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Jazerus posted:I see a lot of discussion about Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon whenever a Stephenson discussion pops up on SA for whatever reason, but very little about the Baroque Cycle. Personally I don't really enjoy any of his books other than the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver in particular) - do most people not care for them? I personally hold that the Baroque Cycle is the best thing he's ever done (although Anathem either comes very close, or matches it). The biggest impediment to it's popularity is, like others have said, the incredible length of the drat thing. It's not just this either: like a lot of Stephenson's later novels it is very dense, very complex at times, and not that interested in holding your hand to spell things out if you are mixing up characters or missing subtext. It's a series that very, very much rewards two or even three rereads to get everything out of it, and that is a tall order for a series that's 8 books long and god knows what the page count is. Speaking of pages, a couple years ago I got a chance to head to Seattle and visit the science and fiction museum that's in the Seattle Centre there when the original manuscript was still on display. Stephenson wrote the entire thing out on paper first, in longhand, before actually digitizing it for printing. This is the snap I took of it at the time. It was impressive! I dunno what it says about me that I could look at that top page there and place where it actually took place in the whole series.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:23
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Cimber posted:I wouldnt call it 'easy'. Accessable, yes. Easy, no. Oddly enough I've had the most success getting friends/family/coworkers into Stephenson by recommending Anathem over Crypto/Baroque or his earlier works. Yes, the scifi-language thing can trip people up at the start but a lot of it is either very analogous to real words (when it says that they're setting up a Dialog and someone is about to get planed, that's pretty easy to figure out) or can be picked up from context. The actual prose and plot is pretty straightforward (the stuff near the end notwithstanding) and easy to read through for most of the book, compared to the more dense and confusing stuff you can find in some of his other work.
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Mar 10, 2014 05:05
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precision posted:Yeah I read that series three times, shut up, don't judge me! I tend to read really fast, to the extent that I rapidly outpace the number of available new books by authors or in genres I enjoy. Because of that, roughly every year I break open the Baroque Cycle and read through it again just to have a couple months of holding pattern to let more new books I'm interested in accumulate. It helps that A) It's really good, and probably some of my favorite Stephenson and B) Very complex to the degree that it rewards reading over and over again. You get a lot more out of it the second time through when you are familiar with all the characters and the plot, as time consuming as additional reads are.
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Sep 11, 2014 01:14
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