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So I was reading some material on Islam and alchemy and I stumbled across the origins of Enoch Root. Essentially the idea is that the prophets Enoch from the Bible, and Idris from the Quran, are both the head of the Hermetic cult Hermes Trismagistus, who was an amalgamation of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god Hermes. So basically Enoch is the Egyptian god Thoth, he is immortal, and he is just spreading knowledge forever being a cool dude.
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Apr 18, 2014 12:18
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That might be the inspiration, but we literally see him use alchemy to rejuvinate.
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Apr 18, 2014 12:39
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Atlas Hugged posted:That might be the inspiration, but we literally see him use alchemy to rejuvinate. Yes, he does it in Cryptonomicon after he is shot in Finland, and we find out that he gave Daniel Waterhouse alchemy during his bladder stone operation where he dies. And he's not alone, there are other immortal alchemissts out there too
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Apr 18, 2014 15:08
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As well as Roger Bacon, John Dee, The Count of St. Germaine.
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Apr 18, 2014 20:22
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Dr. Benway posted:As well as Roger Bacon, John Dee, The Count of St. Germaine. Right. Well, some of them at least, I'm sure in his world some of them are just try-hards.
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Apr 19, 2014 00:48
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Cimber posted:Yes, he does it in Cryptonomicon after he is shot in Finland, and we find out that he gave Daniel Waterhouse alchemy during his bladder stone operation where he dies. And he's not alone, there are other immortal alchemissts out there too Can't forget Newton. Also, I'm at the very end of Quicksilver and it's giving me a headache. The last two sections, Eliza's stolen cross-stitching piece, and Daniel in the Glorious Revolution, drag on for loving ever. I think it might be the only part of the series I don't like.
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Apr 19, 2014 01:54
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The glorious revolution was fine, the coded cross stitch part annoyed the poo poo out of me. That series pingponged between being really awesome to dull as poo poo. For the most part, Eliza's stuff was in the dull as poo poo parts.
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Apr 19, 2014 14:02
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I usually find her interesting because the development of modern economies is fascinating to me. The problem is when she is having adventures and she's just not as good at it as Jack is. And then the whole stitching thing is relating the adventure after the fact which is the most boring way imaginable to tell a story.
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Apr 20, 2014 02:53
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Eliza's letter writing in The Confusion can get really annoying at times. The way they're integrated is kind of clumsy and they take a lot of words to give very little information. And I get that he's just being "realistic" but still, you know.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:45
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precision posted:Eliza's letter writing in The Confusion can get really annoying at times. The way they're integrated is kind of clumsy and they take a lot of words to give very little information. And I get that he's just being "realistic" but still, you know.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:04
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Strange Matter posted:The best correspondence in the Baroque Cycle is between Eliza and Roger Comstock, and I think it takes place in The Confusion but it might be in Odalisque, where Eliza is asking Roger about the english economy as part of a bogus scheme to fund the French invasion of England, and Roger wises up to it and adds a post-script saying "By the way if this is a scheme to fund the French invasion of England, then I'll personally delivery the gold to you crammed up my arse." I missed all of that because reading it was such a chore to read. I ended up skipping many pages until I got to more interesting parts. Really, thats the only parts in NS's works that I ever did that in. Even the Babylonian mythology lessons in Snow Crash I kept up with.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:38
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It's good to know that I wasn't alone in finding REAMDE much weaker than his other works. I think the people saying he wanted to do Tom Clancy are halfway there - I think the objective was to show how an airport thriller would actually play out in the real world e.g. the long discussion of just how hard it would be to land a passenger plane in North America unnoticed, how much bureaucracy spies have to go through etc. but there's a reason that thrillers leave out that stuff - it's not thrilling! Before reading, I would have said that if anyone could make it interesting it would be Stephenson, given some of the stuff in the Baroque Cycle, but I guess it didn't pan out. I also really couldn't connect with Zuleika (sp?), she seemed to be one of those obnoxious characters who make everyone else in the story (including the narrator) sigh and gush over how wonderful they are without any justification - telling not showing, which like someone said is not normally a weakness of Stephenson's. On the other hand, I thought the MMO stuff was fascinating, though I don't know much about Bitcoin so I don't know how relevant that aspect is. I thought his idea of superimposing an MMO onto tedious jobs like watching security footage was amazing. I wonder if it'll turn out to be as prescient as Snow Crash was, which seemed like it pretty accurately came up with the modern or near-future MMO from scratch.
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Apr 21, 2014 20:42
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Gato posted:On the other hand, I thought the MMO stuff was fascinating, though I don't know much about Bitcoin so I don't know how relevant that aspect is. I thought his idea of superimposing an MMO onto tedious jobs like watching security footage was amazing. I wonder if it'll turn out to be as prescient as Snow Crash was, which seemed like it pretty accurately came up with the modern or near-future MMO from scratch. "Gamification" is a growing thing right now - from teachers applying MMO-like progression numbers to grading, to stuff like Fitocracy where you lift weights and level up, to stuff like looking for cancer cures via video game (some of which seem to just be game skins over distributed computing programs and some of which seem to actually involve folding proteins as a puzzle game). e: Just hearing/seeing "Good job! Your number went up!" or "Achievement Unlocked!" is apparently a surprisingly powerful motivator for everything from WoW to primary school projects to powerlifting. I don't know why. Neal's point seems to be that it doesn't really matter what's actually going on behind the game-skin or what the in-game task might be, because if people think they're playing a game and leveling something up then they're happy to do tedious work. I think he's right. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 01:24
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AlphaDog posted:"Gamification" is a growing thing right now - from teachers applying MMO-like progression numbers to grading, to stuff like Fitocracy where you lift weights and level up, to stuff like looking for cancer cures via video game (some of which seem to just be game skins over distributed computing programs and some of which seem to actually involve folding proteins as a puzzle game). because you get an instant and tangible result for your effort. You get that sense of achievement, which is why MMO's have the treadmill they make players run. Its thrilling to get a new level and have access to new powers.
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Apr 22, 2014 01:31
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Yeah, but it works even if you don't get anything tangible out of it. See Fitocracy - you level up, it shows you a "congrats" screen, it takes more points to get to the next level now, nothing else changes, and it's still super motivating.
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Apr 22, 2014 01:33
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It's just as tangible as anything you get in WoW, though. If you strip away the visual element from WoW, the gameplay is just advanced gambling. The gear you have in WoW just effects the probability of being able to get more gear. That's all it does. If you organize your investments poorly, you will get more gear at a slower rate, which will decrease the rate at which your numbers increase. All of the "tangible" rewards you get in WoW are just to maintain the status quo of being able to kill monsters and get loot. By your definition, most games do not provide tangible reward. Which is okay, a lot of board games incorporate elements that could be implented in any number of ways and function in the same logical manner, but are specifically implemented in a way that makes the player fee rewarded for playing. I guess I'm just saying that I'm not surprised at all that if you turn something into a game people will want to do it more than if it's just "boring work", regardless of reward. I mean, most people hate being at their job, where they get paid to perform monotonous tasks, and then they go home and pay to play videos games that are also monotonous tasks. Unlike their bosses, their games shower them with praise for continuing to perform their task well.
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Apr 22, 2014 01:50
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I've started my reread of Confusion and it feels very "eh" right now. Within the first 150 pages, there's hardly any Jack and it's mostly just Eliza trying to get timber. There are some interesting tangents and the discussion of different economic systems in various French towns is neat, but I kind of want to get back to crazy Royal Society experiments and English politics. One thing I've found really interesting is the different portrayals of the various monarchs. The English ones, even James II, seem very down to earth, as far as kings go. William of Orange is kind of a swash-buckling hero in his own right, but le Roi is practically other worldly. It's a really cool contrast to the relatively human British and German monarchs. Louis XIV just seems so much more like a king, or at least how we'd expect a king to act and behave.
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Apr 29, 2014 16:20
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Atlas Hugged posted:One thing I've found really interesting is the different portrayals of the various monarchs. The English ones, even James II, seem very down to earth, as far as kings go. William of Orange is kind of a swash-buckling hero in his own right, but le Roi is practically other worldly. It's a really cool contrast to the relatively human British and German monarchs. Louis XIV just seems so much more like a king, or at least how we'd expect a king to act and behave. Leroy is pretty fantastic. Jack is the only monarch who can compare.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:11
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Finally slogged through the Eliza stuff and am back to enjoying Jack's adventures around the globe. The book immediately picks up once they get their hands on the gold.
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May 6, 2014 10:56
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Atlas Hugged posted:Finally slogged through the Eliza stuff and am back to enjoying Jack's adventures around the globe. The book immediately picks up once they get their hands on the gold. The coinfusion? Yeah, the Jack stuff is fun, the Eliza stuff is important but kind of dull. Just remember, Jack is a huge butt monkey. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButtMonkey
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May 6, 2014 12:46
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Yeah, this is a reread. I know all the poo poo that goes down.
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May 6, 2014 13:48
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I'm listening to an audiobook of Reamde, I read it years ago and it and the baroque cycle are the only ones I have't read twice, and I'm really enjoying the constant unnecessary level of detail he goes into. We've talked a bit in this thread about how it's kind of an odd book. I think the reason it's so weird is because when he's doing this about the past, future, or an alternate dimension it's worldbuilding. We are used to that, lots of books like to populate their worlds with a rich history, there's even that little metacommentary about it in regards to T'Rain. But here he doesn't really need to worldbuild, it takes place in the real world, so it comes across a little more awkwardly. I'm currently in the part where Chongor is talking about Hungarian economics and how he had a job converting software to use their integered currency and it doesn't matter at all to the plot, it's just a little thing the author wanted to talk about for a minute in the middle of the heroine being kidnapped.
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May 6, 2014 15:50
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Nevvy Z posted:I'm listening to an audiobook of Reamde, I read it years ago and it and the baroque cycle are the only ones I have't read twice, and I'm really enjoying the constant unnecessary level of detail he goes into. We've talked a bit in this thread about how it's kind of an odd book. I think the reason it's so weird is because when he's doing this about the past, future, or an alternate dimension it's worldbuilding. We are used to that, lots of books like to populate their worlds with a rich history, there's even that little metacommentary about it in regards to T'Rain. But here he doesn't really need to worldbuild, it takes place in the real world, so it comes across a little more awkwardly. I'm currently in the part where Chongor is talking about Hungarian economics and how he had a job converting software to use their integered currency and it doesn't matter at all to the plot, it's just a little thing the author wanted to talk about for a minute in the middle of the heroine being kidnapped. See, the first half of reamde was ok I guess, he seemed to set the stage for really-neat-poo poo to happen. But he forgot to execute on that and just made the last half to last 3rd a Tom Clancy novel with longer adjectives.
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May 6, 2014 22:42
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Cimber posted:The coinfusion? Yeah, the Jack stuff is fun, the Eliza stuff is important but kind of dull. The King of the Vagabonds is no loving butt monkey, thanks.
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May 8, 2014 17:34
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SnakePlissken posted:The King of the Vagabonds is no loving butt monkey, thanks. Sure he is, he fits the trope fairly well. He gets Eliza, he loses her and gets enslaved. He gets a pile of gold, then loses it. He gets more gold, loses that again. Gets a ship, loses it. Poor guy gets poo poo on through the entire series to the amusement of the readers. But i guess he gets her in the end.
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May 8, 2014 17:47
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No one cares what your TVTrope definition of butt monkey is.
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May 9, 2014 14:11
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Interesting, I just got to the part in The Confusion where Lothar denies that Enoch uses alchemy for longevity. He suggests that while alchemy was a good guess, it misses the mark completely.
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May 19, 2014 16:22
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The truth being Enoch is a Maiàr.
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May 19, 2014 16:38
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He's obviously the Wandering Jew. Or the Count of St-Germain. Or an Immortal from Highlander.
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May 21, 2014 02:49
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I just finished The Confusion. I didn't like it as much as Quicksilver since it didn't have nearly so much Royal Society hijinks but the Bonanza portions were highly entertaining. I'd say the biggest drawback is the over reliance on correspondence as a narrative device. I hate being told what characters were doing long after they've done it. I'd rather just watch the story from their perspective. It made for an interesting twist in Quicksilver before we found out that Eliza had been sleeping with Leroy's intelligence agent, but it just drags forever in the first part of Juncto. Also, I can't imagine how utterly confusing the endings of Bonanza or Juncto would have been if I had read them separately one after the other. On to my reread of The System of the World. This is the one I remember the least about. I know there's a terrorist plot and that's about it.
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May 25, 2014 15:37
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So it seems that Neal at least partly based Randy's adventures in Cryptonomicon on his own: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html In that unimaginably long (at least for a rag like wired, not by Stephenson standards) article he describes the two months he spent scooting around South East Asia, Japan and the Middle East following people who lay fiber optic cable for a living. He explains a business with aims and a model much like Ephite2 and geeks out over the (then cutting edge) technology of telecoms. He then channels his inner Randy by: - facing off against shadowy Post and Telecoms Authorities; - drinking expensive minibar beer in soulless hotels to escape his asian-travel induced malaise; - drinking expensive beer in what is basically the Bomb and Grapnel; - conducting hypothetical Q&A's with his readers (while also giving them GPS meatspace coordinates); and - last but not least, hanging out with an ex-Navy SEAL Vietnam Vet turned dive business entrepreneur and technology nut. It was surreal.
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Jun 3, 2014 14:15
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Has anyone read Some Remarks? I'm thinking of checking out the Audiobook.
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Jun 16, 2014 19:23
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Strange Matter posted:Has anyone read Some Remarks? I'm thinking of checking out the Audiobook. I really enjoyed Some Remarks. It's just a collection of articles and short stories that Neal has written, but it turns out that if you really enjoy some of his other stuff, he's a pretty interesting guy and he has lots of interesting things to say. The article he wrote for Wired that was referenced in the previous post is included and is definitely worth a look, but I remember some other interesting stuff in there as well.
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Jun 17, 2014 16:31
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Coca Koala posted:I really enjoyed Some Remarks. It's just a collection of articles and short stories that Neal has written, but it turns out that if you really enjoy some of his other stuff, he's a pretty interesting guy and he has lots of interesting things to say. The article he wrote for Wired that was referenced in the previous post is included and is definitely worth a look, but I remember some other interesting stuff in there as well. I'm definitely going to check that out, because I love Stephenson, but I think that his story-telling is the worst aspect of his writing. I just want to hear all the cool stuff he's learned and all his cool ideas.
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Jun 18, 2014 04:45
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Strange Matter posted:Has anyone read Some Remarks? I'm thinking of checking out the Audiobook. Some Remarks is worth it just for Mother Earth, Mother Board.
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Jun 19, 2014 05:01
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I agree that Some Remarks is worth it for the Wired article alone. Has it been explained what the deal is with wild animals saving the protagonists in both Cryptonomicon (komodo dragon) and Reamde (mountain lion)? I always assumed that the lion was a reference to Cryptonomicon, but I'm not entirely sure.
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Jun 22, 2014 20:54
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Mzuri posted:I agree that Some Remarks is worth it for the Wired article alone. My take on that is that he sometimes like to show that we are part of a complex and dynamic system. We can forget some of the older systems our systems are based on, so a reminder can pop out every now and again. So sometimes something "random" can happen, but really it's not random, just part of nature. Sometimes a dragon coming out of nowhere to eat your enemy is just what happens when you fight near where there be dragons.
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Jul 8, 2014 17:57
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I just finished reading Snow Crash for the first time. It was both better and worse than I expected. My biggest complaint was that he wrote basically every character exactly the same. They were all wisecracking dorks. Fido was the best character and was totally wasted. As usual though, the ideas were neat. Religion as a memetic virus that was stored in stone tablets is somewhat reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's VALIS, but really goes in a different direction.
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Aug 25, 2014 00:22
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Snak posted:I just finished reading Snow Crash for the first time. It was both better and worse than I expected. My biggest complaint was that he wrote basically every character exactly the same. They were all wisecracking dorks. Sushi K deserved a bigger role. Also the young Mafia guy actually had a pretty great POV introduction, and I was sad that he never really developed beyond that.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:55
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precision posted:Sushi K deserved a bigger role. Also the young Mafia guy actually had a pretty great POV introduction, and I was sad that he never really developed beyond that. Yeah, there were a lot of missed opportunities to make better use of what was already there. It almost feels like two different books, and when you find out that it was originally going to be a cgi graphic novel that sort of falls into place. Basically you can tell it was one of Stephenson's earliest books.
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Aug 25, 2014 02:23
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