Reviews and Comments

Re-read this in 2022 after nearly 20 years. It felt less cool and more annoying this time. All the characters were trying to be so cool & badass that it was hard to follow what was going on. The first time I read this I felt like the characters were just reticent and mysterious. This go round they just felt thin.

Interesting how physical the conception of cyberspace is in this book. Case makes a big deal of how he's leaving meatspace behind, doesn't care about his body. But every metaphor of cyberspace is physical, 3d - the way it looks, the way you move through it. Our internet is much more disembodying than this cyberspace. Don't even need to "jack in" - just a few minutes scrolling on your phone and you've all but forgotten your body exists.

It's also deeply unclear why cyberspace even exists, what the point and function of it is, especially compared to the internet.

Also, for a world run by corporations, public transit is in remarkably good order.

Like most history books, this focuses on the rich dudes and their stupid fights because that's who we've got records about. But Tuchman doesn't let them be the whole story and so covering their wars isn't an impossibly dull trudge thru dull details of one battle after another - there's context aplenty to understand why they fought and how destructive and useless the fighting was.

Plus there's lots of wonderful detail about day-to-day lives of people from all classes and the institutions and ideas that shaped the times - the church and Christianity, chivalry and serfdom, and the gross and frightening gap between the ideals and reality of the century. The 1300s were a long time ago and it's hard to say whether the differences or similarities are more jarring.

Good deep dives on some of the interesting and influential players of the century - the section on Catherine of Siena is fantastic - she may be a saint, but she's also the gothest bitch who ever lived.

But the real takeaway is one that's hard to avoid in many histories - you have to kill all of the rich or at least take all their stuff, because having deep inequality (and the dramatic power imbalances that leads to) in your society will lead to a lot of suffering, even for the well-off, but especially for the many who are not.

A major source of suffering in the 14th century was the plague, which you might think has nothing to do with the psychopaths and the lucky exploiting the fuck out of everyone they can, but you would be wrong:

There is a school of thought that, historically, pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm.

What about in reality? Historian Peter Turchin has described a strong statistical association between global connectedness, social crises and pandemics throughout history. An example is the second century CE, when the Roman and Chinese empires were at the peak of their wealth and power; the poor in both places were very poor, and the ancient silk routes were enjoying a heyday. Starting in 165CE, the Antonine plagues struck Rome; within a decade plague was devastating China too, and both empires then went into decline. Source.