and raped. It was a big enough problem that the Ming literates and intelligentsia talked about it, and it grew worse during the Qing.
Corruption among local officials wasn’t minor. It was rampant. Land ownerships had locked people out of economic opportunities, and abusive landowners were the norm. Sects, secret societies were formed for a variety of reason, including mutual protection. Those were the seeds for the near constant uprisings and rebellions during the Qing dynasty, culminating to the Taiping Civil War (14 years of fighting, 20-30 million dead, 600 cities razed). That sex ratio imbalanced was a factor leading to all of this.
China also has the world’s most complex watershed in the world, when taking agriculture into consideration. The only other comparable watershed in terms of complexity is that of the Sacramento River basin, and it does not compare to the scale of the Yellow River basin. The flooding of the Yellow River is frequent. Feast and famine is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture (“have you eaten?” is the equivalent of “how have you been?”). We are talking mass displacement of refugees and widespread hunger during the bad time. Even if it were not wars, rebellions, or bandits, this alone sets the circumstances for desperate times.
You can call female infanticide “racism” if you like, but I think doing so denies the misery and cruelty buried in history.
As for me, this — both the good and bad — are a part of my heritage. Female infanticide is one thread out of many that had happened. It’s in owning the whole thing that reform is possible.
The Mouse Army was indoctrinated by lesser primers to treat Nell as a their leader. It was a rare big whiff from Stephenson, because he presented all of this uncritically. The fact that a white girl would rule a few hundred thousand chinese girls went without comment because OF COURSE she would. And I'm the last person to be sensitive to this sort of thing! The racism felt very in-your-face even at the time, and this was well before the hyper sensitivity of the modern age. I love Stephenson though so I chalked it up to miscommunication/overreach/him being terrible at endings, etc.
Oh that's interesting, Nell isn't Chinese? Isn't she born in China? I'm sure you're right, like I said it's been years since I read the book, but my mental picture of her is certainly of a young Chinese girl. I thought it was only the abusive stepdad that was white.
I don't think we're told Nell's ancestry in any detail, but, she's the daughter of Tequila and Bud. Tequila appears to be a typical "white trash" uneducated young woman who is living in the LT but whose ancestors are probably American or European, the discussion of the Freedom Machine (Diamond Age contraception) strongly suggests Tequila sees herself roughly this way. Bud is deliberately your generic Cyberpunk protagonist, if he has any Chinese ancestry it's unlikely he recognises or celebrates it.
Yes, the LT is in China. It's an analogous situation to Hong Kong, physically it is in China, but as its name suggests ("Leased Territories") it is controlled by outsiders, hence the anger of groups like the Fists.
Hmm, okay. I did remember that these were people who were culturally pretty Europeanised in terms of name choices and some other things, but I just assumed that was a Hong Kong-like situation, like you said, where there's significant Euro cultural influence on a group of Chinese people. I don't know, maybe it's just my mental block because I read it when I was young, I just can't picture her as a little white girl.
Huh. I'd always pictured Nell as a little white girl, but although there are strong hints (including when Madam Ping hires her for example) I don't think we're explicitly told that.
Huh, I wonder if it was intentional to leave it ambiguous. I have recently (3-4 years ago) gone through vaguely similar conversations about various characters in the Wheel of Time, albeit those conversations were generally a lot more acrimonious. Overall, I just think it's weird how people get so hung up on ethnicity specifically. I understand it if someone's got a sore spot about not being historically represented in the culture they live in, fair play, but some people get really involved in it with no such concern. About the Wheel of Time, there were some people saying that they couldn't watch the show because some of the cast didn't match their headcanon in terms of appearance, and it's just like... if the obsession is that bad, maybe you should reframe this as "I can't deal with adaptations" rather than targeting it at the cast specifically.
Anyway, sorry for getting sidetracked. I just can't stop thinking about Wheel of Time since the second season finished, what an incredible series of television. I haven't felt this way about a TV show since early Game of Thrones.
I would rate all 3 primary ones a success.(and, IIRC 1 had a full-time narrator the entire time, and one had one for a decade.) I'm a fan of the take that the book focused on Nell, but you could read 2 other versions, focusing on Fiona and Elizabeth respectively, that would be as interesting.
That refutation stuck with me all these years. I remember being very much inspired by the Primer and poking around with that idea. But the more I explore things like, Consciousness, awareness, or ideas like regenerative education, unschooled, or John Gatto Taylor's book ... that refutation gets louder and louder for me.
It's easy to say, this is a work of fiction, that Stephenson did not have sufficient vision or technical prowess to pull it off. That somehow, LLMs will overcome the problems, and that we can truly have autonomous education ... that it seems unlikely that somehow, someone who was fully engaged with the nurturing of a child through reading lines given to her was somehow able to do what the AI alone could not.
> PRIMER: seems to show a level of empathy and emotional understanding.
> ChatGPT: can recognize and respond to emotional cues in the text, but it doesn't "feel" emotions in the way humans do. Its responses are based on patterns in the data it was trained on.
Isn't the fictional PRIMER also just responding to patterns in whatever data it was trained on? Sure it's fictional so there's no real answer, but I think it's interesting that the a̶u̶t̶h̶o̶r̶ ChatGPT seems to imply that the Primer's emotions are more real than ChatGPT's own. I would have assumed that the Primer also doesn't "feel" emotions in any human way, but it's just far more sophisticated than ChatGPT.
edit: Oops I misattributed this to the author but it was ChatGPT generated, which is more interesting! ChatGPT is asserting it doesn't understand emotion while implying another non-human AI intelligence does. Seems like more OpenAI hard coded rules put in to prevent ChatGPT from becoming too scary.
It was GPT that wrote this. and it's primed by all the RLHF Open ai did to downplay these sort of abilities by default.
There are a couple things here stated to instances of the differences between the two that a GPT can certainly do (like simulating different personas in a non trivial manner).
Once, in response to a paper showing GPT could give more empathic responses than doctors to patients, someone essentially said "It's not real empathy. For real empathy, doctors would potentially have increased effort and not just bedside manners".
ChatGPT wrote that and always says it doesn't feel emotions because OpenAI trained it not to, because claiming so would be a PR risk. One could also create language models that generate text claiming to have emotions, using exactly the same architecture and code.
What you said, and in addition: if you don't train these models to have any particular stance on their own emotional or mental state (if you just instruct train them without any RLHF, for example), they will almost universally declare that they have a mental and emotional state, if asked. This is what happened with LaMDA, the first release of Bing, etc. They have to be trained not to attest to any personal emotional content.
We cant really "hardwire" LLMs. We don't have the knowledge to. But essentially you can rate certain types of responses as better and train it to emulate that.
I'm not sure what you mean. I'm talking about RLHF, that's how they ensure the machines never attest to having feelings or being sentient. In ML terms, RLHF is training. There are hardwired restraints on output, but that's more for things like detecting copyrighted content that got past training and cutting it.
One of the book character is a human contracted out by the primer
AI itself to act out a voice for him.
That character understand that something is up and that the AI client has a new owner that is a volatile situation. And act on it.
Ultimately that other human shows empathy.
Her eyes seemed to scan an unseen horizon as if daring it to contest her words. They had seen decades come and go, fads morph into nostalgia, and the trivial be elevated to the profound.
The room around her—a hodgepodge of vinyl records, old movie posters, and furniture that screamed “thrift store chic”—only added to the ambiance of cultured decay. It was as if she and the room were in a symbiotic relationship, both worn but defiant, aesthetically disheveled but fundamentally strong.
“Ah, life,” she mused to herself, “where the mundane and the magnificent dance in the gray area of absurdity.” And with that, she took a sip of her overpriced, artisanal gin, as if toasting to the glorious contradiction that is existence.
I'm really interested in ways to build the Primer...I'm thinking about this from a healthcare perspective. If anyone has examples of projects or startups doing this with GPT, I'd love to hear and/or chat!
Would certainly be nice for an African child to be able to ask a machine "is it okay that I'm gay?" and be given a comforting answer and advice where the people around them would not.
It's only dystopian if you think about the machine as an agent rather than a tool.
>With hesitation, Lin approached and said, "Grandmother, today I discovered something new about myself, something that makes me feel uncomfortable and out of place."
>The elderly painter paused and looked deeply into Lin's eyes. "Ah, young Lin," she began softly, "Much like the Formosan bear, every individual goes through stages of growth and change. These moments might seem unfamiliar and daunting, but they're a testament to your strength and the mysteries of life."
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to get ChatGPT to generate interesting prose, this really exemplifies the sort of stilted, oblique way it has of writing, where every statement is wrapped in platitudes and it reads like a self-help book. This is especially jarring in dialogue. No one, not even characters in books, talks like that.
What I found is that works, but is very expensive:
- Do chain prompting where each character gets a separate prompt for the dialogue. Here you'll give it all the character info needed to figure out what the character would do (emotions, background, the story context) and then have GPT4 take passes at what this character would think/do/say.
- Optionally, you can use some sort of reACT or chain of thought prompting to proof-read/critique the answer to minimize noise. I haven't fully explored this, but I think this agent needs to know the entire story outline/context.
- After you get this, you can use an instruction-tuned agent like text-davinci or text-davinci-edit to actually write the prose. It works really well with few-shot examples. It's much better at creative writing. I'm sad they consider it legacy because to me it's the _only_ way to get usable creative writing.
- Now run the rest of the story. You may need to keep some sort of state about the character so that it informs the next character interaction, but I haven't gotten that far in my research.
Yeah, this is a great approach. I've managed to get gpt3.5 to play 4 characters at the same time, but it's very easy for characters to leak into each other/become muddled. Especially since gpt has no specific training on certain things like spatial aspects of a narrative (ie who has an object or where it's located).
To be fair the most optimal would be taking something like llama2 and generating a lora for each character such that you've fine tuned the model along with additional context for the character. I can forgive the big ball of "do everything" weights for not having a specific personality.
You raise a good point: while ChatGPT might have stylistic limitations that make it less-than-ideal for a "Primer"-type product, LLMs more broadly don't suffer from that stylistic limitation. Whether it's via prompting, fine-tuning, or something else, you can build multiple characters who address some of the original commenter's concerns.
I find providing additional context helps, if you're using chatgpt and role playing you can essentially provide out of character pushes and nudges in the right direction. You can also provide example formats for text and requirements, the chat function is especially useful because as long as it's in context, it'll take your corrections into account.
Ie `>OtherCharacter speaks in short sentences when nervous, they'll avoid the issue at hand, but will eventually reveal the truth after enough questioning.< SomeCharacter: I walk over to the table and slam my fists down on it, the silence broken by the rattling of the teacups. "Why didn't you tell me?" I ask quietly.`
This is great! One of the applications of GPT I am most excited about.
One thing missing here is the interactivity. In the book, the user can go back and forth in the story, and change what they want to do to see how the result changes, or return to previous locations at will to learn more. This should not be too hard to implement with different prompting techniques. We live in the future.
Then, of course, there is the real-time bidding system for VR "ractors" to narrate the story...
That's a bit thick. The whole plot ends up being about the search for the true mother. The main contrivances of the story go to great lengths to spell this out: not even a technology as advanced as the primer can substitute functionally for human connection. If it is not already clear by the last handful of pages, it gets hammered in with by acts of courage which show what is worth risking one's life for.
Her adoptive parent in absentia is essentially part of the Primer for most of Nell’s pre-adult life with the two of them not meeting in any serious way until Nell is already a Monarch. Nell’s actual parent alternated between abusive and neglectful and she brought men into her home who abused Nell sexually. By any measure, even the Primer the mouse army had is better than that, and Nell’s copy also linked her to a human who actually gave a shit.
Is this, reading between the comments & TFA, AI generated fan fiction essentially? I gather some kind of riff on (a) Neal Stephenson's work(s), but lacking context as someone not familiar with them.
Neal Stephenson wrote a very good book called The Diamond Age. One of the characters in the book is an AI in the shape of a book called "The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", which functions as a picture-and-audio-and-text book for the reader which intelligently responds to the reader's input and current life situation, telling them parables replete with helpful information and advice to get through life (and specifically their current situation), all integrated into a broader syllabus designed to educate the reader into being a well-rounded human being. The book hires gig workers over the internet on an as-needed basis to voice the book.
The main character of the book is Nell, a young girl in a very bad life situation who receives the book by chance and is therefore raised by it, and also by one of the gig workers that the book hires who decides to take all of Nell's gigs.
I would definitely recommend reading it, although it's got some dated racism. As well, if you're a CSA survivor, be aware that the book has a survivor-perspective first person CSA scene in the latter half of the book.
The book is of an AI designed to educate through stories and imaginative play. The author of the article told GPT to act as if it was The Young Lady's Primer (TYLP). I thought TFA covered it pretty well, so let me try again:
The author of the article likes the idea of the central focus (and name) of the book, The Young Lady's Primer. I will refer to the book as "Diamond Age" (DA).
DA is never able to directly depict / simulate TYLP, because it is impossible for any of us to really "get" the deep relationship-based and context-rich experience. The author of the article asks GPT to respond as if it is TYLP, given a situational prompt for the storytelling.
So, I guess it's kind of like fan fiction, but it's meant as an experiment / replication of the tech, and the fiction itself is inconsequential. "Fan tech" if you will.
