I checked this book out of the library for my boyfriend, but I renewed it when he was done because I was curious, and then I grabbed it on my way out the door one day when I wasn’t sure what I was in the mood to read: I’d recently finished reading a novel and I’d gotten caught up on issues of The New Yorker, and a book of essays and short fiction seemed just right.
Which it sort of was. Some of these pieces are readable and fun, like the first essay, Arsebestos, about the dangers of sitting and the appeal of treadmill desks (though I actually liked Susan Orlean’s recent New Yorker piece about this more), or like Stephenson’s 2003 foreword to David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More (in which Stephenson considers DFW as a product of the Midwestern American College Town). The short stories (Spew (from 1994) and The Great Simoleon Caper (from 1995)) are somewhere between fun and clunky: I liked the latter, with its electronic currencies and crypto-anarchists, more, but it felt more like a set-piece with a moral than I would have liked.
My favorite pieces in this book were the excerpts from a 1994 essay called In the Kingdom of Mao Bell and the long 1996 piece called Mother Earth, Mother Board. Both are at least partly about physical infrastructure (In the Kingdom of Mao Bell is about telecoms in China, and Mother Earth, Mother Board is about the FLAG fiber-optic cable) and both have bits of travel writing in them, which is more the kind of nonfiction I want to read than some of the other nonfiction in this book (like Locked In, about path-dependence and space exploration, or like the essay about Leibniz and Newton). I love this description, from the Mao Bell essay, of Shenzen:
On every block you see an entrepreneur sitting at a sidewalk card table with one or two telephones, jury-rigged by wires strung down an alley, up the side of a building, and into a window. There is a phone book, a price chart, and a cigar box full of cash (in Shenzen, always Hong Kong dollars). […]
All of the phone wiring is kludgey. It looks like everyone went down to Radio Shack and bought reels of phone wire and began stringing it around, across roofs, in windows, over alleyways. Hundreds of wires explode from junction boxes on the sides of apartments, exposed to the elements. (108)
Some bits of “Mother Earth, Mother Board” are kind of a slog, and some bits were familiar to me from Andrew Blum’s Tubes (which I wrote about here), but it does a good job of combining the history of submarine cable laying and the technology around it with the current practices of submarine cable laying in 1996, and it includes this totally excellent sentence:
In the hopes of learning more about the modern business of really, really long wires, we spent much of the summer of 1996 in pursuits such as: being arrested by toothless, shotgun-toting Egyptian cops; getting pushed around by a drunken smuggler queen on a Thai train; vaulting over gates to take emergency shits in isolated fields; being kept awake by groovy Eurotrash backpackers singing songs; blowing Saharan dust out of cameras; scraping equatorial mold out of fountain pens; stuffing faded banknotes into the palms of Egyptian service-industry professionals; trying to persuade non-English-speaking taxi drivers that we really did want to visit the beach even though it was pouring rain; and laundering clothes by showering in them. (125)
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