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Zodiac is interesting, quick, frenetic (for Stephenson) fun. Anathem is basically the slowest, nerdiest, most tangential Stephenson book ever (I have not yet read the Baroque Cycle, its on my plan for this spring). So Anathem is also awesome. A lot of Stephenson's books feel like he thought a topic was cool, studied it really in-depth for like a year, and then just had to tell everyone about it, so wrote a book about it.
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Mar 9, 2014 05:47
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Coca Koala posted:Honestly, I feel like Cryptonomicon is one of the easiest of his books to read. It's long, but the plot never goes totally off the rails like it does in Snowcrash or The Big U, and the infodumps are generally short enough that you're never mired in them. As long as you're willing to take the mathmatical notation that pops up occasionally at face value (and truly, the math isn't that hard; he takes the sum of a series at one point, but the reasoning is pretty well explained in prose and you can easily follow along with the idea behind what's happening) and you can keep the characters straight in your head (much easier in Crypto, when each character has not only their own distinct voice, but also a distinct narration style that Stephenson uses during their segments), there's not really anything that's confusing or tricky about it. So yes, I think Cryptonomicon is one of his easiest books because "getting it" isn't critical to enjoying it.
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Mar 11, 2014 05:57
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Cimber posted:Reamde I got....nuttin. No real deep themes. It felt more like a rather vapid Tom Clancy book rather than a NS book.
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Mar 13, 2014 16:18
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redshirt posted:So, Incanters are real? Also, I feel like we got close to confirmation that Jaad is over a thousand years old, but not quite. Does it seem logical to assume all the Thousanders were actually over 1000 years old and capable of "magic"? Thus the aliens were right to be quite afraid of them? . I think its interesting that while the focus is on the Incanters, Jad working through multiple timelines simultaneously wouldn't mean much without the Rhetor ability to basically "change" the past. Jad can change events near him, but the Rhetors are needed to create a single timeline for Arbre.
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Mar 14, 2014 16:07
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Snak posted:It's been awhile since I read it, but I was pretty sure the both Incantors and Rhetor's were basically just conceptual contructs used to try to describe or understand this multi-narrative multi-verse. If reality exists as a configuration space that inherently interacts with itself, and narrative realities are simply lines of continuity through this space AND it's possible to "change tracks" so to speak when your narrative intersects another, you don't need anything else. No one needs to "create a single timeline for Arbre" because all they did was continue to shift into a narrative where things more or less worked out. From the perspective of people who are in positions to witness the effects of this it can seem like all kinds of other crazy things happen, like changing the past etc. This is partially because it is also established that your unconsious mind actually spans parallel narratives. This seems like a throwaway bullshit pseudoscience line when it's first mentioned, but it ends up being a key idea in how the multiverse operates and how "changes" like Fraa Jaad performs effect other people. This is also how Thousanders are able to "change" anything at all: The workings of the mind span parallel realities unconsciously, Thousanders just learned to become conscious of this and can essentially unify their consciousness across all similar realities. Since they are using information from other realities to inform their actions, they are almost certainly triggering deja vu type responses in other people who's unconscious minds are recognizing things that their other-reality conscious minds observed. That implies that there is some mechanism where people are pulling information from other Narratives and using in them in different ones. Jad does it when he puts in the code, and Lodoghir is strongly implied to be able to do it by being aware of other Narratives. Jad also seems to more "change tracks" while Lodoghir is aware of other tracks but not "switch" between them, if that makes any sense. Though again, I haven't re-read it recently. edit: Remember when Erasmus says that nobody would believe a block of ice inside a sun unless there was an explanation for it being there? I think that's what essentially happened. The Valer attack is a good enough reason that people go along with it, but what actually tipped the scales over for Arbre was the combo of the Everything Killers and the extra information, accomplished by Jad and Jad. But neither of those things "happened", but there was a compelling explanation created. I don't necessarily think that they just happened in another Narrative that we weren't privy to; if Jad essentially picked Narratives from all the options, why does Lodoghir state there's a reason that Jad must be dead in the current Narrative they are in? Surely, if Jad could just keep picking up Narrative options, he could work out one where everything works at once? I think the 3rd storyline being a combination of two ended ones is indicative of outside work, is all. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 21:54
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WarLocke posted:This is outright stated earlier in the book as the reason for/nature of consciousness. The only difference is that Fraa Jad (and presumably other Thousanders) have developed a praxis/method for consciously accessing/manipulating different Narratives as opposed to everyone else who simply do it unconsciously. Also, Jad's death being necessary, per Lodoghir, makes sense if someone had to detonate the EKs, and there was no way for the EKs to detonate without Jad's presense, because only he could know the password. That means that, again according to Lodoghir, the EKs going off is a necessary condition of the ending, which at least means that Jad was triyng to simultaneously set off the EKs and not set off the EKs. So essentially, what happened is what we saw. The EKs went off and didn't go off, simultaneously. This doesn't make sense, so instead, an explanation that resulted in a continuing Narrative happened/was created/exists. Since the Rhetors were said to be able to change the past, this makes sense as something they "did." I'm not set on any of these conclusions, more just musing, but I think I'm on an okay track.
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Mar 15, 2014 22:20
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Cimber posted:That actually sounds rather cool. Huh. And I actually felt the opposite about Eve and T'Rain. I thought that he'd clearly never done much of an indepth research into Eve but his exposure to MMOs was something like WOW, since so much of what he was talking about as novel and new about T'Rain was already done in Eve, or at least laid the groundwork for it.
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Mar 21, 2014 18:29
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Inspector 34 posted:None of that happened in Anathem. Are you talking about Diamond Age? I haven't read it in a long, long time so I'm just assuming these characters and settings you're talking about are somehow relevant to the conversation. I'm pretty sure he's talking about Star Trek for some reason, but only because I was as confused as you at first.
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Dec 27, 2014 14:30
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Atlas Hugged posted:I found this to be worse in the last third than throughout the rest of the book since we're usually seeing the orbital dynamics in motion while the scientists reflect on how and why it's working and why it was so difficult to accomplish. With Stephenson you sort of have to accept a certain amount of lecturing since going off on tangents is his whole shtick and I was happy with how it was presented through the Epic. But when it came to future guns and armor, I'd rather have dropped those exposition dumps and just had descriptions come up of what all the ambots were doing during actual combat scenes. The way he listed all the different terms felt like a video game instructional booklet or an RPG equipment guide. It was awful. I still enjoyed it, mind.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:18
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precision posted:I don't think anyone hates this book, at least I don't, but I think it's weird that people are so eager to excuse Neal's bad writing in this one while condemning REAMDE on similar grounds.  Also, the entire Ymir/Hard Rain section is loving gripping reading that makes up or the last third.
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Jun 25, 2015 13:32
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Relaxodon posted:The most unbelievable thing in the whole scenario of the book is that civilization didn't collapse days after the announcement that the world would end. But it was needed for the tale to be told so he swept the matter under the rug a bit.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:07
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mdemone posted:Since that was obviously intentional, I'm pretty sure we are meant to conclude that they died badly, because c'mon, there's no fuckin' way.
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Aug 20, 2015 01:11
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DONT CARE BUTTON posted:I would like to see some diagrams for the mechanisms used to transfer from orbit to the surface and back in the last part of Seveneves. The only one I think I was able to understand visually were the giant chain whips that would fling small craft into higher orbit from the ring. The big sky bolo was sorta confusing to me, and I just can't fathom at all how how something like the Thor would work.
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Dec 17, 2015 05:53
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