{"id":11781,"date":"2012-04-21T12:14:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-21T12:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2012\/04\/21\/neal-stephenson-is-a-very-very\/"},"modified":"2012-04-21T12:14:26","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T12:14:26","slug":"neal-stephenson-is-a-very-very","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/21\/neal-stephenson-is-a-very-very\/","title":{"rendered":"Neal Stephenson is a very, very important person, according to him."},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre&#8217;s ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a &#8220;pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist,&#8221; and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to the dystopian trend, he added &#8220;if every depiction of the future is grim&#8230;then it doesn&#8217;t create much of an incentive to building the future.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, Stephenson is trying to make a literary course correction&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, since he ruined it for everybody, I suppose it would be his job to fix it too.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine being that influential.  What a burden!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/blog\/editors\/27775\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Just to be clear, this is a cynical blog post pointing out that NS&#8217;s lack of personal humility is annoying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre&#8217;s ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a &#8220;pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist,&#8221; and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/21\/neal-stephenson-is-a-very-very\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Neal Stephenson is a very, very important person, according to him.<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[3983],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-341","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}