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Snak posted:There was an interview with Stephenson where he was asked why his books never have any "good smut" and his response was that he simply didn't know how to write "good smut" There are some pretty smutty things in the Baroque Cycle, but they're all good because he doesn't go into much detail and lets your mind fill in the blanks (Eliza and Jack in the Hot Springs, for example).
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Mar 29, 2014 01:11
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Snak posted:I stopped reading Quicksilver because I found everything about Eliza and Jack's story to be terrible, cliche, and boring. I think that's a very wrong opinion that would change if you kept reading, but also, Eliza/Jack are only 1/3 of the series (well, Eliza does a lot of stuff in book 2, but it's not Jack related at all). I would certainly give it another go. Their relationship does not follow any path you would expect it to, I think.
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Mar 29, 2014 05:01
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Is that the half-dick handjob scene? That was a pretty I... don't think you understood what Eliza did to him in that scene. I hate myself for typing this, by the way: Since the tip of Jack's dick was burned off, he can't achieve orgasm the normal way. He hasn't had one in years by the time he meets Eliza. She gives him an orgasm by stimulating his prostate, because she's a courtesan and knows about this stuff.
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Mar 29, 2014 23:19
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moment.
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Oh, man, I didn't even think about that because I was like "Yep, don't need to know the logistics of getting a dude with half a dick off, let alone ten-fifteen pages worth of it" and pretty much skimmed that chapter. And now I know. God dammit. As if Reamde didn't already have me convinced that man needed an editor. I think you're remember wrong; the scene is actually only like a page, maybe half a page, and is extremely ambiguous and more funny than lewd. That was my original point. Actually, here it is: There followed a long, long, mysterious procedure—tedious and yet somehow not. “What’re you groping about for?” Jack muttered faintly. “My fall-bladder is just to the left.” “I’m trying to locate a certain chakra—should be somewhere around here—“ What’s a chakra?” “You’ll know when I find it.” Some time later, she did, and then the procedure took on greater intensity, to say the least. Suspended between Eliza’s two hands, like a scale in a market-place, Jack could feel his balance-point shifting as quantities of fluids were pumped between internal reservoirs, all in preparation for some Event. Finally, the crisis— Jack’s legs thrashed in the hot water as if his body were trying to flee, but he was staked, impaled. A bubble of numinous light, as if the sun were mistakenly attempting to rise inside his head. Some kind of Hindoo apocalypse played out. He died, went to Hell, ascended into Heaven, was reincarnated as various braying, screeching, and howling beasts, and repeated this cycle many times over. In the end he was reincarnated, just barely, as a Man. Not a very alert one. I've read far worse sex scenes, though I think also that many Stephenson fans are a bit prudish.
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Mar 30, 2014 06:14
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It took me a couple tries to finish Quicksilver, but once I did I powered through The Confusion and System of the World in about a month. poo poo picks up really fast once the Minerva finally gets out of the Bay (though since you got to Jack and Eliza you already got past that part, so).
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Mar 30, 2014 21:31
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Jazerus posted:I am not sure how so many people are consistently stymied by the young Daniel section of the story. I could read Stephenson describe madcap experiments to prove spontaneous generation, on the salubrious properties of quicksilver, in which retinas are damaged through sun exposure to determine the curvature of the eye, etc. forever. Jack's portions of the trilogy are alternately amusing and deadly dull, but rarely did I ever feel as pulled into the period during Jack's sections as the rest. A standout exception I think is Jack's adventure through the siege of Vienna. I loved that stuff actually, what kept tripping me up was "and now let's go back and spend 20 pages talking about Minerva going back and forth between pirates". I would even go so far as to want Stephenson to write a whole 1000 page book that goes into more detail about Daniel and Isaac's college days.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:22
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Snak posted:Cryptonomicon is the same way, if not as bad. Stephenson writes action sequences as though he's trying to transplant a badass action scene from a movie into his book. It never works, in my opinion, and I wish he would stop trying to do it. There is one very notable exception: the 80-ish page action sequence near the end of The System of the World was just loving insane in its scope and quality. Although honestly I liked the last part of REAMDE, partly because I suspect it was partially satire (it even had a hilarious random thing in common with 24 that could not have been a coincidence). It's a weird book, and even weirder as a Stephenson book, because it doesn't have most of the things that anyone normally likes about his books, other than "likeable/awesome characters".
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Mar 31, 2014 22:35
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Sephyr posted:-If you're a human being, you better be a kicker of rear end and/or an engineer/scientist (of the HARD sciences), or go gently caress yourself. Everyone else is a useless waste of oxygen. Even worse if they try to voice any "opinions" on things. I think this is unfair. Roger Comstock is none of those (well, he TRIES to be a scientist, but fails miserably) and is pretty important and actually pretty cool. Daniel himself, while a genius, is also a bit of a bumbling Puritan who most definitely does not kick any rear end. Eliza (moreso in books 2 and 3) completely undercuts your theory. I'm sure there are a lot more I'm forgetting, but what I think you're doing is just letting his typical larger-than-life adventurers color your opinion a bit.
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Apr 2, 2014 00:23
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The best part of REAMDE was Sokolov. He was like every Neal Stephenson typical badass all at the same time. Also the hacker and his friends. They were pretty cool. Are there any hints that REAMDE takes place in the same "world" as Cryptonomicon and Baroque? I can't remember.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:42
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Ugly In The Morning posted:He was pretty great, but I thought his parts were dragged down by the whole romance thing with the spy lady (I want to say Mina, but I'm 99 percent sure that's just Alpha Protocol eating my brain). It was really shoehorned in from the start where it could have worked naturally, and it really annoyed me every time Stephenson would jam it in again. It was a bit shoehorned but I really liked her character (Olivia) and especially how she played out toward the end. There was something really fascinating in reading about how hard it is to actually get anything done in the spy world.
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Apr 3, 2014 01:50
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Nevvy Z posted: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. Honestly, I think he just wanted to write something fun after the heavy weirdness of Anathem. There is a lot of obvious satire - the two fantasy writers are blatant digs at Robert Jordan/GRRM/Brooks/whoever else writes fantasy these days, the gun porn, T'Rain's economy - but mostly, I think he just turned his brain off. I would have a hard time believing anyone who tries to tell me it was intended to be "on the level" of his previous 6 books unless they presented a really cohesive and thorough argument. It's nowhere near my favorite Stephenson novel, but even bad Stephenson is still pretty good.
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Apr 3, 2014 03:18
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I just noticed this thread has the "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" tag and all the discussion is about his non-Sci Fi books. 
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Apr 3, 2014 07:02
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The thing about the Monoliad is that it's loving confusing as poo poo to figure out how much of it there is and how to get it. I mean for a long time a printed version didn't even exist. I'm not convinced that Neal actually wrote much more than a tiny fraction of it, he certainly jumped ship after book 3 entirely. It's not bad but it's not really very good.
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Apr 11, 2014 19:54
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Eliza's letter writing in The Confusion can get really annoying at times. The way they're integrated is kind of clumsy and they take a lot of words to give very little information. And I get that he's just being "realistic" but still, you know.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:45
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Snak posted:I just finished reading Snow Crash for the first time. It was both better and worse than I expected. My biggest complaint was that he wrote basically every character exactly the same. They were all wisecracking dorks. Sushi K deserved a bigger role. Also the young Mafia guy actually had a pretty great POV introduction, and I was sad that he never really developed beyond that.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:55
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He wrote Snow Crash while smoking a lot of weed and listening to heavy metal. It shows. Zodiac is much better as a novel with structure and stuff, but is a much more boring story. Also, I mean, around that time Mondo 2000 was taken seriously, and in comparison Snow Crash is almost understated.
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Aug 25, 2014 18:54
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bewilderment posted:The Baroque Cycle is probably my favourite novel/series but I really did not enjoy Reamde. The stuff with the writers was great, some bits of T'Rain were great, but a lot of the plot to do with the mafia/terrorists just bored me. Also I don't really remember what Csongor added to the story beyond being a mafia infodumb and falling in love with Zula for some reason. The thing I find fascinating about the Baroque Cycle is that the second time I read it, Quicksilver was so much better. And better again on the third read. Yeah I read that series three times, shut up, don't judge me!
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Aug 26, 2014 18:52
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Diamond Age is a massive step up in maturity/writing quality from Snow Crash but still shows signs of "early writer syndrome". Also some people use it as evidence to legitimize Steampunk.  I really enjoyed it though, I just wish it didn't just... end.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:36
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REAMDE is a really good book that could do with some rather drastic editing (you could probably lose at least 100 pages and nothing of value would be lost). It's also written in by far his most "dry" prose so I imagine that is a major turnoff for some. A lot of the book consists of sentences like "She did this. He did that. He picked up the thing. They walked to the place."
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Jan 27, 2015 17:58
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Strange Matter posted:The MMO parts of Reamde area almost great, but because they fall just shy of greatness they end up being kind of terrible in my opinion. I don't know what happened; it's clear that Stephenson was genuinely interested in exploring the idea of an MMO rooted in realistic geo-economics, but I guess he didn't take it that seriously because there are a.) huge, gaping holes in his premises and b.) a lack of follow-through on his ideas. If he put as a much thought into exploring what makes T'Rain tick as he did to the RV prison or the infiltration of the hackers' apartment, it would have been incredible. I think at some point he realized that very few people would be interested in reading the MMO stuff and/or he started to lose interest in writing it or both but he also didn't feel like scrapping half a novel so he just changed the direction of the plot completely. REAMDE is kind of a mess when you think about it in terms of a conventional novel because poo poo just happens, and keeps happening, and it feels like at least four different novels are happening at the same time but not in the awesome "oh my God it's all connected!" way of the Baroque Cycle. Still a good book.
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Feb 3, 2015 23:10
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It's already out? poo poo.
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May 19, 2015 23:06
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I don't always mind the style but early on there are some people with like, loving PHDs talking about the moon and one of them says "Will this affect the tides?" and another one says "As you know, the moon affects the tides," and it struck me as hilariously unnecessary. Like it should have had a  after it.
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May 25, 2015 01:39
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Blind Rasputin posted:The peripheral by Gibson is still one of the best books of the year though. This doesn't even get close.  I'm about halfway through Seveneves and while it's interesting, it's written in a very similar style to REAMDE. Rather than the amusingly purple prose of the Baroque Cycle, which could make anything sound interesting, it has the matter of fact dry tone of REAMDE, so there have been so many entire pages where he's just saying "blah blah ten centimeters wide blah blah connected to the main hub by blah blah at the end of that doowacky there is a ten centimeter diddledaddle". I honestly don't need to know, Neal. I'll take your word for it on some of this stuff. It's not bad but it's nowhere near Baroque or Anathem levels of quality and it's really just all due to the style. 
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May 31, 2015 00:49
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Oh, I loved REAMDE, in that one the dry matter-of-fact tone worked for me because I thought the characters were pretty snazzy. Olivia and Sokolov were definitely two of the best. It's just that it's a novel that isn't good in the same way as his other stuff. And yeah I can't really visualize Izzy, would have been nice if it had an illustration of the station in the same way he included a map of London for Quicksilver.
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May 31, 2015 04:10
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The eBook version I have does have two pictures. I got the general shape of Izzy right, which is all the picture shows. I was referring more to being confused about the logistics of the things that get added. To be fair I started to half-skim those paragraphs after the 20th one.
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May 31, 2015 19:29
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Please rename the thread to "Neal Stephenson: Tekla porn" tia Or at least just correct "Neil" to "Neal" because it's driving me nuts. Probably because I grew up with a "Neal".
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Jun 3, 2015 19:07
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If the world were ending with 100% certainty, wouldn't every billionaire be throwing all their money at trying to survive? Why is that the thing that stretches believability?
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Jun 5, 2015 18:13
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I feel like the first 2/3 just get far too lost in describing the space station and the characters suffer for it, a lot. Early on you have the stuff with Tekla, which is fantastic, and the stuff with Doob is decent (though I cringed several times when he would mention things like "truthers" or how Doob "isn't a spiritual man" because heh, science bitches!) but then there will be literally 30-50 pages where all that "happens" is he does a time jump and then slowly and with what I would consider way too much detail tells us what has been tacked onto the station since before the time skip. Like I said earlier, he certainly used to have the ability to do that and still have it be supremely entertaining (I'm thinking of the lengthy descriptions of the prison architecture in System of the World or the Turkish Invasion in Quicksilver). When REAMDE was written in a dry, no-nonsense style I enjoyed it because the characters were still great and the world-hopping events were still fascinating, but now I'm worried he's moved into a new phase of his writing career that just isn't as fun or exciting as it once was. If Seveneves had just been the last 1/3 but expanded to fit the whole pagecount it would probably have been a lot better. As it stands it's the weirdest book he's written, not because it's odd, but because it's so blase. 
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Jun 14, 2015 15:47
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"It's a one-time crow! We'll never decrypt this!" e: It could have also been a joke about using ravens in the Game of Thrones books. Stephenson has always put things in his books that poke a little fun at fellow popular writers. precision fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 15:14
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I've given up hope on a Snow Crash movie, but a Snow Crash RPG could be super fun.
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Jun 19, 2015 17:07
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ImpAtom posted:My biggest problem with Seveneves I just hit the time skip is that it really just Tells instead of Shows to a degree I find aggrivating. It's a lot of writing which amounts to "Bob gave a speech. It was an important speech and it said all the things he needed to say. History books would record the speech. He said it well. Then Bob discovered a problem. Fortunately Bob solved the problem and it was resolved." I know they can't hyper-emphasis everything in what amounts to an already extremely long book but I got really tired after a few repeated "a thing happens." And he starts sentences with and. And he does it often. And often he does it with several sentences in a row. And it's maddening.
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Jun 22, 2015 21:34
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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. I mean, I like REAMDE more than most, but it seems pretty undeniable to me that Seveneves has less interesting characters (both by quantity and quality) and a generally less interesting plot (in the first 1000 pages of Seveneves, approximately three exciting things happen; one of them on the first page, another one around page 100, and the third one is a thing that you know is going to happen for about 900 pages before it happens). As an huge Stephenson fan it feels bad to say it, but Seveneves is easily his worst novel bar Zodiac. It's still good, but I can't imagine ever reading it a second time. In contrast, I've read the entire Baroque Cycle three times and loved every page of it every time. It's hard to say exactly what happened, but I think that essentially Neal dug himself a hole by wanting to write about a couple things, but then instead of realizing he couldn't build an interesting framework around it, he doubled down on the technical "instruction manual" writing and made the bizarre decision to put the most interesting stuff after a thousand pages of incredibly dry descriptions of interstellar LEGOs.
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Jun 24, 2015 18:22
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Ravenfood posted:Zodiac is great. I should probably have noted that my page numbers might sound off, because in my preferred eReader this book is 1800 "pages". So the Ymir section comes right at around page 1000, which is why I only counted three exciting events in the first 1000 pages (for reference: moon explosion, Tekla rescue, beginning of Hard Rain) The Ymir section is probably my favorite part of the novel.
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Jun 26, 2015 21:04
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Also, the entire Ymir/Hard Rain section is loving gripping reading that makes up or the last third.
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superstepa posted:What should I read next if I really liked The Diamond Age, didn't mind Snow Crash but couldn't get into Cryptonomicon? What put you off about Cryptonomicon? I'll echo that you should try Anathem, but be warned it isn't anything like The Diamond Age. He hasn't written another book in that style/era (yet).
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Jul 4, 2015 14:33
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Yeah I had almost no problem at all with Anathem's language. I vaguely remember a few minor terms I didn't get right away but most of the made-up words are for things like cell phones and TVs so it's not all that important anyway.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:49
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Sarcastro posted:Her background was Fiorina, her irritating and horrible personality was Palin, and her political ability was Clinton. I think. That was my take on it. Literally half Clinton half Palin. Blind Rasputin posted:My mental image was the president from BSG it worked well for some reason. Although now that you mention it, this works great too.
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Jul 10, 2015 22:51
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bewilderment posted:Last I checked, my copy of Anathem has a page right before the story starts saying "You can skip this if you want to figure it all out yourself, but here's what some of the basic terms mean and here's what the two main schools of thought are so you're not totally lost." I don't recall my first printing hardcover copy having that page, but I have smoked a lot of weed since then. Also if it did have that page I would have skipped reading it so maybe that's why I don't recall it.
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Jul 23, 2015 03:25
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thetechnoloser posted:My thread title suggestion is "Neal Stephenson: Orbital Mechanics 101 and Tekla Porn." Anyone? Hey OP, send a message to a mod!
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Jul 25, 2015 18:38
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Definitely about the one-dimensional characters and lack of "Earth going nuts". Whatever problems you have with REAMDE, at least it had some pretty good characters.
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Aug 12, 2015 18:10
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It would have been less cringeworthy if the character had just straight up been named "Neil DeGrasse Tyson".
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Aug 13, 2015 03:40
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