From the SFRA Review
Winter 2025
Ian Campbell
I have a longstanding love/hate relationship with SF author Neal Stephenson—or rather, with his works, as I’ve never met the gentleman. Really cool ideas and digressions into all sorts of knowledge, and then gaping misogyny and the inability or principled refusal to wrap up his narratives. Something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months is the neurolinguistic hacking in Snow Crash (1992), where people could be “neurolinguistically hacked” by exposure to ancient Sumerian language and a bitmap image, reducing them to babbling nonsense syllables. At the time, and even for many years after, this seemed like just a fun conceit to scaffold an adventure narrative onto. But now, our franchised landscape is under the near-total dominance of people who have been neuroliguistically hacked, only instead of babbling nonsense syllables, they babble nonsense about QAnon and “religious freedom” and things about masculinity, that are all breathtakingly counterfactual yet spoken of with absolute belief that they are true.
In The Diamond Age (1995), Stephenson has a girl in a private school chafe at lessons she feels have little to do with her education. Her teacher tells her that “It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,” a statement that I might have glossed over the first time I read the novel, but which seems eerily prescient today. I’ve unfollowed and been unfollowed by many people over the last few months, all because I was unable or refused in principle to stay quiet about their own inability or principled refusal to pull together. Perhaps you’ve been on one or both ends of the same phenomenon.
SF looks at trends and predicts the future as well as estranging the present: though its predictions of the future are usually off in significant ways, they often get the general tone quite well. Snow Crash has Christians looting the ancient Near East for their own benefit; The Diamond Age has what’s left of Western culture ruled by people called Equity Lords. Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge in Hell (2019) has the rural swathes of America outside the metro areas and interstates, “Ameristan”, ruled by a violent Christian culture that rejects empathy and compassion in favor of a hypermasculine model of Christ that has little to do with the Gospels. I’m compelled to wonder whether we get a distorted version of that future, or something closer to The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake. Just our luck, it will probably be all of those.
Enjoy this issue of the SFRA Review, where we have in addition to our usual suite of fiction, non-fiction and media reviews an essay on Ghost in the Shell and not one but two pieces of SF-related fiction. Try to limit your doomscrolling: touch grass, talk to people, make art.
SFRA Review 