Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon & more...

I think it's more or less meaningless tbh. I don't really think writers have obligations to society in this respect, and that the building of spaceships is more to do with funding/military advantage than it is the mood of writing.

that said, conveying wonder is a meaningful thread of the science-fiction tapestry. Robert Conquest put it well in one his poems:

Imagination that debars
The deeps of time, the endless stars,
May grow too numb to harmonize
Its own rag-doll's two button eyes.

I may be feeling slightly sour towards Stephenson at the moment - have put down Quicksilver and will never pick it up again, a thought that gives me some pleasure.

^ Yes

Reading the (great) analysis of Cryptonomicon in N. Katherine Hayles's (great) My Mother Was A Computer must have given me the Stephenson bug again. Picked up a paperback of Quicksilver for what I realize now must be my third reading of this monstrosity (twice in the hardbacks, which I ditched years ago). They had Reamde also but something in me wanted familiar, labyrinthine comfort food. Enjoying it tremendously, though a lot of that is just from knowing the characters and where this is all going. Kind of amazed I got through it the first time, since so much of it appears to be just period scene-setting and detail for the sake of detail, and the narrative arc is virtually invisible.

Excerpt from his new book's up on his site now
http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/

i genuinely enjoyed the most recent book of his i read about parallel realities despite the fact that the word 'praxis' appeared on a single page of the hardcover copy i was reading six times.

seveneves: a bit better than the gun-nut one but man it was hard going as a novel sometimes. Some nice ideas, though.

about 2/3 of the way through. A lot of the zero-g mechanical engineering stuff could have been edited...but I'll definitely finish it

i thought it was pretty good, definitely could've tightened up the first part which made the second seem a little rushed by contrast. reflected afterwards that i wasn't sure if i would've preferred more of the second part or none of it.

wife finished it last night and loved it - guess I'll start it next

Carly Fiorina is going to get us all killed.

?

JBF parallels

100 pages into 'seveneves' and i've only just discovered it's not called 'seveneyes' (because seveneyes turns up no search results here)

Love Cryptonomicon. the physical comedy in the WWII parts was my favourite part

otm, i love those bits too

Seveneves is a palindrome, I now realise. Still not sure of the relevance of this though.

I need to pick up Seveneves, Reamde was so dumb I just kind of tuned him out for years, which was probably unfair. But the politics of it retroactively ruined Cryptonomicon.

Anyone read Cobweb, one of those books he wrote with his uncle in the 90s? The one about terrorists?

Gotta love a book that starts part 3 with "five thousand years later"

And he's just explained the name, and I totally missed it.

New one Dodge is out next week, but is available on Kindle now. It's back in the Waterhouse universe, post Reamde.

been plowing through Seveneves which i don't really recommend as isolation reading given the emphasis on global catastrophe and dread. also it's not really that good. i just hit the big shift about 2/3 of the way through and i'm really not feeling it, kinda exposes a ton of his weaknesses as a writer as well as his increasingly dodgy politics. this book is shockingly comfortable with eugenics and genetics-as-destiny! there's even a character who invokes a "bell curve" type argument about race and intelligence that just goes totally unchecked by anyone else, as if it's trustworthy scientific information like all the other nerdy shit people spout off in his books. i guess if you're really into orbital mechanics it'd be a blast. but after devouring the Mars Trilogy twice over i'm ready for a lot more self-conscious politics in my books about spacefaring nerds.

I couldn't get past the first sentence of that book, which was laugh-out-loud hilarious and bad.

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

I mean, this is like Daniel Pinkwater-level (and I love Pinkwater and would probably like Stephenson's books more if he wrote like Pinkwater, which he generally does not)

I think what I may end up remembering best about this book is the rather brassy choice on the back cover for one of the two review blurbs to be blatantly plucked from a savage pan:

"Fascinating . . . . Insights into the human character shine like occasional full moons." - Boston Globe

"Still, she couldn't help but flinch as the final few flynks snapped around toward them." (p. 617)

gawwwwd the world-building in this final section is just so stupid, in the most blinkered, weird, nerd-author-can't-perceive-how-strange-he's-become kind of way.

author-can't-perceive-how-strange-he's-become kind of way.

― Doctor Casino, Friday, April 3, 2020 2:44 PM

This can either be the best thing or the worst thing.

worst in this case

watched The Core last night and was struck by how much it basically is a dumb and sometimes fun version of this book

the book is already dumb obv so what i mean is "less nerdy"