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empty sea posted:I will never forget the scene where one of his characters creates a spreadsheet to track his masturbatory habits vs his productivity, I loving lost it, what a loving ubergoon. Christ, Neal, there's just some things you don't talk about in public. To be fair, it's heavily implied that Lawrence Waterhouse, the guy making the chart, is semi-autistic. It's also basically explicitly stated that he's an ubergoon. I'm a huge fan of Neal Stephenson's work and spend my time constantly working my way through the Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon, so I've definitely got strong opinions on those books. Cryptonomicon gets a lot of flack for having unnecessary stuff in it, but the only part that I really think could be clipped is the ten page penthouse letter in the middle, which serves the purpose of establishing that Van Eck phreaking is a thing. Everything else reveals, on some level, important things about the characters. Lawrence is the sort of guy who thinks about his productivity in terms of how long it's been since his last orgasm, and in fairness, that entire exercise is a way of demonstrating how utterly in love and infatuated he's just become with the woman he will go on to marry. Randy is the sort of guy who will sit down and work out the perfect method to eat cereal in his brain. It's the epitome of showing as opposed to telling. Helsing posted:Snow Crash was one of my favourite books ever when I read it (I was 12 or 13 years old at the time) but I've never been able to finish any of Stephenson's other books. Its not that I ever threw them down and vowed to stop reading but with both The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon I started them and then put them down at some point and never bothered picking them up again. It's not that they were bad they just really didn't grip me the way Snow Crash did. Try reading Zodiac, which has some of the same crazy energy that Snow Crash does. Stephenson's work makes a pretty dramatic shift in tone around the time of Diamond Age, so if you're not a fan of the slower paced, more cerebral stuff you've pretty much got Zodiac, the Big U, Snow Crash, and maybe the stuff he wrote as Stephen Bury, namely Cobweb and Interface. Coca Koala fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Mar 5, 2014 |
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Mar 5, 2014 08:27
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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 feel like the baroque cycle is Stephenson's best work, but not really his most approachable. You can't look at it as three separate books, you really have to view it as a singular work. Quicksilver sets up the characters and the setting, Confusion introduces the conflict, and System of the World is the resolution. The problem with that is that now somebody has to read a thousand pages before they've even finished with the setup, and that's a pretty tall order. Plus if you read Quicksilver and then take a break before reading the next one because you need some time to digest it, you're hosed because there's no way you'll remember who all the secondary characters are, and their relationships to each other. So now you either need to read quicksilver again, or charge on without understanding what's happening, neither of which is really an entertaining prospect. So if somebody tells me "Oh I tried to read the Baroque cycle but I just couldn't get into it", I'll suggest they give it another try but I don't push past that. It's just not a work that's for everybody.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:55
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Double posting to mention that the kindle version of Cryptonomicon is on sale for two dollars; if you've got a kindle and want an easy introduction to Neal Stephenson, this is a good one. A decent mix of action and info dumps, plus some pretty great characters. http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/ref=pd_zg_rss_ts_kstore_668010011_10
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Mar 9, 2014 23:06
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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. I think I've got like a hundred pages left to read on my current run through, and then I'll start in on Quicksilver again next week for my third or fourth reading of the Baroque Cycle. edit: Okay, so one of the things that I really like about Stephenson's works is how they manage to pretty accurately predict the future. Snowcrash was written in 1992, and predicted a lot about how computers would get networked together. Cryptonomicon was written in 1999 and jumped on the crypto-currency train about a decade before bitcoins were a thing; basically the only thing in Cryptonomicon which dates it to a particular era is some references to floppy disks. For books which have technology as a crucially central theme, Stephenson does an incredible job of portraying technology in a very timeless way. Coca Koala fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 03:03
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Sephyr posted:I liked Cryptonomicon a lot, though as others said here I wasn't very invested in Randy's quest. I liked the characters and their interaction, but their end goal felt nebulous and odd. "We'll start our Bitcoin Haven, and then no one will use ethnic cleansing ever!". The whole thing with his 'antagonist' at the end just seems to fall from the sky for no reason, with all the grace or a hippo at an olympic diving event. Avi's idea wasn't "We'll start a bitcoin haven and then nobody will use ethnic cleansing ever again"; he actually explicitly says that trying to convince people to not commit genocide is a pipe dream. His goal was to start the bitcoin haven and then use the proceeds from that to fund a system by which the victims of ethnic cleansing might defend themselves, i.e. the HEAP. So it's more "We'll start a bitcoin haven and then distribute manuals on guerilla warfare tactics so that people aren't defenseless when the world inevitably turns to poo poo". It's still a weird idea, but it makes a bit more sense than you're giving it credit for here. And he's not saying you have to be a scientist of the HARD sciences, he tends to say that you have to actually go out and accomplish things, preferably things that matter. Randy spends basically his entire life being a scientist, but doesn't really start to have any pride in his life until he actually does something important, i.e. not work at tech support for academia and hole himself up and play marathon D&D sessions every weekend.
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Apr 3, 2014 06:39
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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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Blind Rasputin posted:My mental image was the president from BSG it worked well for some reason. That's actually exactly the same mental image that I ran with, and I agree that it worked shockingly well.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:13
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Snow Crash is great because it's pure, uncut, distilled 14 year old's day dreams and then all of a sudden it just takes a HARD left into Sumerian culture. Also remember that it was written in 1992, so the fact that it predicts things like Second Life and Google Maps is actually really crazy as opposed to just "hey check it out, I'm hip with the technologies".
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Sep 3, 2015 18:39
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I mean, maybe you could somehow get some racist undertones from the opening of the Diamond Age? That's got all the vickie stuff, and the Indian folks in the beginning that the cyberpunk wannabe mugs in the first chapter. Still, though, that's kind of a stretch; I haven't read Diamond Age in quite a while, but I definitely don't remember anything overtly racist in it 
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Oct 3, 2015 05:56
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Nebakenezzer posted:Snow Crash: Because I'm old, I read this when I was 15 thinking it was an awesome cyberpunk novel. A few years ago I went back and re-read it, and realized what everybody in this thread knows: that it's a satire of cyberpunk and a middle finger to all those Reagenauts at the time who thought that "privatize everything" was literally a way to run things. The satirical comments on that work on two levels, since the world it paints is both 1) a squalid dystopia, and simultaneously 2) optimistic to the point of delusional as to how well Libertopia actually would work. withak posted:I think maybe you had to read it in the 90s. SnowCrash really is a great book, but if you recommend it to anybody you have to be very careful to clarify "now, this was published in 1992 so all of the stuff that seems super hokey to you (like second life, google maps, wearable computers) was actually super prescient and groundbreaking at the time". Also, I do feel like you're going to miss out if you don't have the experience of reading it and thinking "Man this poo poo is totally rad" and then coming back years later and thinking "oh my god this is just a 14 year old's wet dream of electric sheep".
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Jul 30, 2016 03:05
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Atlas Hugged posted:That summary sounds awful. Like teenager's first novel awful. "What if, get this, magic were real?" I also hate every name because seriously who the gently caress has names like that? The plot of Snowcrash can be described as "What if there was a computer virus that could only infect hackers  " so i'm inclined to give this one a try too.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:16
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