Short Stories 📕
Hello makers,
This week on Hacker News I stumbled upon an essay that absolutely mesmerized me. It's a long read, full of metaphors within metaphors, about Linux and Apple and Bill Gates, and Disney of all things, and when I reached the end I realized it was written by one of my favorite science fiction authors, Neal Stephenson. Of course, his name is also at the top of the page, but I missed that 🤦♂️
Stephenson's essay also reminded me of another favorite short story of mine by Isaac Asimov. And so, this week, I'm going to share three essays/short stories by three of my favorite science fiction authors. See how this work continues to hold up, years after it was written.
Science fiction is a huge influence on everything I make, so although this may not be a maker-centric newsletter this week, it's a window into the things I think about in my work. I hope you enjoy these.
In the Beginning was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
I absolutely love how Stephenson takes twice as many words to get across a point than necessary. But he does so in stories and metaphors and humor that make it all worth reading. He wrote this essay in 1999, in the days before Mac OS X, when Microsoft ruled the PC market, and the internet was growing rapidly, mainly on Unix and Linux.
Some of my favorite excerpts:
The opening "splash screen" for Microsoft Word summed it up: you were treated to a picture of an expensive enamel pen lying across a couple of sheets of fancy-looking handmade writing paper. It was obviously a bid to make the software look classy, but it failed for me, because the pen was a ballpoint, and I'm a fountain pen man. If Apple had done it, they would've used a Mont Blanc fountain pen, or maybe a Chinese calligraphy brush.
What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing; it's deciding what to write.
Somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars.
The Last Question
by Isaac Asimov
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
This is Asimov's self-proclaimed favorite short story of his career. Written in 1956, it's a series of brief, loosely connected stories about a computer named Multivac. It's hard to talk about this short story without ruining the end, but let's just say it's worth reading to the last sentence. It covers centralization, entropy, and the future of the universe.
Here's a taste:
"So many stars, so many planets," sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. "I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now."
"Not forever," said Jerrodd, with a smile. "It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase."
Burning Chrome
by Willliam Gibson
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/burning_chrome/
Gibson is far and away my favorite author. In Burning Chrome, he is setting the stage for his masterwork Sprawl series. The term "cyberspace" is coined for the first time, in reference to a "mass consensual hallucination" in computer networks. Gibson wrote Burning Chrome in 1982, pre-internet. It's the story of two freelance hackers who attempt to break into the system of a notorious cyber-criminal known as Chrome.
Classic Gibson:
Booze and Vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.
That line, "the street finds its own uses for things," is now colloquially used to describe an unexpected use for any technology. It sums up Gibson's (and my) belief that hacking new technology to do something else is one of the most exciting things about the time we live in.
Keep making, and thanks for reading! 🙌
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Until next week,
Craig 👋