Paul = Neil Stephenson (?)

In reading a "Snow Crash" i'm finding it eerie how similar (though more
polished) Stephenson's style is to my own. A few years ago, at the
height of the war in Afghanistan, I penned a little ditty called "Ricky
on the Mountain", which naively apes Stephenson's predisposition
towards a franchise-dominated future, blurred lines between virtuality
and reality, Japanese culture, and really odd forms of terrorism. Bear
in mind I had never read a cyberpunk novel, nor did I read much fiction
in general (beyond the amazing George Saunders and a few other random
writers), but I felt intuitively drawn to the breathlessly creative
hodge-podge pop, marketing, and neologism-obsessed futuring of dear
Neil. Was it because I was (and still am) a genius? Or was I tapping
into a rather thick and juicy emerging morphogenetic field, badly
expressing in my own way what Neil was getting accolades and blowjobs
for expertly articulating. In short, pop-cyber is the cultural stew we
all now swim in, and all but the most dull and insensitive can spot the
cross-pollinating spleen-passion of a hundred million bits of informa
flying around to create new and higher (w)holes.

So here I am, c.150 pages into Snow Crash and loving every minute of
it. How, oh how, could a writer ever get beyond such densely-imagined
mythologizing of the Age of the MiniMall? Two ways: 1) add the
esoteric, and 2) go multimedia.

1) While Snow Crash's Black Sun centerpiece has an esoteric mythology
of sorts (witness the way in which avatars "die", get hauled into
"hell" by a bunch of little black eyeless men, then give way to a new
avatar by the very same user), Stephenson's knowledge of the occult and
mysticism in general seems lacking, thought its these very mental
frontiers that it seems one must ponder in navigating the info-space of
the psychonautic MetaVerse. The whole thing is an altered, if "faked",
state, and states and altered states seem to have their own native
properties, structures, behaviors, and the like. That Hiro Protagonist
(at least thus far in the novel) does not practice Centering Prayer or
Kundalini is not to Neil's disadvantage, but it is to our advantage,
for it highlights a new space into which eso-fiction may step. I'm
looking for a novel which would express what the World Soul sees
through the eyes of the witness.

2) Go multimedia. The tendencies of cyberpunk already indicate they
need an operatic, wagnerian usage of multiple media streams to fully
convey the whole smear. Emmy-deserving sci-fi series Wild Palms did
this for TV, but these pulp novels leave us hungry. As did The
Lawnmower Man, which equated cyber with VR, and we all know how far
along VR has gone (yeah right-- where are my $20 wraparounds god damn
it?!?!). But there is much to be done with cheap A/V technology,
blogging, dynamic programming, noise music, etc. that has yet to be
exhausted.

Topic for another post.