"We've arranged to meet here to talk about his latest novel, number 17 over nearly four decades of wildly popular, cinder-block-sized sci-fi thrillers."
Because climate change is a major, global, and increasingly visible threat to our presence on this planet - and Stephenson hadn't made it a theme of any of his books over the last four decades. In the opinion of the article's author, this is significant. Seems reasonable to me.
Of the top of my head, I don't recall any other issue that the zeitgeist even tacitly required a fiction writer to cover. The book will probably be great but what an odd article!
You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it? This toxic attitude is really what I was poking at as I suspected it was the case. That or click bait sensationalism.
There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.
> You mean that the author implies that it was Stephenson's duty to write a book about global warming based on the authors self perceived authority to demand it?
But even if it wasn't what you meant, it certainly is an impression one can pretty legitimately get. Maybe more so from the headline than the whole contents (can't quite recall, already a few days since I read it); but that only shows that the constant clickbaitification of headlines sucks.
I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.
There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.
I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early.
I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler.
When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
I'd broadly agree with your comments about Diaspora. The characterisation isn't great, but what makes it so impressive to me is the colossal (time, space) scale of the thing.
I can't decide if I need a browser extension that just deletes the word "finally" from headlines, as it never adds anything but unnecessary drama or actively blocks the whole article from my view on the basis that it's probably clickbait bullshit.
Has anyone written an AI yet that can read the article and tell you that before you waste your time?
Don't forget about the word "quietly". Usually trying to insinuate something shady is happening but always leaves me thinking: "Would I really expect them to broadcast this loudly?"
I have you covered! I developed this half-joking half serious extension to remove the word 'actually', but it already expanded to include words like 'literally. (each word is configurable individually)
'Finally' denotes op'ed, subjectivity by author of Wired article. It signals those who care about global warming to click, while those who don't care are more inclined to skip. Ie. it has a use.
While you're at it you can do the same with questionmark / questions, cause the answer is probably "No.".
HN does use software to (de)prioritize certain titles and URLs.
"finally" is very much appropriate. No need for petitions. The article quotes Stephenson: “I'm a guy who found a niche writing fiction about technical and scientific topics. It seemed odd to me that I should get to the end of my career and never take a whack at it.”
Because for many people (this author included), this topic is akin to a religion, complete with holy literature (sci-fi) and a high priesthood (scientists and sci-fi writers.) So when a "god" like Stephenson (the word god is used in the article to describe him) doesn't preach about the imminent End of Times, everyone gets nervous.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:
But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.
And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”
I followed up. About what?
Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.
Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”
The author was talking to his son, who was feeling unmotivated about going to college because the world was ending soon. The author's reply was the section I quoted.
Within this context it reads as a father instructing his child about the importance of learning so they can recognise opportunity when it arises. Is it culty because of the dome?
The exact same conversation could be had at an obscure religious cult ranch in the middle of the desert. Remember, these people are completely serious.
“Dad, I’m depressed and unmotivated about going to college.”
“Son, the world is ending in the near future in sci-fi fashion and I want to make sure you survive in the dome.”
No matter how bad climate change is, I can assure you, we won’t be living in a dome to escape the hellscape in 20 years. People who believe this are exhibiting cultish behavior.
The "fi" part in "sci-fi" stands for "fiction". While it could be said that we're not sure about precisely how the world is ending, we can certainly make some projections. Making sure your children can survive even a pessimistic projection isn't necessarily cultish behaviour, especially if it's based on evidence-based modeling (whether or not this specific example is I cannot say, I'm not terribly interested in finding out what fresh hell the future has planned for me. Reality as it is is bad enough).
Do you have anything to support the assurance? If we have to spend whole lives indoors with A/C and CO2 scrubbers that is practically as bad as the domes.
(It is likely that elevated CO2 levels will harm human cognition, it isn't widely known probably because it's too depressing. There are counterarguments like "oh that happens only above 1000ppm we're far from that" but they're based only on short-term experiments.)
Do you honestly believe that everyone will spend their lives inside an air conditioned room and with CO2 scrubbers?
My assurance is reality. Reality isn’t a science fiction novel.
Interestingly you only get these absurd predictions from a very narrow group of people, which lines up quite well with what my original comment said. It’s a religious movement, not an accurate assessment of climate science.
The reality is that worldwide CO2 production isn't going to decline anytime soon. What's absurd about predicting that? And if it's only agenda of narrow group of people, where are the majority voices supported by research?
Because absolutely no climate science says that increased CO2 in the next twenty years will lead to humans living entirely inside with AC’d units? Again, this is basic science.
The real effects of climate change will be difficult enough. We don’t need to waste energy on inventing fantastical ones.
Combine this with wetbulb temperatures which force everyone to stay in airconditioned indoors for weeks or months in large part of world (this too is supported by climate science). Fantasies? I hope so but expect the worst.
You’ve moved the goal posts about five times now. First it was our entire lives indoors. Now it’s just a few months a year in some parts of the world. First it was in the next 20 years. Now it’s by the end of the century.
A single study that predicts brain damage from CO2 “by the end of the century” is pure speculation at this point. The link you shared even says it’s still very unclear what the effect is.
I’ll say it again; the actual science says that climate change is a serious problem. It doesn’t say that we are headed into the apocalypse in the next decade.
Ok sorry I was unclear. In 20 years it could be just a few months indoors, and by end of century all the time.
The actual paper linked from the article links to some research like: "systematic relationships were found between most of the cognitive function scores and CO2 concentration, including from 550–945 ppm". Thinking that in 20 years we could go over 550ppm outside certainly isn't a fantasy, or?
See also the use of the word "now", which seems to imply "Oh God, after everything else, what are they up to now?" as in (from the Daily Mail) "Now police blame victims for being burgled!"
Snowcrash is where i would begin (where i did begin). It was some years ago now so i don't really remember why I hated cryptonomicon but I did, iirc, the plot jumped around all the time, I couldn't care about the protagonists. Am I remembering correctly that the whole plot ultimately revolved around a large stash of gold?
Cryptonomicon is a fictionalized telling of how Alan Turing cracked the enigma code and how that led to the future of computing.
The timeline does jump around between world war 2 and "modern" times. There was a large stash of gold, but I don't remember that being particularly important in the grand scheme of the book.
I love science fiction and read a lot of it, but I just couldn't get through Cryptonomicon, I just have the feeling that after a lot of pages nothing is really happening. Should I just keep reading until it gets better then? The start seems super slow with 0 interesting developments.
IMO Cryptonomicon is one of those novels where the journey is the real destination. If you don't enjoy the texture of his prose as it meanders through weird character episodes and technical exposition, there isn't some huge payoff at the end that will make it all worth it. That's pretty much all the book is.
If you're looking for something built around a more traditional plot, Anathem or Reamde might suit you better. People also like Diamond Age, but I think it falls down at the end--IMO at that point he still hadn't figured out how to write endings.
I'm not convinced it's the subject matter and/or length turning people off Cryptonomicon. For all its weird made up words and spec-fic wankery, the fact is that Anathem has a pretty standard YA-esque protagonist and a relatively coherent plot that's paced well (IMO) and carries its momentum through to the end. This makes it read more like a mainstream page-turner than a lot of his other works, the most prominent of which is probably Cryptonomicon. I mentioned Reamde for the same reason, though as you say it's a lot more grounded in the world we know.
It seems like at least one child of my comment agrees with me. It's interesting (and kind of neat) how much fans of Stephenson seem to disagree on the merits of his individual works.
I liked both Cryptonomicon and Anathem once I actually punctured through the wall of frankly gratuitous language, but I fell asleep multiple times on the way. Recommending it to other folks is something I wouldn't do I think, as I don't feel the books were very well written.
I really like all of his novels from Cryptonomicon onwards - apart from Reamde - I did like Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, probably because it wrapped up the Baroque Cycle in such a neat way.
Diamond Age is definitely my favorite, despite the shortcomings at the end. Having said that, "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" is the only book of his that I've struggled to keep reading.
Fall is AFAICR the only one of his that I've at least half regretted reading all the way through, and this from an until recently compulsive -- in the sense that I always finished every book I hadn't given up on already in the first few (tens) of pages -- reader. (Fortunately, I seem to have outgrown that recently.) Anyway, it was weird how bad I found it, given how much I liked the previous Dodge book (especially the part with the kids driving through the "Facebooked" West). [EDIT:] Cribbing from sibling comments: Reamde ? [/EDIT]
In online discussions, I've seen Seveneves getting a lot of flack, which I also found peculiar because IMO it was great; pretty much a return to Snowcrash form but with the added bonus of a few decades experience (so he knows how to write endings etc :-) ).
But after Fall, my second-least-favourite of his may be Diamond Age. Can't recall for sure why, been ages since I read it. [EDIT:] Not that I thought it was bad, I think. Just the least good of many many good books. Apart, that is, from Fall. [/EDIT]
I think one of the points people like Stephenson is his sometimes slow, semi rambling erudition on a matter of things that a particular mindset finds an entirely thrilling. Most of his good stuff is about the world and the books are just lenses into queer and interesting things.
Similar writers - Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams.
This slow ponderous style with brief moments of impactful plotting might not suit all.
It’s probably the longest book I’ve read that I didn’t particularly care for. What kept me going was the intermittent amusing cryptographic or engineering digression.
You can tell which places Stephenson visited during his research, because he’ll describe them in great detail, like the business district of some city in the Philippines.
It gets a little better as it goes along, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it.
Honestly, and I say this as someone who loved the book, it doesn't get 'better'. If you don't like the prose and structure of the first 50-100 pages you probably won't like the book.
Thanx, that's all I needed to know. I have sometimes pushed through hundreds of pages because I knew something was coming, but if nothing is coming I really prefer to spend my time otherwise :)
I was going to offer the same advice (and generalize it to anyone who writes big books, whether its the count of monte cristo or modern sci-fi epics) people who write long books, and therefore people who read them, generally aren't in it for the destination, but the journey.
Having said that, there are some authors mentioned in this thread that didnt immediately click with me that are now my favorites. There's usually at least one (relatively) short book that should give you an entryway to try them out, without the full commitment.
I don't mind long books, I wrestled through the first 400-500 pages of Atlas Shrugged and couldn't put it down after that anymore. Also, the entire Foundation trilogy went down quite well. I can appreciate a journey, but perhaps not all journeys.
It's a good tip to try short books of writers first, I'll do that. Although generally I let myself be guided by reviews, and it works for me in general, Cryptonomicon is one of the outliers.
I’m a fan of stephenson, but honestly i’d skip it. Its not one of his best to the degree that you should force yourself to read it—if the beginning doesn’t grab you, it’s not going to later as it doesn’t change much throughout the book, or the surrounding other three books.
If you haven’t read snowcrash, grab that, it’s a fanatastic book.
The gold is intended to back the cryptocurrency that the modern-era folks are trying to get off the ground. An unassailable gold backing for the currency, plus the data haven project, was supposed to prevent genocide by making fascism more difficult to implement. I think.
I’d also recommend “Mother Earth Mother Board”, an essay of his also in Wired about the laying of an intercontinental fiber cable. Hugely enjoyable and a good peek into his writing.
My intro to his work was his essay: In the Beginning... Was the Command Line [1]. Back then I didn't read Snow Crash; a couple of years ago I did. Loved it! I haven't been able to get through Cryptonomicon. I did like Diamond Age, but as another commentor said it falls off at the end.
Written by someone with bad attention span when it comes to reading fiction (easily bored/distracted).
Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books of all time, but as Stephenson's success has risen so has lack of editing.
He's the one author that I think would really benefit from releasing both a "mainstream" copy of his works and then a "director's cut" of the same story.
I agree with this. Snow Crash and Zodiak were such taut novels, Diamond Age was a little lush, and Cryptonomicon was a slog for me and then I tuned out.
My favorite remains Zodiak -- I read it over and over as a teenager and when I moved to Dorchester, MA years later had deja vu when I realized how well he captured the Boston area. I used to do stealth rides on my bicycle around Boston late at night because, yes, the cabbies will try to kill you. Fun times.
Seveneves was alright, but Anathem, fuck me do I have better things to do. Anathem was the first time I felt a complete disrespect for my time from Stephenson.
Anathem is definitely my favorite novel of his, too.
Seveneves: just stop after act 2. Pretend the last couple hundred pages of the book don’t exist.
Fall: this is the first Stephenson book that I ended up skimming. I could not bring myself to care about the endless retelling of Paradise Lost. And yes, I’ve even read The Big U. It was better than Fall, imo.
Snow crash or seveneves are more accessible imo. That’s where I would start. No doubt cryptonomicon is an amazing piece of work, but it’s a beast to get through. Not as much of a beast as Anathem, but still tough.
Anathem is my favorite book of his, but I definitely had to pause and reread and just decide not to fully absorb the detailed architectural descriptions of the maths/monasteries in the early pages.
I lost count of how many times I started and stopped anathem before finally pushing through to finish it. It has to be at least 5 or 6. It’s worth it imo, but I agree there are entire sections that I will never fully understand.
I even enjoy his lesser novels and have read all of his novels multiple times. So, I've been looking forward to this one and just finished my second re-read of Fall, which has grown on me since it came out; probably one of his least accessible novels. Half of the fun in that one is all the back references to his past novels (e.g. Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, REAMDE) with characters and events being referred to.
So, maybe don't start with that one. Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon are probably all good ones to start with and all still very much on topic despite being a few decades old now.
English is not my primary language and I had a really hard time getting into the Cryptonomicon. Started three times over 20 years and didn't make it over the first 100 pages the first two times.
Having now finished it I can say that it is definitely worth it, but I would recommend to start with something simpler, e.g. Diamond Age.
I find him frustratingly variable. I enjoyed Snow Crash and reamde and some of his non-fiction work. A lot of the rest (including Cryptonomicon and Seveneves) seems over-long, over-digressive, and annoyingly inconclusive. I don't know why - he's clearly an intelligent and thoughtful author.
If you want a book where several things are happening on every single page, Reamde is for you.
People treat it like it is not his style because it is an absolute romp. It sends up every action/sf trope in one book. Russians, crashing a business jet, plasma cutter, off-grid extremists, you name it, it's in there.
From the article: "From 1999 to 2006, Stephenson worked as a member of the technical staff at Jeff Bezos' private space rocket company, Blue Origin. A three-year stint at Intellectual Ventures Lab, the R&D arm of the science investment firm started by Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold, involved some climate-change-related research."
The Blue Origin work seems pretty logical.
The Intellectual Ventures stint/k proves that we all have a price for rose colored blinders.
Yeah, before he realised and changed his mind, it probably seemed like just too good a deal financially to pass up. Perhaps with some element of "Maybe I can influence it for the better", which he then gave up on.
I am thrilled to learn that the title of the book is about the absolute disaster inherent in typical geo-engineering ideas.
But nobody talks about how, as the oceans acidify, the basis for the whole, worldwide ocean ecosystem is teetering at the edge of collapse, and that, what, two billion? people today depend on that ocean ecosystem for their protein. (Calories are cheap. Protein is dear.) Wars will happen over access to the scraps.
Meanwhile, as extremely densely populated parts of the planet become uninhabitable -- first, the crops will fail -- the people who live there will not sit down and die. They will move, in their millions. (It is already happening, across and around the Mediterranean.) The places they will try to go are already populated, and crops there will be in trouble, too. There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable. But the refugees will not be going there, and will not be equipped to make the places livable. They will head for civilization, in places that do not want them.
Political pressure to try to keep them out will put right-wing extremists in power, whose solutions will resemble what were called "final". Once in power, they will start wars, as they do. Will those rapidly become nuclear wars?
Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.
Anyway, if civilization collapses, fossil fuel production and, thus, consumption, will plummet, and atmospheric CO2 concentration might start down, provided we have not got a positive-feedback cycle already locked in, as the tundra melts and decays.
While not agreeing or disagreeing with your post, this part warranted I reply:
There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable.
This isn't really so for most, if not all crops.
The problem isn't the cold, it is growing season length, and sunlight, and shade.
I'm in southern Quebec, 300km from New York state. Some years, certain crops fail to reach maturity, as the growing season is shortened by too much rain / cloud cover. EG, old human editable yellow corn has a longer growing season than newer 2-colour/"peaches-n-cream" varieties, and sometimes never matures.
And in the spring/fall, the sun, even where I live, does not get far about the horizon, even at peak.
Many crops also cannot handle 24 hours of sun! Plants literally need rest cycles too.
So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.
Peat moss, and other such plants, do not need to produce large fruits or nuts to survive. And of course, our crops are picked for making the largest fruit/nuts, so require more time to be usable.
Stepping back from this issue, one thing of note.
Massive amounts of cropland is not used in southern Quebec, and other regions of Canada. Sometimes, it is not profitable to farm, and you can find lots of land sitting fallow.
Canada could easily double or even triple its crop output if food was more expensive.
I don't know how this applies to the rest of the world, but I do know that the EU does pay some farmers not to farm.
Outside of the economic realities, there is the fact that sometimes more tha 50% of Canada's wheat crop rots in silos.
This may seem horrifying, but is logical and sensible. Growing crops is not under our full control. Pests, drought, too much / not enough sun, means that there are bumper, and poor crop years.
You always want enough, or in the bad years people could starve.
Which leads to why the EU pays people not to farm, yet keep farmland. If conditions change, say some regions are at war, or have economic breakdowns, this fallow land comes into use, else again, we starve.
Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.
> The problem isn't the cold, it is growing season length, and sunlight, and shade.
> So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.
> Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.
Oh, surely it will help to at least some extent? Wheat, and even more so barley and rye, have been grown up to at least the middle of Finland and northern(ish) Sweden for hundreds of years. And those were the old not-so-refined varieties.
No, because you are describing folks in shitty parts of the world. They will die just fine in regular wars and just because they aren't nuclear or the world will not end because we had them doesn't make it any less tragic.
> Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.
Raise your children better than you were, because it won't be you dealing with the problems.
>Disaster number one: You can practically smell the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 massing microscopically. This was back in late July, just after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said that everyone, vaccinated or no, should go back to wearing masks inside.
Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it. Such worries among a large crowd of mostly young people such paranoia despite nearly complete vaccination? What was the goddam point of such heavy handed vaccine mandates in the first place if even after these vaccines that presumably work well to dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness, people should still scurry back behind all the health measures? At this point it's like going into panic mode over people possibly transmitting the ordinary annual flu to each other if the vaccines reduce the chances of death as much as is clinically claimed.
> Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it.
It's very obvious the writer is just acknowledging the odd circumstances of the meeting with Stephenson. This isn't Reuters -- the writer is setting the scene for the reader and adding personal perspective. He doesn't dwell on the topic.
Your response about Covid is ironically exactly what you're accusing the author of, an off-topic narrative wedged into a discussion about something else.
People don’t understand risks or logarithms. The risk of a given consequence can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on characteristics but people want the same response. The risk can vary by time by orders of magnitude but people want the same restrictions.
Ultimately people can’t accept nonzero risk and conversely think that it is possible to eliminate all risk of something (at the same time happily accepting risks thousands of times higher)
This. And also the west seems completely obsessed with safety, it trumps any other value now. But safety has a massive price, but that doesn’t matter any more.
I’m also guessing a large part of how politicians can make themselves seem useful is making people safe. There’s not much else for them to do any more everyone is so well off.
Look at how authoritarian the lockdowns in Australia, China, and various other Asian countries were. It worked, unlike the weak lockdowns in Europe. Look at how authoritarian governments are, like Russia, Turkey, any country in Middle East, Belarus, Myanmar. Safety (for the ruling tribe) sells, as does security theater (post 9/11), but its not unique to West. Nor is it useless (if it were, it would simply not exist).
Is it interesting to note that some authoritarian governements (I have Russia in mind) have been less able (willing ?) to contain the epidemic using "harsh measure" than more "liberal" countries ?
What makes you think Australia's lockdown worked, yet? They've not as far as I'm aware opened up and demonstrated they're free of SARS-CoV-2. And since the current vaccines aren't reducing spread of the virus (enough), what do you think is their end goal? Keep the country locked up from the outside world forever?
Its just a device. One of the things that journalists (and particularly those who practice what used to be known as "magazine journalism") are taught is to "hang" their article on some current event or situation. The intention is to give the reader a feeling of topicality that links the content (a book launch in this case) to their present situation.
(Also your comments about vaccination and "panic" are bs.)
I can think of no better word to describe the notion of otherwise healthy, not extremely elderly people being asked to go back to masks even inside DESPITE being vaccinated because of a new variant of the virus emerging despite it's having been shown to not be notably worse in terms of symptoms. Such things beg the obvious question: If the vaccines work, then why be asked to wear a mask again if nearly everyone's vaccinated? Or why mandate them even in preference to previous, recent infection if they work so weakly that the masks are requested again?
> If the vaccines work, then why be asked to wear a mask again if nearly everyone's vaccinated?
Very few nations (including the US) have vaccination rates that are high enough to generate herd immunity.
Vaccines do prevent a vaccinated person from becoming seriously ill if they become infected. Vaccines don't do much to prevent a vaccinated person from becoming infected and, once infected, infecting others.
Masks do help to prevent an infected wearer from infecting others. Surgical masks have low effectiveness at preventing the wearer from becoming infected. That's why its important that enough people wear masks: we each protect each-other.
Individualistic societies seem to be having a particular problem with these concepts.
> Individualistic societies seem to be having a particular problem with these concepts.
Above all, the more individualistic individuals even within those societies.
To spell it out: Even in America -- which for all I know you, andyjohnson0, could well be from just like I'm pretty sure helloworld11 is -- there are sensible people like you.
But yes, in those societies three are more of the helloworld11-style "Rah, rah, mah freedum!" ones than elsewhere.
People are dying or getting sick and it impacts their lives. Nothing forced about that narrative. If it bothers you to read about it, you could probably hold off on reading new things for five years. Perhaps things will have changed then.
