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Neal Stephenson Discusses His New Climate Change Thriller - and Coining the Word 'Metaverse' (cnbc.com) 96

Posted by EditorDavid from the snow-crashing dept.
Tonight CNBC interviewed science fiction luminary Neal Stephenson about his new "geoengineering climate change thriller" — and about his coining of the original term "metaverse." Author Neal Stephenson shot to fame almost 30 years ago with the science-fiction novel "Snow Crash," which envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse," a computer-generated world accessible through virtual reality headsets. Since then, he's written several more novels encompassing technology and history, including a trilogy set at the dawn of the scientific revolution, and has done work for various technology companies including Jeff Bezos' space travel company, Blue Origin, and augmented reality company Magic Leap.

His new novel, "Termination Shock," out November 16, focuses on the looming issue of our age — human-generated climate change, projecting a near future of extreme weather and social chaos. Against this setting, a maverick oilman decides to take matters into his own hands and builds the world's biggest gun to shoot canisters of sulfur dioxide into the air, echoing the effects of a volcanic eruption and temporarily cooling parts of the globe. Geopolitics, social media and Dutch royalty all play a part.

Stephenson acknowledges that geoengineering is a radical step, but suggests as the effects of climate change grow more destructive, the demand for radical solutions will grow.
In the interview Stephenson suggests one factor that might increase popular support for climate-change action: rising sea levels. "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water."

The interview also touches on how it was 1992 when Stephenson coined the word "metaverse," and now it's being claimed by major tech companies. "All I can do is kind of sit back and watch it in amazement," Stephenson tells CNBC: But, as many have noticed, "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse."
Neil Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004...
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Neal Stephenson Discusses His New Climate Change Thriller - and Coining the Word 'Metaverse' More

Neal Stephenson Discusses His New Climate Change Thriller - and Coining the Word 'Metaverse'

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  • envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse," a computer-generated world accessible through virtual reality headsets.

    Are you sure you are not thinking of William Gibson? [wikipedia.org]
    That sounds exactly like the famous sprawl series from the 1980s, except he call it "cyberspace", which caught on long ago.

    • Go read Snow Crash. If you enjoy this genre, you owe it to yourself.
      • Snow Crash is so much fun. Also it's written so much like a script treatment, I'm surprised it never got movied up.

      • Re-read it a few months ago, and was pretty amazing how close a novel

        which envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse,

        came true by now.

    • Wow, you've never read Snow Crash?

      I'd say to turn in your nerd card, but you obviously never even applied for one.

      • Stephenson is the preeminent author for Nerds.

        Every one of his books celebrates aspects of nerd culture for their time period.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          Stephenson is the preeminent author for Nerds.

          Every one of his books celebrates aspects of nerd culture for their time period.

          Yeah, they're pretty well the definition of "up your own hole" writing.

        • I'm a big Stephenson fan, but William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984, Snow Crash came out in 1992. I'd say Gibson is really the one who brought cyberbunk to the mainstream and the concept of the net and virtual reality.

          With a 8 year difference in publication dates -- if you realize what Gibson wrote, before the internet as we know it even existed, his prescience is utterly amazing.

          • Snow Crash is a dystopic sci-fi parody of cyberpunk. Or "cyberbunk" as you aptly put it. It previously coined the internet use of the word "avatar," and now "metaverse" has caught on. The word. A description of VR in another book using a different word isn't relevant to the current discussion, and

            With an 8 year different in publication dates, Stephenson's masterful work may very well have been been a parody of Gibson.

            And lets get real; Gibson's book was post-TRON. He didn't mainstream shit. And he only sold

            • To be fair, I read Gibson in Omni Magazine as a teen, decades before I heard of Stephenson

              That said, I have read everything that Stephenson has written since then, Diamond Age in particular brought me to tears, and lead to approaches in helping my mildly autistic grand-daughter gain considerable function

        • I think of covid as the precursor to The Diamond Age.

        • Every one of his books celebrates aspects of nerd culture for their time period.

          But, whatever you do, don't waste your time on "Seveneves".

      • Wow, you've never read Snow Crash?

        I'd say to turn in your nerd card, but you obviously never even applied for one.

        Nope, but it just arrived at my most local library and I'll pick it up this week. ILL reservation so I'll have to rush through it.

        • You won't have to rush it to get through quick, it's, uhhhh, Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson. lol

          It's under 500 pages.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by shanen ( 462549 )

            ILL has a firm limit of two weeks, and I always tend to be reading a number of books at the same time.

            But I agree that he writes so well that his books tend to go quickly. But ditto Gibson. (No ditto for me, but I sometimes wish I could find a coauthor (even a ghost) to help out...)

            • Slashdot has lots of writers, Creimer is published too.

              Two weeks is surprisingly short. Maybe they deliver the ILL on a bookmobile's schedule?

              When I read it, it was still normal price at the bookstore, and in good supply. Now the used copy is almost the price of the new copy.

              Personally, I would just buy it. I like owning books. Not that I read them more than once, but when I see it I'll think about it. I'm going to wait for the paperback of Termination Shock, though. Actually I almost bought the signed hard

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by shanen ( 462549 )

                English books are in short supply around here, though as of two years ago there was still a bookmobile in a nearby city. My most local library handles ILL almost like regular books, though I have to do the reservation at the desk, not with the website. But after that, it's almost the same, except the ILL book cannot be renewed, but has to be returned within the normal two weeks.

                (As translated into the local language, it would take me at least a couple of months to read it, though that version is widely avai

            • When I read Snow Crash, I was working in GIS for a TLA and had previously been a pizza delivery driver.

              Needless to say I read it in about 3 sittings, and got the giggles throughout

              Highly recommended

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by shanen ( 462549 )

                I've enjoyed all of his books that I've read, but pretty sure I wasn't introduced to him until around 2005. Can't easily check just now because Tripod shut the CGI gateway... I can still run the PERL locally, but it's a major pain without the HTML front end. Pretty sure the one (of his books) that I read most recently (a few months back) was published around 1995.

                I'm trying to set up the Copilot for Python to do another port of the database, but been pretty slow on such things lately. I'd rather just hack s

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bardrt ( 1831426 )
        I think what I find funniest about this is that the link you linked to itself links back to a slashdot post.

        https://slashdot.org/story/04/... [slashdot.org]

        Well, that or the part several questions above the "who would win in a fight" question where he compares sci-fi convention goers to writers convention goers via "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell".

        • I was meta-linking ;)

          To be honest, I remembered the story from the original interview in slashdot, but the other link came up in my search

          In either case the story was kind of buried, so thanks for reading through the dross

          I think Neal's version in pure gold

    • Re:Cyberpunk (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday November 15, 2021 @07:26AM (#61989533) Homepage Journal

      Are you sure you are not thinking of William Gibson?

      Those of us who have read both are sure. You apparently haven't, so it's not clear why you'd feel qualified to snark us what we think.

  • Not enough (Score:3, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:20AM (#61989095) Journal

    In the interview Stephenson suggests one factor that might increase popular support for climate-change action: rising sea levels. "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water."

    It's not enough. In the next hundred years, hardly anyone will have their house filled with water from rising oceans. More people will have their houses fall into the ocean from erosion.

    • And what is it, exactly, that causes coastal erosion? Idiot.

      • And what is it, exactly, that causes coastal erosion?

        I'm not sure what you are implying here. I doubt you can quantify it.

    • We're still at the "plague of scorpions" phase.
      https://abcnews.go.com/Interna... [go.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Effects of the climate change do not just include rising sea levels but also more extreme weather: more frequent cases of high rainfall and storm surges.

      You don't need a house on a sandbank overlooking the ocean to be at risk. It could be much further inland.
      We will see more events such as how Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. We will also see more rivers overflowing.

      • That's a hypothesis, for sure. But even following that hypothesis, not many people will have their houses filled with ocean water in the next hundred years.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ahodgson ( 74077 )

          I think you'll be pretty surprised at how poorly this comment ages.

          Current estimates have ~150 million people who will live below the high tide line by 2050, and another 90 million by end of century, and that assumes emissions actually get cut.

          • I think you'll be pretty surprised at how poorly this comment ages.

            I'm happy to be wrong, but ...

            "Current estimates have ~150 million people who will live below the high tide line by 2050, and another 90 million by end of century"

            ... what are you quoting here?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nucrash ( 549705 )

      End result is pretty much the same. How will be filled with water. It won't be standing, but it will be filled with water.

      I look forward to being told I should just sell my water filled house, because we should all be able to find a sucker who wants a water filled house, right?

    • Why did you add "oceans", which was not in the quote?

      No, no need to try to explain. We know why.

  • Uncanny Valley (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:46AM (#61989131)

    "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse."

    I don't see advertising very often, only a few times a year during college football season, so I admit my responses to ads are a bit different than most people's, due to lack of acclimation.

    However, the Metaverse ad that they're running seems really odd. It has animations done in paper-mache style, I guess to lower expectations about display quality. And the humans look pretty skeptical. It's almost like a parody ad in that way. And the animations seem pretty creepy. In a creeper type of way. But they're not sure they're having fun, either.

    Totally bizarre messaging. With no use case hinted at, no positive emotions expressed, no hint of what values they're supporting. Zuck hasn't even read Start With Why, or anything. He's a complete chucklehead to have renamed the company without even being able to express why! Or even what, which is a pretty low bar. Which reinforces my theory about the what Second Life with virtual video screens showing ads.

    Can anybody who watches TV regularly share their impression of the ad?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ruddk ( 5153113 )

      I haven't seen ads in years so I tried to find it on YT. I found some things from "Meta". I noticed that they had disabled comments and likes(of course dislike counter is gone a lot of places).

      This tries to tell that you can work from home and be on the job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
      but all they manage to do is to show how you can wave your hands around.

      The other videos I saw, seemed to focus on how you can meet people and stay at home for your entire life. It seems kind of strange, if there is some

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The graphics are low end to keep people from throwing up. If the graphics were complex, cheap headsets (which are vital for its success) wouldn't hit the high frame rates needed to avoid vertigo and motion sickness.

      There is also the issue of network bandwidth. Realistic avatars will take too long to download on slow connections.

      • lol if true that would be hilarious, but I doubt they're dumb enough to target slow connections... but it seems dumb no matter what, so maybe!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      My first thought was that they're being vague to avoid being drawn into any kind of substantive discussion. But actually looking at their ad, they're kind of suggesting that on-line gaming is a substitute for in person relationships for people who aren't good at those. It's creepy and off-putting.

      Either (a) Facebook's marketers are too stupid to see this or (b) this is market segmentation, and they expect to their early adopters to be social misfits.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      There are a bunch of different ads [youtube.com], it's not just one.

      The commercial doesn't match anything realistically creatable with technology in the near future.

      • I don't believe you, because you didn't say anything other than "ur rong" and provide a video link that, obviously, I would never click.

    • All the Humans looked depressed; which would be probably accurate if your brain lived in the Metaverse but your body lives in the real world.

  • although 2 hrs n 40 minutes is more of a conversation than an interview. Great stuff if you're into it. https://youtu.be/xAfdSak2fs8 [youtu.be]

  • Tonight CNBC interviewed science fiction luminary Neal Stephenson...

    Neil Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004...

    So, who's the guy who answered questions, and what's he got to do with Neal?

  • The other thing Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash was essentially Google Earth. It was an app in the metaverse, but it allowed you to zoom in on the Earth and view aggregated data in real time. He even references this in his later novel REAMDE where he mentions Google Earth and the character says he heard Google ripped off the idea from some old sci-fi book. That's classic.

  • "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water."

    When you consider that sea levels have gone up what, a whopping 2.5" in a century, if "your house is full of water" in that case, well, whoever built it already below the surf line back then was a fucking moron. And you for buying it today.

    I'm not a professional builder, but my understanding is that building on ocean shores in the US you have to be AT LEAST 10-15' above high tide level.

    • Several of my friends in Michigan ended up with their houses full of water a month or two back.

      There is no need to build on the ocean shore to end up with a house full of water from climate change.

      • It's funny, isn't it, how whenever someone wants to "prove" something they toss out anecdotal evidence as if it's meaningful in some way?

        I have several friends who live on lakes in MN and WI and they're complaining about low water.

        It's almost like that shit's meaningless to this discussion, ain't it?

        • Except it's the exact opposite. Water levels and freshwater availability are changing rapidly, and that is causing huge problems. And the change is accelerating.

          So the shit's very meaningful to the discussion, for those who pay attention.

  • From previous discussions on climate change, it is plainly evident that 99.99% of the chattering classes are completely unable to separate climate change from emissions control. There is a total mental block that permits no other solution to the problem of global warming.

    We have seen this recently at the COP26, which was ostensibly about reversing warming, but in reality was about micromanaging carbon. What every attendee know, but may not speak, is that their "solutions" will be too little, too late, too

  • Or did he not trademark "metaverse"?

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