His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.
He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.
Anyway, in case you were curious:
Hobbs: https://web.archive.org/web/20041204055248/http://www.crypto...
Master Key: https://web.archive.org/web/20041022021127/http://www.crypto...
I also liked Seveneves, but it should have ended 2/3 of the way through. There was a point that would have made for an excellent ending (which is something Stephenson famously struggles with IMO), but then he forced in another 1/3 of a book that didn't engage me and which felt like it just petered out.
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I jotted down these things that drove me nuts in Seveneves:
* Describes pykrete every time it’s mentioned, which is way too often.
* Say “light green arc” again.
* There’s always a TV tuned to the Epic.
* Spacers and Diggers speak the same language after 5,000 years of English-Russian hybridization?
* So much time spent explaining the different races, then absolutely nothing was done with it.
* Red vs blue space, then absolutely nothing was done with it.
* “Diggers” capitalized in first use, no lead-up.
* “Sonar Taxlaw”? Really? Her volume of the encyclopedia just happened to conveniently start with “sonar”?
* They just gave up on Mars sometime, I guess.
* Oh, look, a secret religion at the end because, why exactly?
* Diggers would not have been remotely like “rootstock” humans after evolving for 5,000 years in caves. Look how much we’ve changed since 3,000 BC.
I liked it, overall, but each of these yanked me out of my suspension of disbelief.
Maybe it's because I know more about life sciences than physics and simply missed that the orbital bits were equally nonsensical, but at least they didn't manage to shatter by suspension of disbelief. But then some vague magical genetics and a brief mention of "yeah, they can eat algae" are used to solve a bunch of intractable problems - and both treated as being far less interesting than, as you say, pykrete!
Given the title of the book and the fact that the final third hinges on the biological bits, it felt incredibly lop-sided - like he'd spent all his research time playing with Kerbal Space Program and only got round to stitching the two parts of the book together on the night before the deadline.
And sociology / anthropology / linguistics? Eh, we can wedge some stuff in once the important parts are done.
I didn’t hate the book at all. It was otherwise fun to read. But man, those bits I mentioned really stuck in my head and I couldn’t un-see them once I started noticing. Like, imagine that literally every time you were in a bar or restaurant with TVs, at least one of them was showing a documentary of the American revolution. Wouldn’t that be odd? Well, apparently in 7000 AD people just can’t get enough of their own founding history lessons.
i like Polostan and generally recommend it. looking forward to the sequel in a few weeks. havent read anything Stevensons said about Polostan but if i had to guess id say it targets a YA audience instead of a high school/undergrad audience
amazing none of his books have been adapted. they play out like movies in my head, albeit a lot of men participating in the socratic method and waving at white boards
These were indeed verbose. Some folks love it, some not as much. Then there was a deliberately semi-utopian near-futurism phase (Seveneves, whatever one it is with the cloud-seeding gun in West Texas) and now we’re into some historical fiction (Russian spy stuff).
Might be worth dipping in a toe again to see if any of these fits your fancy. Stephenson didn’t just swap to Cryptonomicon and stop there.
Termination Shock
I liked this interview, very nuanced and well-reasoned answers.
It's also concerningly prescient, as he often has been, especially in an early scenario in the book that shapes the world so the rest of the book can happen.
Same here. But I skipped far fewer paragraphs of his earlier works.
:)
acheron•1d ago
Note: (2004)
jdkee•1d ago
jjs•1d ago
hungryhobbit•1d ago
It's kind of tiny compared to here (<1/5th the articles maybe?) but it still has an older/Slashdot-y crowd.
fragmede•1d ago