Doug’s answer to “Is it just me, or does one of the characters seem profoundly like a current real-life Astronomer wh…” > Likes and Comments
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And yet the two warring space cultures are "Red" and "Blue". It is left as an exercise for the reader to discern any meaning in the fact that the Reds are "bad" and the Blues are "good".
A fair point, but by that point in the book the factions' conflict is so clearly rooted in the earlier part of the story that it does not admit any sort of real world political allegory... unless, I suppose, you really want it to. And Stephenson does go to great lengths to avoid writing that sort of thing. His novels after 9/11 were set in the late 17th early 18th century and on another planet respectively.
I agree Doug, that the labels probably don't refer to anything in the current political landscape. Still, Red-Blue is an interesting choice.
Reminded me more of Communist Russia vs West
Yeah, I worried at one point that Stephenson meant Julia to be a Hillary Clinton clone, which I felt would have taken the book into seriously weird real-person-fanfic territory with the creepy obsessive relationship between her and the Malala Yousafzai clone. But once Julia becomes more clearly villainous and unhinged, she no longer really resembles even the right-wing caricatures of "Crooked Hillary".
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Fred
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Mar 29, 2016 05:23PM
And yet the two warring space cultures are "Red" and "Blue". It is left as an exercise for the reader to discern any meaning in the fact that the Reds are "bad" and the Blues are "good".
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A fair point, but by that point in the book the factions' conflict is so clearly rooted in the earlier part of the story that it does not admit any sort of real world political allegory... unless, I suppose, you really want it to. And Stephenson does go to great lengths to avoid writing that sort of thing. His novels after 9/11 were set in the late 17th early 18th century and on another planet respectively.
I agree Doug, that the labels probably don't refer to anything in the current political landscape. Still, Red-Blue is an interesting choice.
Reminded me more of Communist Russia vs West
Yeah, I worried at one point that Stephenson meant Julia to be a Hillary Clinton clone, which I felt would have taken the book into seriously weird real-person-fanfic territory with the creepy obsessive relationship between her and the Malala Yousafzai clone. But once Julia becomes more clearly villainous and unhinged, she no longer really resembles even the right-wing caricatures of "Crooked Hillary".
