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Coriolis posted:The first chapter of Snow Crash is the most enjoyable piece of written language I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I much prefer quote:He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap’n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other’s essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon-handle, the polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole milk, because otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of a buffer that retards the dissolution-into-slime process. The giant spoon goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the milk-pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Meanwhile all his concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor-sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain-hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy’s strategy would never work. But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy’s purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap’n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap’n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves.
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Mar 1, 2014 21:45
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Cimber posted:Anathem is probably up there tied with Cryptonomicon as my favorite books. Its just so interesting and nerdy. Going from that to Reamde was such a disappointment. 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. I think my favorite thing about him is that his work really can't be pinned down. He isn't the * guy, even a little.
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Mar 6, 2014 04:37
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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? It was all really very funny and usually entertaining, it was just so goddamn long.
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Mar 9, 2014 00:15
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redshirt posted:I just powered through the last 200 pages again, and I think this interpretation is correct. Jad destroys the transmitter in order to sever the causality link between Abre and the group in orbit, allowing Jad to control the Narrative without outside interference. I think it's that Jaad can mess with the Narrative around himself, but having an observer outside his story collapses it. So he destroys the transmitter so he can manipulate things, but Erasmus serves as his way of collapsing the timeline into a final, acceptable result
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Mar 14, 2014 15:07
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I thought that the Rhetors were totally bullshit. They never existed really, they are just annoying assholes who like to try to linguististically gently caress with people
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Mar 14, 2014 19:24
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Cimber posted:That is very possible. You just blew my loving mind.
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Mar 15, 2014 04:06
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precision posted:I've read far worse sex scenes, though I think also that many Stephenson fans are a bit prudish. It may have been this thread, the sci-fi thread, or the Abercrombie thread where it came up, but the theory I like is that the issue is that people like their sex scenes like they like their sex, and what some people enjoy, or can tolerate, is very different from what others enjoy. That said, that's like the smallest part of the longest book ever.
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Mar 30, 2014 08:54
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I don't think there was any one part of the Baroque cycle I didn't enjoy, but it was so goddamn LONG.
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Mar 31, 2014 17:08
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Part of me wants to think there's got to be a reason for a lot of these things and it's just over my head. But most of me thinks he just kind of flubbed one a little and that's ok because I still enjoy most everything he writes and this wasn't really bad, just not good in the way I am used to from him and it's following what I personally consider his best work so I think that might factor.
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Apr 3, 2014 03:11
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I'm listening to an audiobook of Reamde, I read it years ago and it and the baroque cycle are the only ones I have't read twice, and I'm really enjoying the constant unnecessary level of detail he goes into. We've talked a bit in this thread about how it's kind of an odd book. I think the reason it's so weird is because when he's doing this about the past, future, or an alternate dimension it's worldbuilding. We are used to that, lots of books like to populate their worlds with a rich history, there's even that little metacommentary about it in regards to T'Rain. But here he doesn't really need to worldbuild, it takes place in the real world, so it comes across a little more awkwardly. I'm currently in the part where Chongor is talking about Hungarian economics and how he had a job converting software to use their integered currency and it doesn't matter at all to the plot, it's just a little thing the author wanted to talk about for a minute in the middle of the heroine being kidnapped.
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May 6, 2014 15:50
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Anathem I can at least reread. The Baroque cycle is scary.
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Sep 13, 2014 01:34
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Khizan posted:I've never understood why the Da5id thing is such a big problem for people. Back in college Lobsterboy came to hang out with me from the dorm across the way and my best friend ended up calling me Nevvy for a week IRL. It was weird as gently caress. How is Davidwithafive prounounced anyway? That's the bigger issue I have. Casimir Radon posted:It probably seemed like a better idea 23 years ago before "leetspeak" completely wore out its welcome. L33TSP3@K
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Jan 21, 2015 15:18
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And that's part of what makes it great. Sometimes it's nice watch a stoner comedy or an action movie.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:16
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I've been going through his audiobooks for my latest round of rereads and did Reamde a couple months ago. I tend to read fast, and audio books force me to slow down and really take everything in. On reread I definitely enjoyed Reamde way more than the first time, I think because I can see how the pieces fit together.Notahippie posted:My complaint is that a lot of it is completely jettisoned with no payoff. What ever happens with the "War of Realignment"? It completely drops out of the novel and never comes back. That's a shitload of words wasted on something with no payoff. Maybe Stephenson was making some kind of a commentary on priorities and how as soon as somebody Dodge cared about was in danger that stopped to be important to him, but if that's the case then I think he could have cut the entire subplot by 50% and still made the same point. And if he was trying to make a pastiche of tehcno-thrillers that put in red herring plot points then it's even worse. To misquote the Filthy Critic, you can wink and laugh when you poo poo on my chest about how ironic is is, but I still have poo poo on my chest. They basically just work it into the story of the game. It was never a real crisis anyway, it's just internet nerd drama. I'm sure it's metacommentary on SOMETHING but I'm not sure what. As for "That's a shitload of words wasted on something with no payoff" have you never read one of his books? He spends a shitload of words on EVERYTHING. He tells you every detail about all kinds of poo poo. That's just what he does. pseudorandom name posted:The entire first half of Reamde exists purely to put a bunch of unrelated people into that hotel room in China so that the back half can happen. They're two completely independent bad books stapled together in the most pointlessly hamfisted manner possible, the second book ends with a gun nut's masturbatory fantasy out of nowhere and the MMO subplot was done better by Charles Stross four years earlier. Talking about Rule 34 and or the other one? I like Stross but for as bad as Stephnson is at wrapping up his books they at least have a climax. Charles Stross books just sort of resolve in a really unsatisfying way.
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Jan 27, 2015 15:41
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General Battuta posted:I don't know anything about REAMDE but why did he name his MMO setting Train? Terrain, T'rain. The MMO started with building a realistic world by emulating actual processes by which planets are formed. MikeJF posted:First, as has been said, he sets up this entire MMO world that the story is obviously meant to revolve around, but ultimately he doesn't really know how to tie it into the climax so he kinda drops it towards the end after spending half the book talking about it. For its importance in the text, it needed to have been a part of the conclusion of the story. I feel like this bit is projection by a lot of nerds who read Stephenson's other work and got really excited about the MMO bits, myself included. On my first read I felt the same way. On my reread it really seemed to play itself out just fine. It's hard to have high drama in a videogame when one of the characters literally owns the servers unless you start going to TRON levels of fantasy. quote:Third (time to get nerdy), Stephenson admits that he basically knows nothing about MMOs past some stuff about the old Everquest/Ultima Online era despite having predicted the whole concept, hasn't kept up with it at all, and it glaringly shows. MMOs have spent the past decade and a half experimenting and refining and discovering what works and what doesn't, what's popular and what's not, and his MMO is a huge ambitious version of a lot of gameplay concepts that were tried out and basically found to be... basically a flop and not actually that fun or even workable. And yet it's described as being incredibly popular. It really does read like it was written in 1997 and just feels incredibly anachronistic to anyone who's familiar with how MMOs developed in the real world. I could forgive it in another book but he's a technology-focused writer who spends an incredible amount of time going over it in intricate detail. Could you expound on this?
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Feb 6, 2015 13:32
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I've never seen that cover. It's awesome.
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Jan 28, 2016 15:24
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Reamde holds up on rereads. I haven't finished seveneves. edit- wrong spot Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 03:58
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Hackan Slash posted:Obligatory XKCD specifically calling out Anathem I like that it's a probability because despite the improbability Anathem is good as gently caress.
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May 8, 2017 19:30
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Notahippie posted:I agree. And I always thought Stephenson was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with it and making fun of the trope by coming up with random objects to replace instead of the typical "plascrete" or whatever. "Hamburgs" or whatever it was stood out to me that way. Looking back, that whole bit about the speelycaptor and it's compatibility with farspark is probably poking fun at the idea of taking the names of technology too seriously. "they aren't even compatible formats"
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May 9, 2017 21:35
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I'm only about halfway through so far, but I love the concept behind it. Magic is real, sure. But witches being basically Fraa Jaad is a really fun way to explain it.
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Jul 12, 2017 13:35
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