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Just started a reread of The Baroque Cycle. I read it before I read Cryptonomicon and liked it a lot better. Anathem still remains my favorite book of his. I'm a total sucker for anything that teaches me a made-up language while I read it. Reading the proofs and axioms and trying to figure out which real philosophers they were based on was a fun game too.
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Mar 5, 2014 15:25
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Nevvy Z posted:Reamde is super weird, for him I mean, but I'm excited to reread it. Usually on rereading his books I can piece them together better because there's just so much STUFF going on all the time. Well he's definitely the "go on long tangents" guy.
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Mar 6, 2014 11:02
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I actually thought the lingo in Anathem was really natural sounding. I assume he used English etymology for a lot of the words as opposed to Russian like in A Clockwork Orange but I could be wrong. It also helped that the most important word or phrase in the chapter was given a definition at the start of the chapter it was relevant too. The book definitely benefits from a reread though because you're already familiar with the terminology the characters are using.
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Mar 8, 2014 06:47
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A quick google search found this. http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Anathem_Wiki It explains the meanings of terms in the context of the book and then explains what real world philosophy the term is referencing.
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Mar 8, 2014 17:46
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For me, I just couldn't get into Cryptonomicon as much as his other books because the Randy plot never drew me in. The stakes were so low compared to the WWII story, especially since he doesn't reveal what they're really planning until practically the very end of the book. Obviously, trying to prevent another holocaust from ever happening is a noble goal, but all you know is that these guys are scheming up some fake business to get capital and internet infrastructure built until they come across the gold and then their true plan is explained. I'm also hoping we get the Shaftoes in the Old West story that links The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon.
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Mar 12, 2014 05:43
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Grifter posted:What makes you think Epiphyte [1] or Epiphyte [2] were fake? They're not fake in the sense that they aren't actual companies with employees and a cash flow. It's just that Randy and co. aren't running them because they actually have any interest in those companies. They exist solely to setup the infrastructure they need to accomplish their actual goal.
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Mar 13, 2014 06:43
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You got to learn what Neal Stephenson thinks of himself as a person and a writer. Both fictional writers in the book are based on different aspects of his personality.
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Mar 13, 2014 14:01
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WarLocke posted:With the guy being named Jules Verne and them name-dropping Faraday cages, and IIRC someone says Earth offhanded once in the book, so I think so yeah. They discuss this a bit. It's called "collapsing the wave length" or some bullshit like that. It all goes back to the very first chapter of the book where Erasmus is serving as amanuensis. Erasmus's function throughout the whole book is to serve as a witness for the plot. I'd go so far as to say Jaa himself is the protagonist. Jaa is aware of all possibilities simultaneously through some trickery of his order. Further, he is able to allow other people to "see" these possibilities, as dreams or visions or whatever. He then "collapses" the possible narrative with the "real" one, so the witnesses remember what they saw but continue to exist in their original reality. So all these people see the possible outcomes of contact with Arbre, sometimes even witnessing themselves dying in other possible narratives, and retain that knowledge in their original narrative. I think it's all implied that there is no "true" narrative, meaning that every single time Erasmus thought he was going to die, he probably did in another narrative and the story just keeps moving forward in a narrative where he didn't. The whole thing is a really interesting look at the nature of storytelling. Sure, Erasmus should have died over and over again, and hell he even did at one point, but if he did then the story would be over and that wouldn't be a very satisfying conclusion. There's always at least a possibility of survival, even when it seems implausible, and that's the narrative we get to watch.
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Mar 14, 2014 04:45
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Cimber posted:No, Fraa Jad actually shifts his consciousness to different causal domains. Thats why Fraa E feels the everything killers going off in his belly (they were the big pill they swalloed before taking off) when they were attacked by the guards. But in another casual domain Fraa Jad was able to meet and talk to the space ship captain and figure out questions about the wick, IE Arbe was upstream in the HTW than earth and the other two planets. Also don't forget that Fraa Jad 'died' on launch, which is why he was always so quiet in space until he smashed the transmitters. They developed this ability while sitting around watching nuclear waste. They were getting radiation poisioning from the waste, so they figured out how to shift consciousness to narratives that they did not take the damage at that point in time. Thats also how Fraa Jad is supposed to be hundreds if not thousands of years old. I disagree. None of what you posted actually goes against my interpretation at all. I don't think he's shifting consciousnesses, but rather allowing other people to witness the other casual domains. He's not moving from one Fraa Jad to another. Every Fraa Jad is aware of every other Fraa Jad simultaneously. They're working in tandem. Jad flat out explains how they survive radiation poisoning. In some world tracks the radiation effects them, in some it doesn't, and in the ones that it doesn't it's because their cells don't get damaged, so they don't age like normal people.
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Mar 15, 2014 03:23
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Except we know that what Enoch does is explicitly alchemy.
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Mar 15, 2014 05:52
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Cimber posted:lets put spoiler tags please. How loving funny would it have been if the French guy had instead introduced himself as Mr. Waterhouse.
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Mar 15, 2014 15:10
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Jad even makes an offhand comment about being less able to influence/perceive the other narratives because there are less Fraa Jad's. So it seems his abilities are limited to world tracks where he's still alive and that's the other reason to bring Erasmus along. He needs a witness for those world track's he's died in.
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Mar 16, 2014 03:33
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Eve, the world's greatest excel simulator.
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Mar 21, 2014 05:23
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I'm doing a reread of The Baroque Cycle last night and just finished Quicksilver (the book, not the volume, seriously the most confusing way to discuss a series ever). I think it starts slowly with Enoch and Trinity, but once you get into the Plague Years things are only slowed down by the Minerva sections, which are way more interesting on the reread just because you realize these characters are actually important to the story later. The economic stuff, notably the rise and fall of the two Comstock houses, makes a great deal more sense the second time through. I think I'm enjoying the storytelling a lot more than I did the first time. Jack's story was always more accessible I thought because it was the most conventionally a story with him traveling from point to point and having adventures, but I do like all the insane theories and experiments the Royal Society get up to. I can't tell if Stephenson is implying Leibniz really did steal the calculus or not. There's the scene near the end of Quicksilver where Daniel and Leibniz are discussing using series to approach a number and how Newton has been using them to find tangents. Leibniz is deeply unsettled by this because he had assumed Newton was only interested in alchemy. It's at that point that Leibniz swears to be unmatched in mathematics. So it seems that at least the seeds for the calculus were planted in Leibniz's mind by Daniel from what Daniel learned from Newton.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:20
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I think his action sequences that are more a comedy of errors than people being badass work really well. Jack Shaftoe is constantly stumbling his way into fights and they're all really fun and interesting. The kung fu battle in Anathem is great because there are multiple times when Raz probably did die, but the story just switches to a different narrative where he didn't.
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Apr 1, 2014 02:45
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Cimber posted:They outright said he died when the everything killers in his gut were detonated by Fra Jaad I meant when the Valers rescued him from the mob.
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Apr 1, 2014 03:50
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This is a spoiler but Daniel, the one everyone turns to as a mediator, is himself an atheist. I do think that Stephenson places a huge amount of emphasis on the power of knowledge and more importantly the power of reason, but I also don't have a specific issue with that. Anathem is cool because a couple of the supporting characters are more like "average Americans" with practical skills and believe in a vague notion of god and religion but don't really let it interfere with their lives. Though one of them does admittedly get converted. Actually, there are conversions in multiple directions in that book, from agnostic to theist and theist to philosopher (though I can't recall if he ends up denying the existence of god or just abandons his dogma). Reamde carries the "average American" thing further and I don't think religion is at all important to anyone except the Jihadists, and then it's obviously not seen as a good thing. Stephenson at least makes those characters seem human, but you can only humanize a mass murderer so far.
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Apr 2, 2014 05:51
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The other thing to remember is that Neal Stephenson is writing stories and is very well aware of the fact that he is writing stories. Even though I'm not super interested in Randy's plot, I'd be even less interested if he was a mildly successful computer programmer stuck in a loveless relationship for the rest of his life. Lars von Trier could probably make it compelling, but that's really not what Neal Stephenson is all about. The only reason we care about adventure stories is because implausible things happen to larger than life characters in interesting ways. Sure, not a lot of screen time is given to regular people so it could actually seem like Stephenson is criticizing not being a super-savant or bad-rear end-extraordinaire, but if that's what you're looking for you can just read someone's Livejournal. Stephenson is directly addressing this problem in Anathem and Reamde. In Anathem, the narrative is so impossible that it actually relies on multiple parallel universes to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, while Reamde is a parody of over-the-top, unbelievable action movies. The great thing about The Baroque Cycle is that most of the savants are actually real people so Jack's exploits almost become believable in that context.
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Apr 2, 2014 11:52
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Ugly In The Morning posted:The relatives with an assload of guns are Christian sepratists. Oh I totally forgot that.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:38
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precision posted:here is a lot of obvious satire - the two fantasy writers are blatant digs at Robert Jordan/GRRM/Brooks/whoever else writes fantasy these days, In interviews he's said that the writers are actually parodies of himself. They're probably digs at some other authors too. Like I don't know how you can write about a morbidly obese fantasy writer and not have it be a dig at GRRM, but that writer is also highly prolific which is way more of a Stephenson trait than a trait of just about any other author in fantasy save for Sanderson.
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Apr 3, 2014 03:33
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We should really get a mod to spell poor Neal's name correctly.
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Apr 7, 2014 05:31
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redshirt posted:Question about Anathem: Because Jad is orchestrating everything and the only people he is even remotely familiar with are the avout following him.
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Apr 7, 2014 09:02
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I just finished my reread of King of the Vagabonds and Jack's last line about the prodigious butt-loving of Mr. Vliet is funny every time. It's like something out of the Bible! I have to admit I was really disturbed by William of Orange face raping Eliza this time I read it.
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Apr 10, 2014 08:54
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That might be the inspiration, but we literally see him use alchemy to rejuvinate.
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Apr 18, 2014 12:39
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Cimber posted:Yes, he does it in Cryptonomicon after he is shot in Finland, and we find out that he gave Daniel Waterhouse alchemy during his bladder stone operation where he dies. And he's not alone, there are other immortal alchemissts out there too Can't forget Newton. Also, I'm at the very end of Quicksilver and it's giving me a headache. The last two sections, Eliza's stolen cross-stitching piece, and Daniel in the Glorious Revolution, drag on for loving ever. I think it might be the only part of the series I don't like.
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Apr 19, 2014 01:54
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I usually find her interesting because the development of modern economies is fascinating to me. The problem is when she is having adventures and she's just not as good at it as Jack is. And then the whole stitching thing is relating the adventure after the fact which is the most boring way imaginable to tell a story.
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Apr 20, 2014 02:53
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I've started my reread of Confusion and it feels very "eh" right now. Within the first 150 pages, there's hardly any Jack and it's mostly just Eliza trying to get timber. There are some interesting tangents and the discussion of different economic systems in various French towns is neat, but I kind of want to get back to crazy Royal Society experiments and English politics. One thing I've found really interesting is the different portrayals of the various monarchs. The English ones, even James II, seem very down to earth, as far as kings go. William of Orange is kind of a swash-buckling hero in his own right, but le Roi is practically other worldly. It's a really cool contrast to the relatively human British and German monarchs. Louis XIV just seems so much more like a king, or at least how we'd expect a king to act and behave.
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Apr 29, 2014 16:20
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Finally slogged through the Eliza stuff and am back to enjoying Jack's adventures around the globe. The book immediately picks up once they get their hands on the gold.
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May 6, 2014 10:56
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Yeah, this is a reread. I know all the poo poo that goes down.
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May 6, 2014 13:48
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No one cares what your TVTrope definition of butt monkey is.
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May 9, 2014 14:11
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Interesting, I just got to the part in The Confusion where Lothar denies that Enoch uses alchemy for longevity. He suggests that while alchemy was a good guess, it misses the mark completely.
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May 19, 2014 16:22
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I just finished The Confusion. I didn't like it as much as Quicksilver since it didn't have nearly so much Royal Society hijinks but the Bonanza portions were highly entertaining. I'd say the biggest drawback is the over reliance on correspondence as a narrative device. I hate being told what characters were doing long after they've done it. I'd rather just watch the story from their perspective. It made for an interesting twist in Quicksilver before we found out that Eliza had been sleeping with Leroy's intelligence agent, but it just drags forever in the first part of Juncto. Also, I can't imagine how utterly confusing the endings of Bonanza or Juncto would have been if I had read them separately one after the other. On to my reread of The System of the World. This is the one I remember the least about. I know there's a terrorist plot and that's about it.
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May 25, 2014 15:37
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I thought he was talking about a cult punk rocker who would honestly fit right in in any Stephenson book.
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Dec 30, 2014 15:08
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The problem with Reamde is the same problem I have with Stephenson in a lot of his books. When I'm interested in the tangent he's going off on, I find the work very compelling. When I don't care about the topic or the character it's in relation to, I'm tempted to skip it. The MMO stuff in Reamde is really good. The stuff about building a secret room in an RV less so, though both are very well researched. I'm also going to disagree with people when they say the love story in Anathem is bad. Anathem is a really strange novel for a lot of reasons, but one of the most unique things about it is that the protagonist is by the end of the novel completely aware that he lacks any agency. He was playing the book in cheat mode and none of his decisions actually mattered because there were an infinite number of him playing along and the plot could switch to a different Erasmus at any point along the way. The only thread in which he actually had any impact was the love story. That one was uniquely him in all his teenage, socially awkward math monk glory. Parts of it are a bit cringe inducing, but that's because the characters are behaving exactly as they're supposed to. It's also why the book ends on a wedding, because that's what's important to Fraa Erasmus. Sure, he saved the world, but he didn't have a lot of say in it.
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Jan 26, 2015 15:34
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Of all the weird rear end tangents Stephenson has gone off on in his books, I think the one that sticks with me the most is his discussion of flight plans in a post 9/11 world.
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Jan 29, 2015 06:04
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Maybe it's just because I've been rereading The Baroque Cycle where he gets to play with language a hell of a lot more, but does the prose and dialog especially feel super clumsy to anyone else?
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May 21, 2015 06:22
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The problem is that all of the dread goes out the window for the last third and it becomes a boring political thriller where we don't really have a stake in who comes out on top.
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Jun 3, 2015 01:29
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The way I see it, he had two really great ideas for a book. He wanted to tell a natural disaster story on a scale most writers wouldn't attempt while exploring how humanity would survive with the technology available to us at the moment. But he also wanted to tell the story of a future earth where our society was as far removed to the society in the story as the Egyptians are from us. The problem is that while there's an obvious relation in continuity between those two stories, linking them doesn't necessarily benefit the other. If Seveneves had simply ended with the Eves making their pact, I think most of us would have seen that as a pretty logical conclusion and satisfying ending for the events that had just transpired. He could have tacked on an epilogue where one of the characters postulated about any humans left on earth who might still be alive and what 4000 years in extreme conditions would do to them, or if they would ever hear from the Mars group again, but that story was over when they got to Cleft. You then have an entirely different book with entirely different characters in an entirely different society for Stephenson to play around with. The problem is that it doesn't feel nearly as far removed from the events of Seveneves as it should. Over 4000 years have passed and they talk about it like it was yesterday. Sure, the events forcing humanity into space and creating new races informs their entire society, but so much else would have happened. He at best vaguely references political entities that rose and fell in the interim, but nothing but the Seven and the Hard Rain seem to have any lasting impact on their society. And I think this is because the reader is now super familiar with the events of the Epic and it would be strange to introduce a mythological take on those events in the same book. Stephenson also used the new Seven at the end as a thematic continuation of the characters we left behind on Cleft. They're not literally the same people, but we get a glimpse at those people's logical continuations. But as a result the future society doesn't feel authentic. I think he gets one or the other of those two books, but not both, at least not without separating them into two and putting a decade of other novels in between. The last third would have worked a lot better if we had introduced characters and a crisis and used those as a way to walk backwards through the four millennium that it took to get to the Eye. We need to see the Seven worshiped as almost god-like beings. We need legends of deeds and fragments of history that are misremembered. The Epic should be seen through a foggy haze, scraps of records having survived, not every piece meticulously preserved and analyzed and played non-stop in every building at all times. Maybe Stephenson decided it would just be too drat weird to describe events that had happened only a few hundred pages back differently than the reader had just read them? But I think that's the only way the second story would work.
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Jun 15, 2015 02:41
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Blind Rasputin posted:Could someone just explain where in hell he got the idea for the talking messenger crows? Literally the most bizarre thing I read in that book. It was weird and I have no idea what the inspiration was from, but it seemed practical enough. They liked loving around with genetic sequences and getting crows to remember messages isn't much of a stretch from what crows can already do. It's a tough system to spy on because it's not bouncing on radio relays or satellites. The crow only delivers it to a person you've specified. If you are worried about the crow being intercepted, you can have it remember a coded message that only the intended recipient would understand.
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Jun 15, 2015 04:37
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Sharzak posted:I was really excited about this up until about halfway through because I thought it was going to be connected to Anathem--it's been a long time since I've read it but weren't the aliens in that similar looking to humans and traveling in a similar type of spaceship, looking to resettle? With a similar dynamic of nearly human genetics? I was so sure that the book was going to suddenly feature interdimensional travel at the end which would have made all of the early dryness worth it The original travellers in Anathem were not from earth. Earth was actually the third dimension visited with the world in Anathem being the fourth. Also the ships weren't similar in design beyond rotating for gravity.
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Jun 19, 2015 11:00
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