Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon & more...

What's interesting though, was that I found myself telling people about the book as I read it. I always tried to paint it in a positive picture, as I usually try to see the good in a book while I'm reading it, but I invariably made it sound just horrible. After I had finished it, it struck me that these bad sides really were what stuck out in the book, not any of the strengths.

That being said, due to some of the potential I found in the book, mainly due to the "cool idea" factor, I have picked up Cryptonomicon. Not too thrilled about it though, so it keeps getting bumped behind any number of library books.
I think i would've enjoyed it a lot more if I read it when I was 14 or 15 years old though, as back then I was far more susceptible for this sort of action-packed airport-book.

My girlfriend read Quicksilver and I heard nothing but horrible things throughout those 800 pages. Unsympathetic characters, pretension at the expense of, well, everything etc. I've got an advance of the next one but I don't think I'm going to read that one either.

AVOID

It took me a few goes to finish the Baroque Cycle, but I'm glad I did - the last half of System Of The World is the best part of the series.

Baroque Cycle is perhaps a little too unwieldy to approach any of this quite as well, and it burns a lot of its running time on period charm and just Stephenson showing off.... BUT, it's arguably a more satisfying read. The characterization is certainly his best yet - with Daniel Waterhouse he gives center stage to a protagonist who's not a one-note (Hiro), messiah (Nell), badass (the Shaftoes), superhuman genius (Lawrence), a blatant author stand-in (Randy), or anything else so simple. The hero as an undertalented (or underachieving) coward overshadowed by much greater men of his time has tremendous meat to it, and Stephenson doesn't shy away from exploring it. Over the 2700-odd pages of Baroque you can come to really love Daniel, flaws and all, in a way that goes far beyond what you normally hope to get out of escapist period fiction. He's a nice piece of work. Eliza never comes together quite so well, although you can feel him trying and she certainly beats America Shaftoe. Half-Cock Jack is, of course, pure entertainment and lights up every page, something often quite necessary since, especially in the first half, Baroque has an unfortunate tendency towards long passages of correspondence and courtly intrigue. Overall, though, it's a really satisfying slab of fiction, and I rattle on about it partly because I think it demonstrates well how far he's come along since Snow Crash and Diamond Age (both of which I would recommend!). Really cannot wait to see what comes next.

Sci Fi announced that George Clooney will be part of the creative team bringing the retro cyberpunk book The 'Diamond Age' to the channel. Neal Stephenson will adapt the miniseries from his novel, which I'll basically sum up as the adventures a young girl goes through as she comes into the possession of a talking "smartbook." Clooney and partner Grant Heslov will executive produce.

I really liked Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, but really madly loved The Baroque Cycle because I'm a huge fan of long works of historical fiction involving pirates, scientists, and conspiracies, and it has all three! In that respect, it's the closest thing to The Sot-Weed Factor I've read in years, which is my barometer of the most fun book ever. And I want more. So given that that's where my taste runs, what would ILX recommend?

Diamond Age would lend itself well to television, I think. We'll see.

Maria,

George Clooney has bought the rights to run Diamond Age as a limited series.

Stephenson update on the eve of the release of Anathem

it is a good book. or maybe two of them: the convent part and the space part. i read an advance copy, and i have to say it is a pretty swell release, espesh the early philosophy-lite stuff.

the CD that comes with it is ... i know, by eno (right?) ... but kind of terrible, even unlistenable.

oh, wait David Stutz, a former Microsoft techie now involved in early classical music—and an HBC member—composed and produced the effort, which is being considered for widespread release. "It's a pseudo-liturgical use of mathematics and higher thinking," Stutz says. Actually, to the untrained ear it sounds like the neo-Gregorian chanting that accompanies ritual baby sacrifice in horror films.

i am sorry david stutz. i do not have an untrained ear -- i just think it is ... too schematic or something.

Hardcover £9 at Amazon, paperback £23. Wtf?

I bought Quicksilver the week it came out. I put it aside because I thought once I started it, I wouldn't be able to stop so waited until I had a good long break. I opened it on New Year's Day and put it down after 50 pages due to excessive name-dropping and officiousness. Most disappointing.

[Daniel's] a nice piece of work. Eliza never comes together quite so well

i bought quicksilver over a month ago and it took me about four weeks of stopping and starting to get through the first book. once i got to the jack/eliza sections the going got better. confusion is a far more lively read if maybe a little lighter on ideas but i've been sucked into the series now.

i believe in eliza more than any of the others and her story is the one that gives the books their emotional heft. i can see what you mean, Dr. C, about daniel feeling real but he (has yet) to seem lovable. i always have this terrible clive james article in my head when i think about books like stephenson's and eliza feels like the kind of kate croy + a corpse character he claims can't exist.

Daniel comes into focus in The Confusion, I think, as he sort of realizes his own strengths and limitations. System of the World has him taking stock of these things and doing his best with them. Somewhere in the midst of all that is where he becomes lovable.

Elaborate on the Clive James thing? It sounds interesting but I can't fathom what exactly you're referring to here (corpse character?).

I like Eliza a little more on the second read, but moreso than Jack she seems saddled by the picaresque narrative - she wears so many hats and does so many things, but rather than a super-badass can-do lunkhead she's intended as a plausible human being...she makes sense to me in any given scene/subplot, but taken together it's just so much to bring together into one person.

clive james wrote this article for the new yorker a couple of years ago about detective fiction where he basically claims that the narrative demands of detective fiction make a psychologically complex character unachievable. some harvard real talk about characters acting as types rather than ppl blah blah blah if henry james was a murder mystery. so, i guess my point was that eliza's actions seemed to work structurally and still feel psychologically real.

maybe that's why i didn't really like system of the world since eliza's personality is obscured in favour of daniel's pov.

most prophetic 19th Century novelist evar

clive james wrote this article for the new yorker a couple of years ago about detective fiction where he basically claims that the narrative demands of detective fiction make a psychologically complex character unachievable

I actually used to teach a class in which it was demonstrated that ALL fiction is detective fiction. Good times.

On finishing up Confusion re-read - god, is Eliza's perspective ever dumped in this series! Her plots probably have more page time than either Daniel's or Jack's, through the first three-quarters of The Confusion, and then, what the hell happens to her? The seemingly really crucial moment of her and Jack coming face to face after all this time, and it's a really brief scene told in omniscient third person, maybe favoring Jack if anybody. (In general the ending to The Confusion is rushed, shocker I know, but really after all that gallivanting around the world you'd think he could linger on the actual getting-home as much as he does on the manufacture of watered steel or the primitive nature of the 17th century French credit economy...)

I was at the new B&N in Tupelo on Thursday (2nd day in business...seems like a risky venture in such a lowbrow town) picking up Anathem, and was appalled to see that for mass market publication, the Baroque Cycle is being broken down from three hardcovers to eight paperbacks.

"clive james wrote this article for the new yorker a couple of years ago about detective fiction where he basically claims that the narrative demands of detective fiction make a psychologically complex character unachievable"--i want to read this, link?

bump for the new one. anybody else doing REAMDE?

So far it's...a fun, techy shaggy-dog story that loves guns, maps, and MMORPGs. Stephenson can write a digression better than anybody, and I just read a fascinating 500 word treatise on the street design in Xianmin (?) city. One of his protagonists is a female African refugee, a hipster twice orphaned and raised in Iowa, who makes a living by writing code to represent the movement of magma in the underground of a virtual medieval world.

I loved REAMDE.

I just got it from the library. I tend to read on the subway ride to work, so this is a bit unwieldy! I'm finding it much more engaging than Anathem, however.

Didn't hate it, but have forgotten almost everything about it, as I thought I would. Just, "meh", really. Felt the lack of digressions; also felt like he'd tried to cater to his critics at the expense of the aspects enjoyed by his audience.

it was entertaining but seemed pretty dumb for stephenson. basically a nerdy, 900-page airplane book - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

maybe "dumb" should have been in scare quotes there.

I loved REAMDE and totally annoyed Mr. Jaq by staying up too late reading it with single-minded purpose. And then not being able to tell him anything about why it was so engrossing, because it's really not his kind of thing so attempts were met with ????
¯\(°_0)/¯ ???? kinds of looks.

I've heard his campus comedy novel thing is horrible and I have no real desire to read it

i liked it a lot when i read it in college. it wasn't as funny when i re-read it a few years ago, but it's still good.

700 pages in, and i'm still liking this a lot. there's only been one weird digression (bears and the t/f of menstrual blood attraction) and i agree it's an 'airplane novel' but i'd be v. satisfied to read a lot more of these, if that's what NS wanted to write

i thought anathem was better, despite some long boring unnecessary stretches. reamde was fun and i also burned through it pretty fast but was ultimately pretty silly.

Tried to read Quicksilver last year, not long after I wrote this in the SF poll results thread:

Enjoyed Snow Crash, but the awkwardness of the infodumps stayed with me more than the plot or anything else; thought The Diamond Age a lot better, & it made my ballot. Keep looking at that Baroque Cycle, but I fear it will basically be x,000 pages of me shouting 'NO NO NO WRONG NO NOT LIKE THAT' at the book, since I am ok at Europe 1640-1740 (and I didn't enjoy Cryptonomicon so much. It was ok).
― portrait of velleity (woof), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 8:05 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The prophecy was fulfilled, except I stopped after 200pp. Might still read Anathem one of these days.

yeah, awkwardness of the infodumps otm, also it seems to amplify the sci fi writer's belief that they can predict the future to an annoying degree since the novel is set in the past, all the horses have run so that you get a lot of "there's this obscure thing the british are importing from the indies ... you steep it in water, it makes you feel excited ... they call it ... thé" which is just awful awful awful to read

Nell's father, Bud, is presented as an archetypal cyberpunk character [...] Stephenson attempts to establish The Diamond Age as a "postcyberpunk" book by killing this character early on, while acknowledging the influence of the cyberpunk genre.

cackhanded symbolism or harmless fan service? anyway i couldn't really deal with the overall ridiculous try-hard ideas factory run wild of the diamond age, thought anathem was a lot more simple and grounded in its world building.

xp

right and if he had a cute factoid about the past he would not hesitate to work it in; but in most ways it felt like a really underimagined version of history – weak sense for the language and politics, no feel for place, fixation on (relatively) Big Names. And not really trashy enough to be a romp; quite fancied itself.

I dunno, like I say, it's a period I'm a little too close to, but I couldn't deal with it.

hey, i finished those. i had totally forgotten that.

'anathem' and 'reamde' are basically waiting for me to i. see cheap paperbacks and ii. have a long haul flight

well, no, i'm waiting for that to happen. nothing i do is going to make the books give a shit.

xp no, it's precisely a romp, that's why the things you're complaining about are kind of irrelevant, or let me rephrase that, irrelevant to me. you can boil most of stephenson down to a good old adventure wheeze with part of an encyclopaedia brazenly regurgitated into it. that's not everyone's good time but i'd say if it's worth you bothering with him that has to be more of an attraction than a distraction.

i think anathem is his best book and the context that he makes for himself there - connected to our world but deliberately separated also, really works for him. what's less obvious is that the baroque cycle books are really the same thing - not quite our history, which i think becomes obvious. an not really just an alternative history. it is fiction with strands of our history papier machéd onto it.

reamde is embarrassing garbage half of it felt like tommy friedman travel lit and the rest was unconvincing characters acting unconvincingly but most importantly it wasnt really that fun. its not like jack shaftoe was a particularly well-realized character but he was a lot of fun to spend time with - none of reamde's sunday magazine composites are allowed to be that much of a joy since theyre so busy illustrating some aspect of how the world is now or w/e

lack of fun otm.

I posted my first reaction to Reamde before the part of the book when the characters get to the Pacific NW which is when it all went flat. Would have rather read Cryptonomicon again.

sunday magazine composites are allowed to be that much of a joy since theyre so busy illustrating some aspect of how the world is now or w/e

^^^^ OTM.

Really enjoyed Diamond Age and Snow Crash (though both had problems), but feel no desire at all to attempt these mountain-sized books

Picked up Zodiac for a buck and plowed through it over the last few subway rides. I'd always expected it to be kind of dumb, but it wasically entertaining. The flaws do show pretty clearly (large, ill-defined cast, really awful 'bearded craze-o badass' protagonist (very Spider Jerusalem or King Mob), female characters are a mess, etc. etc.). Can see all kinds of stuff he comes back to in Snow Crash, or problems he tries to fix. Lot of... boating. If you can get past the stuff that just really doesn't make sense it's kind of fun - shorter than his others and structured a bit by being a neo-noir detective deal (that also feels a lot like it's pitching to be an action movie).

so wait what was the deal with enoch root again

There's a whole site dedicated to that I think. The best theory I read was that he was a robot sent back from the future to guide the timeline. The books, taken together, establish something rather different - is it safe to spoil Baroque Cycle at this point?

yeah i figure if ive forgotten once already I can forget again pretty effectively should i ever decide I want to read them

.. again

enoch root is a wizard

Still have trouble eating lobster tomalley ever since reading Zodiac xp

hahaha yeah the lobster thing is one of the definite "will stick with you" parts of the book.

Enoch Root is an alchemist, or alternately a wizard that is easily misinterpreted as an alchemist in the 17th century. He knows how to use the Solomonic heavier-than-normal gold to concoct a resurrection/eternal-life potion which is used successfuly on at least three other characters, shifting the books from science/historical fiction to fantasy I guess. He pokes around in history, meddling with things; his overall project isn't really explained, but his speeches in Cryptonomicon suggest it's a kind of quest to support 'Athena' over 'Ares' in Stephenson's moral universe. This seems to mean forcing the Waterhouses of the world (nebbish, apolitical thinkers) to get their hands dirty and take stands on good versus evil, and forcing the Shaftoes of the world (chaotic-neutral grunts who would, one suspects, be easily deployed by Ares) to some point of redemption, similarly pivoting them from selfish pursuits to morallly-driven quests. I think.

what a weird series of narrative decisions

do you remember his kickstarter, god

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/604023

I'm unsure where I fall on his call for New Optimism

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4955
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dear-science-fiction-writers-stop-being-so-pessimistic-127226686/?no-ist

I think it's more or less meaningless tbh. I don't really think writers have obligations to society in this respect, and that the building of spaceships is more to do with funding/military advantage than it is the mood of writing.

that said, conveying wonder is a meaningful thread of the science-fiction tapestry. Robert Conquest put it well in one his poems:

Imagination that debars
The deeps of time, the endless stars,
May grow too numb to harmonize
Its own rag-doll's two button eyes.

I may be feeling slightly sour towards Stephenson at the moment - have put down Quicksilver and will never pick it up again, a thought that gives me some pleasure.

^ Yes

Reading the (great) analysis of Cryptonomicon in N. Katherine Hayles's (great) My Mother Was A Computer must have given me the Stephenson bug again. Picked up a paperback of Quicksilver for what I realize now must be my third reading of this monstrosity (twice in the hardbacks, which I ditched years ago). They had Reamde also but something in me wanted familiar, labyrinthine comfort food. Enjoying it tremendously, though a lot of that is just from knowing the characters and where this is all going. Kind of amazed I got through it the first time, since so much of it appears to be just period scene-setting and detail for the sake of detail, and the narrative arc is virtually invisible.

Excerpt from his new book's up on his site now
http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/

i genuinely enjoyed the most recent book of his i read about parallel realities despite the fact that the word 'praxis' appeared on a single page of the hardcover copy i was reading six times.

seveneves: a bit better than the gun-nut one but man it was hard going as a novel sometimes. Some nice ideas, though.

about 2/3 of the way through. A lot of the zero-g mechanical engineering stuff could have been edited...but I'll definitely finish it

i thought it was pretty good, definitely could've tightened up the first part which made the second seem a little rushed by contrast. reflected afterwards that i wasn't sure if i would've preferred more of the second part or none of it.

wife finished it last night and loved it - guess I'll start it next

Carly Fiorina is going to get us all killed.

?

JBF parallels

100 pages into 'seveneves' and i've only just discovered it's not called 'seveneyes' (because seveneyes turns up no search results here)

Love Cryptonomicon. the physical comedy in the WWII parts was my favourite part

otm, i love those bits too

Seveneves is a palindrome, I now realise. Still not sure of the relevance of this though.

I need to pick up Seveneves, Reamde was so dumb I just kind of tuned him out for years, which was probably unfair. But the politics of it retroactively ruined Cryptonomicon.

Anyone read Cobweb, one of those books he wrote with his uncle in the 90s? The one about terrorists?

Gotta love a book that starts part 3 with "five thousand years later"

And he's just explained the name, and I totally missed it.

New one Dodge is out next week, but is available on Kindle now. It's back in the Waterhouse universe, post Reamde.

been plowing through Seveneves which i don't really recommend as isolation reading given the emphasis on global catastrophe and dread. also it's not really that good. i just hit the big shift about 2/3 of the way through and i'm really not feeling it, kinda exposes a ton of his weaknesses as a writer as well as his increasingly dodgy politics. this book is shockingly comfortable with eugenics and genetics-as-destiny! there's even a character who invokes a "bell curve" type argument about race and intelligence that just goes totally unchecked by anyone else, as if it's trustworthy scientific information like all the other nerdy shit people spout off in his books. i guess if you're really into orbital mechanics it'd be a blast. but after devouring the Mars Trilogy twice over i'm ready for a lot more self-conscious politics in my books about spacefaring nerds.

I couldn't get past the first sentence of that book, which was laugh-out-loud hilarious and bad.

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

I mean, this is like Daniel Pinkwater-level (and I love Pinkwater and would probably like Stephenson's books more if he wrote like Pinkwater, which he generally does not)

I think what I may end up remembering best about this book is the rather brassy choice on the back cover for one of the two review blurbs to be blatantly plucked from a savage pan:

"Fascinating . . . . Insights into the human character shine like occasional full moons." - Boston Globe

"Still, she couldn't help but flinch as the final few flynks snapped around toward them." (p. 617)

gawwwwd the world-building in this final section is just so stupid, in the most blinkered, weird, nerd-author-can't-perceive-how-strange-he's-become kind of way.

author-can't-perceive-how-strange-he's-become kind of way.

― Doctor Casino, Friday, April 3, 2020 2:44 PM

This can either be the best thing or the worst thing.

worst in this case

watched The Core last night and was struck by how much it basically is a dumb and sometimes fun version of this book

the book is already dumb obv so what i mean is "less nerdy"