Talk:Neal Stephenson
Latest comment: 2 years ago by Doug Weller in topic Building the metaverse with Lamina1
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maximalism
editWhat does it mean to be a maximalist writer? Nitpyck (talk) 06:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
- I believe it is an oblique reference to the supposition that sometime in 2000, in a pistol duel at dawn, Stephenson fatally injured his editor… setting the parameters of the interpersonal arrangement for all subsequent replacements. Dlamblin (talk) 23:29, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
The entire "Writing Section" appears to have been written by contributors without clear grasp of the material.
editThis section is rife with misrepresentations and inaccuracies.
It omits notable mentions of actual scientific theories and problems that are clearly very important to Stephenson, as they recur throughout his work.
For instance, his use of waste heat in computing (Diamond Age), and cost of training a neural network (The Fall) are notable.
I am going to look to make minor edits to correct and clarify, as opposed to major, and others with a science or philosophy background, or, ideally both, should do the same.
Dukezhou (talk) 23:11, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
- I'm wondering, are there now sources covering this type of content? I'll admit that I haven't looked for a while, but as of several years ago, nobody was writing about the technology, philosophy, references, meanings, etc. in Stephenson's works. So if there are sources, I'm interested in checking them out. If there aren't sources, then unfortunately that sort of content would be inappropriate per WP:V and WP:OR. Woodroar (talk) 00:44, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
- Hello Dukezhou and Woodroar. There is a 2006 collection of academic essays about Neal Stephenson and his fiction up through the Baroque Cycle, Tomorrow Through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization edited by Jonathan Lewis, an English professor at Troy University (Alabama, not Çanakkale Province). I've linked to the Google Books preview, which has a detailed ToC and part of the index, as well as a helpful Preface containing a biography of Stephenson and detailed descriptions of each essay. The essays are not visible in the GB preview, but if this looks like a useful source of notable/reliable secondary research sources, I can contact the editor about making it available to you. We will need to agree on a file-sharing scheme. (You can ask @Root2702 on Twitter for a character reference.) Bridgman (talk) 21:35, 30 June 2021 (UTC)
- Hi Bridgman! Thanks for finding this! I should also mention that I recently got access to JSTOR through The Wikipedia Library to verify a sourced claim, and I now see that there are dozens of scholarly articles about Stephenson's works. I guess I just wasn't looking in the right place(s) before. The problem is that I currently don't have much free time to read them and summarize for this article. So I'm theoretically interested in Tomorrow Through the Past, but if I'm honest, I don't think I'd actually do anything with it. Sorry! Woodroar (talk) 22:19, 30 June 2021 (UTC)