Somehow, by boat, plane, bus, snowmobile - you name it - Stephenson is able to get this large cast of motley characters to converge in the Pacific Northwest, where the terrorist Jones plans to cross the border into the United States and make terrible mischief. Amazingly, the author has created characters we latch onto, notably Richard, Zula , and oddly enough, Jones, and spirits the action along at supersonic speeds, never throwing us off track and rarely hitting a sour note. But then Stephenson, the Seattle-based, "noir futurist" author of Snow Crash , Cryptonomicon and the Baroque trilogy - all big, epic, enjoyable reads - is pretty amazing.
He injects this screwball scenario with enough suspense, adrenalin and humor to keep the pages flashing by. A thousand-page epic never read so quickly. Thoroughly engrossing, absolutely addictive be prepared to bid family and friends adieu for a good 50 hours , Reamde is a smart, brainy, profound book.
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Ask your friends X. Keibul lambjao [en]. Amagabelli [en]. Seborrahea [en]. Attribale [en]. Ganys [en]. Last updated November 10, Felix Muerdter [en]. Firuza [en]. Last updated November 11, Create a quiz. If it had blown through its target right away the way some of these things do, it wouldn't have been the case either. But when you're slowly building towards the goal and you don't know whether you're going to hit the goal or not, you end up paying a lot of attention to the thing and kind of gardening it.
You're interacting with the community of donors quite a bit, trying to figure out what works, and answering questions. It ended up being a full-time job during those 30 days to try to keep it moving and find ways to push it over the finish line. I think the process forces total honesty and full disclosure. In order to make this work, we needed to make a case that would pass muster with people who are very sophisticated about games and how games are developed.
Anybody who knows anything about developing video games knows that it's a very significant engineering challenge. It would make us look foolish to have a novelist, even if I am a geeky novelist, asking for money to make a game. Everybody would know to some level that that's not real. Our approach was to tell it like it is all the way through and let the chips fall where they may in terms of whether people wanted to fund it or not. In the end, it worked, and we were able to make it work without committing to stuff that we wouldn't be able to deliver.
Did people say they had heard about the project because you were involved, but they wanted to know how your group as a whole was going to pull it off? Well, that's obvious. We don't need to hear from people to know that.
A lot of the feedback that we got was clearly from intelligent, skeptical people who were in effect doing a kind of due diligence. When you raise money the old fashioned way — through a VC or whatever — there's a due diligence process there, which can be pretty thorough. Looking at the Kickstarter process, you might think that it's people throwing their money away, but I believe that the community there does a better job of actual due diligence than actual private investors might.
I was just reading an article about Curt Schilling , who burned through some number of millions of dollars trying to make a video game. If a geek novelist has no chance to make one, I can't imagine a baseball player would. I read about that. I have no idea what their failure mode was, but we figured that the best way to avoid a big failure like that was to pick a very small kernel. To pick a narrow goal and keep it narrow. We heard from a lot of would-be donors who said, "If you make it run on such and such operating system, if you make it work with the hardware that I have, or if you include my favorite weapon, I'll donate more money.
It would have been very easy for us to say, "Oh sure, we'll do that. Instead, we said we were only going to do one thing, take it or leave it, and that worked. If we can do what we said we were going to do, maybe we can go back to the well later and raise another round.
For me, this way is a much saner and more comfortable project than raising a vast amount of money from someone and then trying to execute on an incredibly big and complicated project. He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do.
Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age. It would be saying a lot to say that SF can save the world, but I do think that we've fallen into a habitual state of being depressed and pessimistic about the future.
We are extremely conservative and fearful about how we deploy our resources. It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century. We are looking at a lot of challenges now that I do not think can be solved as long as we stay in that mindset. This is more of an "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" kind of thing. My hammer is that I can write science fiction, so that's the thing I'm going to try to do.
If I had billions of dollars sitting around, I could try to put my money where my mouth is and invest it. If I did something else for a living, I would be using my skills — whatever they were — to solve this problem, but since I'm a science fiction writer, I'm going to try to address it through the medium of science fiction.
I would imagine the billion dollar "Save the World" Kickstarter is a little ambitious right now. More and more frequently, I'll meet a reader who will mention a book that to me is a pretty recent book, something that I just finished writing, and he'll say, "I read that when I was a kid. I'm not as conscious of the passage of time, but that seems to be happening. You originally wanted to make Snow Crash an interactive graphic novel but it was too early.
Is the Mongoliad project the next step? I wouldn't say next step, but I have been interested for awhile in trying to figure out how new tech is going to change the way we tell stories. My ideas about that change along with the technology. The Mongoliad was the pilot project for a larger effort that we hope will make use of the Internet and a lot of modern media production technology to tell stories in a big world in a number of different media. We chose prose first because it's the easiest and quickest thing to produce.
We chose the Internet as the distribution channel for the same reason. The other stuff we're working on including CLANG are efforts to expand that into other mediums, in this case video games.
We're just going to keep picking away at that, sort of like the guy in The Shawshank Redemption with the little hammer. Eventually, we may hit a stone wall and have to give up the project, but as long as we're allowed to keep tunneling, we'll keep doing so.
Oh yeah.
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