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The Baroque Cycle is probably my favourite novel/series but I really did not enjoy Reamde. The stuff with the writers was great, some bits of T'Rain were great, but a lot of the plot to do with the mafia/terrorists just bored me. Also I don't really remember what Csongor added to the story beyond being a mafia infodump and falling in love with Zula for some reason. The Baroque Cycle in terms of narrative structure actually reminded me a bit of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in terms of how it ends up being read. The first book is spent painstakingly setting up all the elements of the setting. Then the rest of the work accelerates to an action-packed conclusion. I guess they're also both historical novels with large sections of them set in England, which helps. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 06:53
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One of the main concepts that makes T'Rain supposedly novel and exciting is that you can effectively exchange real money for game money, and vice versa - and also that you can buy game subscriptions with real-money if you want. Neither of these is a particularly new concept. Guild Wars 2, for example, has a full-blown direct conversation of real money to 'Gems' at a fixed rate, Gems being funny money that can buy things from the Gem store, and then can sell those items for in-game gold, so the only extra step is finding the most convenient unit of conversion from Gem to gold. GW2 doesn't let you withdraw your cash into real life, but other games, like Second Life, have. The idea of buying more game time with in-game gold has also existed for a while now, although it's usually in the form that real money is required to buy the Game-Time Item, which instead of being instantly added to your account can instead be sold for game gold. T'Rain also doesn't really seem to have many quests, although it does have minigames, so it's closest to Eve Online where players are supposed to be building their own home bases and forming networks to mine gold and such. The idea that you also need to pay more to play the 'fun' classes is an odd idea that I don't think I've seen anywhere outside of some Korean MMOs.
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Feb 9, 2015 23:23
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Last I checked, my copy of Anathem has a page right before the story starts saying "You can skip this if you want to figure it all out yourself, but here's what some of the basic terms mean and here's what the two main schools of thought are so you're not totally lost." Just basic stuff like "This is like Earth but it isn't, some people live in scientific compounds called Maths, and there are two main types of these people."
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Jul 23, 2015 01:40
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Anathem is good and if you can tolerate Anathem then you can get into Cryptonomicon and then go deep into Baroque Cycle. I thought Reamde was bad because Stephenson is no stranger to changing reality/science/maths to fit the story he's trying to tell, but Reamde is trying to be set in 'the real world' while featuring the world's worst MMO and the craziest shenanigans. Basically everything Sokolov does, and the whole sequence with Csongor+co on the ocean on a boat, feels like something that fits in better with the world of Snow Crash. I genuinely thought I had almost no problem with suspension of disbelief, and then I read Reamde.
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Jun 2, 2017 07:28
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