RE: Eagle Time Reading List
11-24-2015, 01:40 AM
I mean, out of all his books, I'd say that only really Zodiac has a decent 'conclusion-y' ending.
By the way, I'm re-reading Zodiac. It's very Stephenson: a gritty direct-action ecoprotagonist trying to uncover a conspiracy, asides about chemical pollution and boat hydrodynamics every so often, set in Boston... but I happen to like Stephenson's writing, so I guess I'm once again super biased.
I think one of the big things about Stephenson is that apart from anything else, he really does his research. Sometimes excessively so, which is why you get asides about mining engineering in Cryptonomicon and the proper technique to magnet-harpoon-landsurf in Snow Crash.
One of his really, really big themes in all of his books is the 'emergent order in chaos' concept, which he goes on and on about in at least three different books. You know, the whole 'there are archetypes that repeat through history and we used to worship them as gods but now they are part of the cultural zeitgeist, like how hackers are the new Loki/Coyote/Artemis, societas eruditorum est' thing.
The only one where there isn't really a hint of it is Reamde, but that book is a fucking mess. Word of God is that Reamde was actually chunked together from two different books he was writing, because the publishers needed a new one to shit out. If that's true, I think he shouldn't have done it. Both the MMORPG part and the terrorism part had real potential as separate books, and instead we got a book that started out as an interesting look into MMORPGs and ended up with a hundred-page gunfight/chase scene. Which honestly says a lot about him.
I haven't read his latest novel yet, so it's a toss up in between whether it'll be a cool sci-fi Stephenson thriller or a shit modern-day okay here's ten pages of weapon specifications for the gun this guy's about to shoot Stephenson 'thriller'. More on this as it follows.
Also: I'm discounting Cobweb for the purposes of this argument, I want to keep the sample size to Stephenson-authored books only.
Also: Also: the Diamond Age suffers from the same weaknesses I've talked about here but is worth a read anyway.
By the way, I'm re-reading Zodiac. It's very Stephenson: a gritty direct-action ecoprotagonist trying to uncover a conspiracy, asides about chemical pollution and boat hydrodynamics every so often, set in Boston... but I happen to like Stephenson's writing, so I guess I'm once again super biased.
I think one of the big things about Stephenson is that apart from anything else, he really does his research. Sometimes excessively so, which is why you get asides about mining engineering in Cryptonomicon and the proper technique to magnet-harpoon-landsurf in Snow Crash.
One of his really, really big themes in all of his books is the 'emergent order in chaos' concept, which he goes on and on about in at least three different books. You know, the whole 'there are archetypes that repeat through history and we used to worship them as gods but now they are part of the cultural zeitgeist, like how hackers are the new Loki/Coyote/Artemis, societas eruditorum est' thing.
The only one where there isn't really a hint of it is Reamde, but that book is a fucking mess. Word of God is that Reamde was actually chunked together from two different books he was writing, because the publishers needed a new one to shit out. If that's true, I think he shouldn't have done it. Both the MMORPG part and the terrorism part had real potential as separate books, and instead we got a book that started out as an interesting look into MMORPGs and ended up with a hundred-page gunfight/chase scene. Which honestly says a lot about him.
I haven't read his latest novel yet, so it's a toss up in between whether it'll be a cool sci-fi Stephenson thriller or a shit modern-day okay here's ten pages of weapon specifications for the gun this guy's about to shoot Stephenson 'thriller'. More on this as it follows.
Also: I'm discounting Cobweb for the purposes of this argument, I want to keep the sample size to Stephenson-authored books only.
Also: Also: the Diamond Age suffers from the same weaknesses I've talked about here but is worth a read anyway.
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