Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes Neal Stephenson has just released a teaser comprising the first 26 pages of his new novel Seveneves. The first words? "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"

fmackay writes "Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age is to be adapted for a Sci Fi Channel miniseries. George Clooney is producing and Stephenson will write the screenplay — the first time he has written for television."

Aeonite (Michael Fiegel) writes "Mark Jeffrey is probably best known to Slashdotters as an online media entrepreneur and one of the co-founders (along with Mike Maerz and Jim Bumgardner) of The Palace, an avatar-based chat system popular in the late 1990s. Jeffrey is not to be confused with Neal Stephenson, though both men have websites featuring clockwork imagery, goatees, and novels which contain references to Sumerian mythology -- Stephenson's Snow Crash and Jeffrey's first novel, The Pocket and the Pendant. From a distance, one might be inclined to believe that similarities to Stephenson's own work are more than cosmetic: Jeffrey thanks Stephenson on the Acknowledgments page of his novel (along with Stephen R. Donaldson and Carl Jung, among others), and one Lulu.com review (mentioned in a press release) describes The Pocket and the Pendant as being 'like Stargate, Harry Potter, Snow Crash and the old Land of the Lost rolled into one.'" Read on for the rest of Fiegel's review. The Pocket and the Pendant author Mark Jeffrey pages 220 publisher Lulu.com rating 5 reviewer Michael Fiegel ISBN 1411613236 summary In a world where time has no meaning, one boy stands alone against the forces of darkness.

In my estimation, that's a lot like saying that chocolate chip cookies are "like flour, sugar, chocolate chips and vanilla rolled into one." Both statements are true, in part, though they leave out a lot of other ingredients, and mention some (Snow Crash and vanilla, respectively) which proportionally make up very little of the overall batter.

Granted, I know what the reviewer was thinking of when they wrote that assessment of the book; namely, the Sumerian myth. But beyond that, it's misleading to suggest that a Snow Crash fan would also enjoy The Pocket and the Pendant. I'd go so far as to say quite the opposite. Snow Crash was a Cyberpunk novel loaded with heavy doses of socio-political and religious satire, violence and sexual imagery, among other things. The Pocket and the Pendant is a fantasy novel that contains no overt satire, little violence outside of a few bruises, and nothing sexier than the word "girlfriend." To draw comparison between the two is akin to comparing Star Trek and Star Wars: about all they have in common is stars. One is science-fiction, the other's science-fantasy; one takes place in the future, the other "long, long ago"; one's got Wil Wheaton, the other's got Natalie Portman; one's designed for adults (Seven of Nine, the Borg), and one's focused on a younger audience (Jar-Jar Binks, the Ewoks).

Given that dichotomy, The Pocket and the Pendant falls squarely in the Star Wars/fantasy half of the speculative fiction genre. As a longtime fan of Star Wars, I can't say that's a bad thing. There's much that's good about this book, and as a first novel it shines far brighter than many works I've laid eyes on. However, there are some uneven spots that must be acknowledged along the way.

Humble Beginnings

After a brief prelude which sets up the action to follow we are introduced to the novel's protagonist, Max Quick. Max is introduced as being "a very strange little boy," a phrase that bothered me the first time I read it. As we will learn just a few dozen words later, Max is twelve years old, as are his peers, who are also, time and again, referred to as "little boys and girls." When I think of someone who's a "little boy" I think of the teenage Amidala in The Phantom Menace calling the 8-year-old Anakin "a funny little boy." I do not think of twelve-year-olds as "little children," but rather as pre-teens well on the way to adulthood: Natalie Portman's Matilda in Leon, who is twelve going on 32; Nabokov's twelve-year old Lolita, four-feet-ten in one sock; the drug-using pre-teens and barely-teens in Kids and Thirteen.

In the world of The Pocket and the Pendant, however, twelve-year-olds truly are "little boys and girls," possessed of a wide-eyed innocence that, while capable of being tainted and turned, is nevertheless omnipresent in the mannerisms and language of the main characters. Mention of "girlfriends" causes blushing, and one twelve-year-old character uses the term "tummy" and repeatedly refers to her mother as "Mommy." Consider the following dialogue:

" Can you hear me?"
"Yes!" came the little girl's voice from somewhere above, now sounding more hopeful. "Oh, yes! Whoever you are, can you help me, please?"
"Yes, I will, I promise," Max called back. "What apartment are you in?"
"912," she yelled back, "The door's open! Hurry! I'm scared!"

The only child in the book who's portrayed as truly malicious and evil is Ace, described as a "big kid" by the author in a clear effort to put at least several years between him and the "little twelve-year-olds." While it's true that there are some young antagonists who have reverted to barbarity, even their actions seem more like a foolish game than true maliciousness, bringing to mind scenes from Lord of the Flies or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome or even Peter Pan, kids turned savage not by choice, but by circumstance. Sasha, one of the most vicious-tongued of these savage "Serpents & Mermaids," even joins the other "good little children" on their quest after a time.

In all, there are four heroes in the novel, all presumably in the same age range, all "just four little kids" as described by our hero, Max Quick, himself. He's accompanied by Casey Cole, his female sidekick (and not his girlfriend, as he insists); Ian Keating, a British transplant, here playing the role of Spock to Quick's Kirk; and, of course, Sasha, who comes in late and serves mostly as a plot device, conveniently tripping or falling into trouble when necessary. As to the plot ...

All The Time In The World

The action begins for our heroes as it ends for everyone else on the planet: on April 9th at 3:38, in the middle of a solar eclipse. That's the moment at which time itself stops. Mothers are frozen in the middle of making breakfast, fathers are paralyzed as they drive to work, and children are stuck fast as they head home not to play GTA San Andreas, but to eat lemon and jelly sandwiches and play hide-and-seek (for such is the world of Max Quick). In fact, it's not just people who are affected, but presumably the entire universe itself: the wind stops blowing, flocks of birds halt in mid-flight, and waves become frozen on the ocean, each immobile and essentially as hard as stone.

As it turns out, not everyone is stuck in time. There's Max, of course, who quickly discovers that while the rest of the world is stopped, he has gained respectively supernatural powers, able to "whoosh" about with great speed and hear across great distances since everything else in the world has fallen silent and still. He soon rescues Casey, who has discovered two powers: first, the ability to "fall inside" mirrors in order to escape from danger; and second, the ability to rub objects to "heat them up" and unfreeze them from time. This discovery leads to one of the more unintentionally amusing lines in the book if you're an adult:

Everything seems to be like that: slow and sticky -- but I figured it out: if you rub it and heat it up, it comes loose and then you can use it." She beamed.

The unwitting double-entendre there makes me question the assessment that The Pocket and the Pendant is "a fast-paced adventure sure to thrill young and old alike." Clearly, the author intends this line to be read from the perspective of an innocent child, discovering a secret and describing it in perfectly obvious and appropriate terms, but I think it is likely that only a child (or "young adult," as the library likes to call them) will be able to take that at face value. But on with the story...

Max and Sasha, in an attempt to uncover the mystery behind the stopped time, soon encounter a rogue band of youth gone wild, which leads to a very clever battle set inside a time-stopped bank of fog, and the eventual capture of our heroes. Luckily, they discover a disgruntled member of the gang (Ian) who is able to help them escape via a magical book-cum-"deus-ex-machina". At first, it seems strange that the novel interjects a magical tome into what had previously been a more science-oriented storyline, and stranger still that the characters all seem to just accept this magical object at face value. But as the plot unfolds, this becomes more acceptable to the reader; as we discover, not only is there a reason for magic and science to exist side-by-side within the story, but there's a reason why the main character seems capable of embracing it all without questioning it.

As the story evolves, we encounter more quantum-bending books, a Nam-shub (Sumerian incantation), UFOs, an entire army of alien centurions, and an insidious plot that involves a rogue planet, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian "gods" and the interference of Snow Crash's favorite god, Enki, one of the novel's most interesting characters despite the fact that he (and, perhaps, the author) seems to believe that all the world's problems can be solved by giving troubled children a bowl of ice cream (this happens three times in the course of the novel).

Enki gets some of the more interesting (and some of the more adult) dialogue in the novel, though I hesitate to use the term "dialogue" since it's mostly "monologue." Enki is not alone, however. Heroes, villains, diary entries and side characters all spout off great gouts of plot for pages and pages, at times explaining backstory, at other times (as with Enki) seeming to speak the author's own philosophical beliefs as they attempt to justify thousands of years of history, archaeology, religion and philosophy in one neat little storyline. One entire chapter is devoted to Enki's reconciliation of Sumerian mythology and Biblical references to Adam, the Nephilim, the Flood, Babel and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Not that it's done poorly here; on the contrary, it's done as tidily as Stephenson does in Snow Crash (which is to say, solidly enough to serve the plot, but probably not enough to stand up to actual scrutiny in the "real world"). Surely the RIAA would disagree, however, with Ian's concise assessment that good and evil are akin to users who share on P2P networks, and those who do not (respectively).

The Pocket and the Pendant

As Enki explains to our heroes, "The Pocket" of the title is the little "pocket of time" within which the characters find themselves through the course of the novel. To reveal more about the nature of this "pocket" is to spoil parts of the story, but suffice to say that it goes far deeper than your typical "time has stopped" trope, and involves weaving the concept of neural networks, the nature of consciousness and quantum mechanics into what Enki dubs "Dreamtime."

Various objects called omphalos -- special amethysts, diamonds, rubies, lapis lazuli, emeralds, etc. -- "contain echoes of the very Dreamtime itself", allowing users to alter reality in various ways. Some omphalos are used to allow users to travel faster, others to communicate across great distances. "The Pocket" was created by an omphalos called the Chrononomicon, and "The Pendant" is another omphalos which the novel's villains are searching for within "The Pocket." It has the capability of affecting the entire human race, and whether or not they can be stopped before achieving their goal is ultimately on the shoulders of Max Quick and his three friends. If the heroes succeed, the world will be saved from evil. If they fail, all humankind will be enslaved, just like the band Planet Furious, who are, late in the book, "thawed out" and forced to perform onstage for an army of villains in what has to be one of the silliest scenes in the novel.

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with "silly" in a children's book. Scenes like this are bound to capture the imagination of younger readers. But adult readers are going to have a hard time grasping the relevance of "Johnny Jupiter, Sophisto, Frankie Mercury and Sid Venus" in a novel which, pages earlier, was going on about quantum mechanics and the nature of reality.

Who's The Audience?

This issue is addressed in this review over and over again, precisely because of the author's apparent intent:

"The novel is written for both adults and young adult readers alike," says Jeffrey in a press release about the novel. "I consciously wrote in a fast-paced and humorous style accessible to both audiences, yet didn't want to create something 'kiddie'.

All told, before the book is out, we'll have encountered references to ancient Sumeria, Judeo-Christian mythology, quantum physics, time travel and astronomy -- heavy, weighty topics that will probably fly over the heads of many children reading the book. We'll also have encountered children calling each other names, characters who speak in "kiddie" language to one another, a "Beep-o-tronik" cell phone and a "Vicious Cycles 'Sportstervarius' motorcycle." These two things -- adult language, and childish language -- exist not together, but side by side, separate and noticeably unequal. Consider the following, from page 180 and 181, respectively:

It was the same kind of feeling one got looking at an Escher print. It was numinous, chthonic.
The gestalt was one of controlled geometric chaos -- triangular, dodecahedral, octagonal and tetrahedral shapes in every direction.

"...I forgive you." She paused a moment and then added, "I even forgive you for what will happen to my Mommy."

The novel certainly has pieces that are appropriate for older readers, and it definitely has pieces that are intended for younger readers, but I am hard pressed to say that it can appeal as a whole to either group. Due to the nature of the story and the fact that the protagonists are children, my gut instinct is to suggest it's definitely a children's book. I can see a child enjoying the book much more easily than I can see an adult finding it all fulfilling. Slashdot is mentioned on page 67, but I don't think the typical Slashdot reader would find the novel really and truly fulfilling. However, their children probably would, especially if mom or dad was there to explain what "numinous" or "chthonic" meant.

This is not to say that adults cannot enjoy such novels. Many a children's novel has been embraced by adults: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, A Wrinkle In Time and The Hobbit spring immediately to mind, and of course there's the ubiquitous Harry Potter and much of Piers Anthony's work, especially the oft-forgotten Mode books. Such novels contain worlds where youthful innocence is threatened on the path toward experience, and children (or hobbits) are forced to grow up faster than they might like in order to save themselves and others. The Pocket and the Pendant is at home with these books, not with Stargate or Snow Crash. And that's good company to be in.

Nuts & Bolts

It's worth mentioning the book's layout, at least in passing. The number of lines varies from page-to-page, with some pages leaving a more comfortable 1/8" white gap above the rule at the bottom, and others cramming an extra line in there, seemingly at random, but likely due to the somewhat inconsistent spacing between sections within each chapter, some of which are quite wide, others narrower. Rather than being fully-justified (with even edges on both sides), the book is merely left-justified, with ragged right edges. While not a mortal sin, it's at least venial, making the text hard to read in some places where words sorely in need of hyphenation are instead dropped to a new line:

For his part, Max was surprised to find that there was something disturbingly
familiar about Mr. Siren also. Then, Max caught a flash, a snippet
of...something. He blinked in confusion and tried to concentrate.

From a stylistic standpoint, one annoyance is that the novel's main villain has a habit of speaking in pseudo-archaic English, with "thee," "thou" and "thy" peppering her speech, presumably in an effort to make her seem older and more alien. While I would normally consider this as egregious a sin as George Lucas burdening Jar-Jar Binks with Jamaican patois, I will let Jeffrey off the hook here since he has one of the characters question this very issue late in the novel, in a rather amusing scene.

Far worse, however is the author's unfortunate habit of liberally sprinkling his text with italics for emphasis. I cannot find a single page in the book that does not contain at least one or two italicized words. In general, one uses italics as a means of emphasis only sparingly, and the overuse in this novel leaves the reader a bit seasick, riding a roller-coaster of emphasized words up and down, up and down. Much of the time, one can chalk this up to the gushing exuberance of an excited speaker, but at times, such emphasis seems wholly out of place within the context of a given sentence:

Oh, it is you, I knew it was," she said, shaking her head. "But how can it be? I don't understand ... but I have no doubt: it's you alright."

Overall the book is well-edited, with only a handful of typos to be found throughout. One of the most amusing, repeated twice, is to be found on page 201 near the end of the novel, where a character unfortunately serves ice cream not in "bowls" but in "bowels." That's one your kids might actually notice, and laugh uproariously at.

Unintentional potty humor -- some things are funny no matter how old you are.

In Closing

For those who enjoy many of the other books mentioned above, The Pocket and the Pendant is a good, fun read. However, it's hard to get past the notable imbalance between the book's "adult" and "kiddie" elements. It will be interesting to see where the author takes his characters should he write a sequel to this novel, and if he's able to more thoroughly blend the weightier language with a consistently child-friendly storyline.

The best advice for those who are unsure of whether or not this is for them is to check it out themselves. A free preview of this novel, including the first two chapters, is available in .pdf format for immediate download from print-on-demand-publisher Lulu.com and www.pocketandpendant.com. The P&P website also includes cover art, news and updates about the book, a blog, and several other reviews.

You can purchase the Pocket and the Pendant from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done. 1) right to keep and bear code - by arashiakari

Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United States) under the second amendment?

Neal:

Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can't tell whether this is a troll. I'm going to assume it's not, and answer the question seriously.

I'm no constitutional scholar but I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say "No, anything that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government is covered by the Second Amendment." There might be something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court Justices to see it that way. I suspect the answer is no. It's just too easy for them to say "it is not a weapon." To me it seems a lot easier simply to invoke the First Amendment.

Also, remember that there might be unwanted side effects to classifying code as weapons. In the U.S., where the right to bear certain weapons is written into the Constitution, it might seem like a clever way to secure access to such code. But authorities in other countries might say "look, even the U.S. Government defines this string of bits as a weapon---so we are going to outlaw it."

It's difficult to form an intelligent opinion on issues like this without doing a lot of work. One has to learn a lot about the issues and then think about them pretty hard. I haven't really done so, and so I'm inclined to trust people who have, like Matt Blaze. At crypto.com he has posted some interesting material that is germane to this topic.

See http://www.crypto.com/masterkey.html

and especially

http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html

To make a long argument short, what I have learned from Matt's writings on the topic is that (1) it's not a new issue, (2) it's a First Amendment issue, and (3) it's best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public.

2) The lack of respect... - by MosesJones

Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe" and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension by the "quality" press.

Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?

Neal:

OUCH!

(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)

First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.

To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral tradition---which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn. And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with the painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.

But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called "literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system.

Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings. Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's personality flaws---I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book "The System of the World" by one critic who found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher. And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life. They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me somewhat of the split between Christians and Faeries depicted in Susannah Clarke's wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." The faeries do whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as ludicrously irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve or appreciate their freedom.

Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males 18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.

In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on the Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with Neil Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his blog

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp

the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when viewed from the other side.

Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system I am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.

Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman publishes Anansi Boys, all of his readers are going to know about it through his site and most of them are going to buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in the New York Review of Books, or care what that review says.

So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.

What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews. For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of wildcat review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write about it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing apparatus. It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one of my books.

It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as Slashdot is Exhibit A.

3) Singularity - by randalx

What are your thoughts on Vernor Vinge's Singularity prediction. Is it inevitable? Will humans become a part of it or be left behind by this new "species"?

Neal:

I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

I know Vernor. To know him is to respect him. He kicked my ass (as well as J. K. Rowling's and Greg Bear's and a few other people's) at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and on top of that he knows more physics than I ever will. So I don't for a moment think that he is peddling any such ideas with his prediction of a singularity. I am only telling you why I have a personal mental block as far as the Singularity prediction is concerned.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.

5) What are you reading these days? - by IvyMike

Since you're Neal Stephenson, I suspect the answer could be something like "surveys of ancient Sumerian accounting systems".

If that's the case, please include a work of modern fiction or two in your list; something you think that a fan of your work might also enjoy. :)

Neal:

Fiction I have lately read and enjoyed:

Set this House in Order by Matt Ruff
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Iron Council by China Mieville
Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
The I Love Bees alternate reality game
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke
The Fool's Tale by Nicole Galland (in galleys; soon to be published)
Short story collections by Etgar Keret: The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God, and The Nimrod Flip-out. Last time I checked, The Nimrod Flip-out was only available from an Australian publisher named Picador, but this should pose only the most minor of challenges to Slashdot readers. Keret is a young Israeli writer who has also done some work in film and graphic novels.

Nonfiction:

Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Lincoln's Cooper Union address
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

6) storygramming -by Doc Ruby

You programmed computers before you wrote novels. Greg Egan shares that hyphenated career, and continues to illustrate his stories with Java applets [netspace.net.au]. Do you still program, possibly targeting the same subjects with your word processor as your compiler?

As _Snow Crash_ was originally designed as an interactive game, and such landmarks as _Myst_ have regenerated as (usually bad) novels, do you see the arrival of a truly multimedia story, delivered simultaneously in multiple media, anytime soon? By whom, specifically or generally?

Neal:

It has already happened in the form of the I Love Bees alternate reality game, which, as many of you must know, is a promotional campaign for Halo 2. I know the people who did it, but I have lost track of what I promised not to reveal publicly, and so will shut up for now.

I still program, but I tend to do it as a diversion from writing, and so there is little crossover between it and fiction writing. Modern programming is hairy and difficult for me to get a grip on. This is because (1) there is so much user interface code, which kind of makes my eyes glaze over, and (2) GNU type code is crammed with macros, compiler directives and switches that make it very difficult for me to read the source files. Lately my platform of choice has been Mathematica, which is expensive (compared to gcc) but makes it easy to do anything with a few lines of code. Mathematica makes it easy to do proper documentation, in that you can mix narrative material freely with executable statements.

For Cryptonomicon I needed to generate some illustrations of a cutaway view of the mountain where Goto Dengo was building his tunnels. It needed to have a rough, natural-looking profile that maintained its roughness, but still had the same overall shape, when I zoomed in on it for more detailed illustrations. I did this with a Mathematica notebook that used the classic fractal technique of midpoint displacement.

For the Baroque Cycle books I needed to convert my manuscripts, which were all TeX files, into a Quark format used by the publisher. So I wrote an emacs lisp program that churned through the TeX files looking for TeX escape codes and converting them to their equivalents in Quark. This was nasty and tedious but, in the end, reasonably satisfying.

7) Money - by querencia

One of the major themes in Cryptonomicon that carried over (in a big way) to The Baroque Cycle is money. You introduced some "futuristic" views of currency and of where money might be going in Cryptonomicon, and you skillfully managed to do the same thing, while explaining some of the history of modern monetary systems, in the most recent books.

You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems (barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess---and believe me, it is a wild guess---I'd say that money and the way it works is going to be a constant, not a variable.

8) BeOS - by Coryoth

When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line," you were very much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do you still use BeOS 5, or have you acquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or, instead have you embraced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?

Neal:

You guessed right: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of "In the beginning was the command line" is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

9) Travel tips for modern primitives? - by timothy

Mr. Stephenson:

I greatly enjoy your travel stories, both non-fiction (Mother Earth, Motherboard) and in particular your descriptions of the Philippines in Cryptonomicon.

Can you share some of the ideas you've developed for savvy trav'lin? For instance, how do you deal with carrying sufficient technology (whatever level you deem this to be) while minimizing the risk of theft, breakage, or loss by other means? Do you dress native or carry your entire wardrobe? [And broader, do you travel with something close to nothing, picking up necessary items as the need arises? What do you not leave home without?]

Do you carry any sort of self-defense means in some places, and if so What and Where?

Neal:

I haven't done that much in the way of adventuresome travel lately. Even when I was doing so, I was never the sort of hardened third-world travel geek that you are imagining. The thing is that when you go to such countries you can typically get a room in a five-star hotel for less than a hundred bucks a night. At that rate, it's easy to be a sellout and wallow in luxury. Staying in a dive is more romantic, but makes it harder to write. My excuse (if I need one) is that typically I'm not writing about backpackers and rural people in those countries; I'm writing about well-heeled expats whose natural habitat is airport bars and Shangri-La hotels. So that's where I tend to end up.

Re "self-defense means:" I am reminded of a history book I read recently entitled "Skeletons on the Zahara" by Dean King. It is about some American sailors who get shipwrecked on the Atlantic Coast of Africa and go through hell. Eventually most of them make it back to freedom with the help of some Arab traders based in Morocco. These traders range across the Sahara on incredibly arduous journeys. They are just about the toughest and meanest hombres you can possibly imagine. They've been through all kinds of fights and ambushes, plagues of locusts, sandstorms, etc. and come out on top. Because of their success they have acquired camels, horses, and weapons: not only swords and daggers but rifles and shotguns too. After having rescued the Americans, these guys go out on another journey in the desert, and find themselves surrounded by a few dozen people who are wretched even by the standards of the Sahara: no animals, little in the way of clothing, and no weapons except for bags containing stones. A fight breaks out. The traders discharge their weapons and kill everyone they shoot at: maybe half a dozen. Then before they can reload they are all killed by flying stones.

The best "self-defense means" when you are surrounded by a hundred million people of some other culture is to avoid dangerous places and figure out some way to get along with the folks around you.

10) Confidential Proposal, Off shore data haven (Score:5, Funny) - by SlashDread

Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country Nigeria.

I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Barrister Leonardo Akume, lawyer to the late Dr. Koffi Abachus, a brilliant Nigerian mathematician.

My former client, late Dr. Koffi Abachus, died in a mysterious plane crash in the year 1994 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind.

He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on data storage. It is said the data storage device he had developed, would be roughly ten times more secure compared to the latest quantum excyption techniques. The device was about the size of a steamer trunk, and stored on a privately owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr Koffi Abachus is also the King of the local tribe by heritage...

Neal:

Your proposition sounds quite reasonable. In order for me to provide you with the support that you need, I will need for you to wire $100,000 into my Swiss bank account...

Oh well.. Should there BE a data haven? If so, where?

Neal:

At this point, that is probably a technical question that I might not be competent to answer. I can carry a gig of encrypted data on a thumb drive now, and it doesn't cost much. Soon it'll be smaller and cheaper. Millions of people in different countries carrying gigs of data on thumb drives, iPods, cellphones, etc. make for a pretty robust distributed data storage system. It is difficult to imagine how one could build a centralized, hardened facility that would be more robust than that. But perhaps there's some technical or regulatory angle that I'm failing to appreciate here. I have not kept up to speed on this since Cryptonomicon.

11) Blue Origin - by Concerned Onlooker

The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin [blueorigin.com], a company that is working to "develop a crewed, suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space flight?

Neal:

Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.

Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.

As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

12) Do new publishing models make sense? - by Infonaut

Have you contemplated using any sort of alternative to traditional copyright for your works of fiction, such as a flavor of Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license? Do you feel that making money as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term, or do you think that writers like Lessig who distribute electronically via CC are merely indulging in a short-lived fad?

Neal:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved on. My suspicion is that everything that's been going on lately will amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to making money for themselves and for authors.

You can use the brick-and-mortar bookstore as a way to think about this. There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there's no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it's true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you're going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that's only the smallest part of what publishers actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.

jmweeks writes "Neal Stephenson's The Confusion is an exhausting read--not simply in keeping track of the dozens of major characters, many with two or three names or titles or hyphenated titles; not due to its quite literal circumnavigation of the globe; not even, or at least not only, because of its interminable cycle of fortune and misfortune: Its 800-plus pages are much more taxing for what Stephenson leaves out than what he includes." Read on for the rest of jmweeks' review. The Confusion author Neal Stephenson pages 813 publisher William Morrow rating 8 reviewer Jose M. Weeks ISBN 0060523867 summary An exhausting and extraordinary read from the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.

The Confusion is the second volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (preceded by last year's Quicksilver , to be concluded later this year with The System of the World). Quicksilver tells two stories: the political and scientific development of Europe at the beginning of the Enlightenment, through the person of Daniel Waterhouse, and the adventures of "Half-cocked" Jack Shaftoe, a vagabond tramping around France and Germany, as he rescues a young woman named Eliza and does his best to win her. As the story develops, Eliza leaves the life of adventure and enters the world of politics, acquiring for herself along the way the title of Countess in France and Duchess in England; Jack falls so deeply to adventure that he disappears completely from the final third of the novel. We leave him to a certain death, an oar-slave aboard a pirate ship, half-insane with syphilis.

As The Confusion begins, Jack, in the first of dozens of reversals of fortune, wakes cleansed of syphilis by a boiling fever, rowing for a much less brutal master than expected, and somehow a member of a cabal with (I suppose by definition) a Plan. Eliza finds herself relieved of a staggering fortune and held, for practical purposes, under house arrest.

This volume follows the largely-separate stories of these two characters over the course of fourteen years, interweaving them chapter-by-chapter, as they move toward some ultimate climax that, of course, we will not have reached by this volume's conclusion. Stephenson labels each of these, though they are non-contiguous, as a book of The Baroque Cycle. Jack's story is book four, "Bonanza"; Eliza's, "Juncto", is book five.

Lazy critics will certainly remark that The Confusion has an appropriate title. Those who read at least two-thirds of it may notice that Stephenson presents a definition of "con-fused" (solids melted and then allowed to run together and mix) that bears a certain resemblance to the structure of this novel. But I read the title more as a reference to a period of time, at the cusp of the Enlightenment, in which all of Europe seems taken aback (another term for which Stephenson provides the origin, which he positively revels in doing). The world is in the midst of a deep depression, and the great confusion then is, what exactly is money?

Indeed, one gets the impression that The Baroque Cycle could just as well have been titled "How Money Got To Be That Way." Late in this novel, when Stephenson compares foundries to heartbeats, it becomes very clear that what we've been witnessing throughout The Confusion is the path through the gushing arteries and trickling capillaries driven by that heart. I recall now that in Cryptonomicon Stephenson spent an uncomfortable amount of dialog on the financial inner-workings of corporations. At the time I dismissed it as the ramblings of a particularly pedantic character; now I'm beginning to wonder if, inside Stephenson's hacker/geek-novelist facade, there isn't an accountant just screaming to get out.

Yet I make it sound dry, and Stephenson is anything but: in The Diamond Age he made Turing machines seem exciting, in Cryptonomicon it was cryptography and computer programming and mathematics in general--and he did so without the cheating we've been forced to accept these days, especially in film. And here, in the ebb and flow of silver, Stevenson constructs revenge plays, alchemical conspiracies, and an engrossing picture of the Way Things Work. There is a slow and deep pleasure in learning, in understanding; his talent is to impart this with all the visceral immediacy of swordplay.

That is not to say that he is above actual swordplay. Or conspiracies of piracy and murder and torture. In the world of Jack Shaftoe we have adventure packed so thickly that Stephenson finds he can't quite fit it all in: We follow Jack through each daring escape, each execution of an intricate plot that doesn't quite go according to plan--then we cut to the next chapter, months or years later, in which Jack has somehow found himself again destitute and in great peril. We spend half the chapter trying to figure out exactly what he's gotten himself into, and how, and what precisely happened to all of his co-conspirators, and the other half (once they've coincidentally reunited) watching them plot once more.

The worst of these is about half-way through The Confusion: After Jack and his cabal leave us successful in carrying out a particular plan, we return to Jack to find he's been working in an animal hospital in Hindoostan, hung in mid-air so that all the blood-sucking patients, from mosquitoes to ticks to giant centipedes, can feed. As he is displacing native workers I can only assume this is an elaborate pun on the word "scab." (His jokes, when they misfire, are horrendous. Example: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.") We find his companions have been scattered by a pirate ship (filled exclusively with female pirates) and Jack has been waiting patiently three years for the narrative to return to him. This was the point I nearly put the book away.

I can accept the cyclic reversals of fortune; I can accept the method of storytelling that begins in the middle and fills in back-story as it moves forward; I can accept a very long middle volume of a trilogy, which by nature has no real beginning or end. Together though, these do exhaust my patience and at times my attention. The Confusion would be a much better novel written completely at 1000 pages than it is part-summarized at 800.

Now I fear I'm being too negative. The novel dips at the center, but it shines in every chapter concerning Eliza, and toward the end it even shines for Jack. Eliza's talent lies mainly in manipulation, and so much of her story involves cryptic political moves, hints being dropped, and relationships being exploited. As the novel begins she is still young, and her motivation is mainly revenge. She is a the Stephenson heroine: Sharply intelligent, beautiful in a fierce sort of way, sexually uninhibited, and though morally centered, vicious when wronged. (He understands his audience--geeks, male, young--and he has a pretty good idea of what they want.) As she grows older, she softens, or at the very least she becomes to some degree satisfied.

There is maturity here, for Stephenson's characters and for Stephenson himself. Moreso than anything he's so far written. He allows his characters the room, the experience, the years it takes to fundamentally grow. There is more to it than that, though: there is the classical resonance, Jack's journey with The Odyssey, the reluctant Esphahnian revenge play with Hamlet, the general Shakespearean method of History, melding the reality of Kings and Dukes with the artistic truth of fiction. Stephenson has in The Baroque Cycle given himself a canvas broad enough that he can truly develop.

About the ending: though Stephenson need not really bother to end this book, as it is incomplete until the third volume is published, he does make an effort. What it suggests about the further story is intriguing, but it suffers from the same deficiencies, as an ending, as plagues his other novels: It is tied together clumsily and it doesn't really make all that much sense. It is painfully abrupt. I think, though, that I have come to understand why Stephenson ends his books this way: his characters are so vivid, so capricious, that they drive his stories anywhere but the ending he had in mind. He closes a book not in completion so much as surrender.

Disregarding Snow Crash, which is of another class completely, this is the best book Stephenson has so far written. I score it an eight, but I do so on a scale broader than the nine Slashdot previously gave Quicksilver: The Confusion is the superior novel.

You can purchase the The Confusion from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

CosmicDreams writes "The CRN (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology) reports that nanofactories (like the ones that were installed in every home in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age) will arrive "almost certainly within 20 years". In short they claim that molecular nanotechnology manufacturing will solve many of the world's problems, catalyze a technologic revolution, and start the greatest arms race we've ever seen. They conclude the risks are so great that we should discuss how to deal with this technology so that we don't kill each other when it arrives."

Thousandstars writes "I saw the article on the best and worst movies of 2003, and, being a literature geek, I thought it would also be appropriate to ask for the best and worst books of 2003. In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list. How about everyone else?"

Christina Schulman writes " Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle, is the new doorstop from Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon . It's set in late-seventeenth-century Europe, and while it has a few links to Cryptonomicon, you don't need to read Cryptonomicon first. A bit of background reading about the English Civil War wouldn't hurt, though." Schulman's review (below) is enough to whet the appetite, without major spoilers -- perfect for those of us who've been waiting since the end of Cryptonomicon for another 900 pages. Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle author Neal Stephenson pages 944 publisher William Morrow rating 9 reviewer Christina Schulman ISBN 0380977427 summary More than you ever wanted to know about the English Restoration and the invention of calculus, with lots of explosions, syphilis, and piracy thrown in for good measure.

First, let's make it clear that Quicksilver is not science fiction. It's historical fiction, occasionally about science, for people who like science fiction, i.e. geeks. It has math, optics, and vivisection, but no computers, no code, and no high-speed pizza delivery.

This is also not a book that gets anywhere quickly. It's 900-plus pages, and it's not padded so much as it is fractal. Stephenson wanders down side tracks, stages elaborate adventures and morality plays, explores philosophical issues and geometric proofs, assembles obscure puns, and drags in all manner of famous people and events, purely for his own amusement. Either you sit back and enjoy the game, or you hurl the book (with effort) at the wall somewhere in the first few hundred pages.

Daniel Waterhouse is a seventeenth-century geek; his father's a prominent associate of Oliver Cromwell, but Daniel's more interested in Natural Philosophy than in decapitating kings and Catholics. At Cambridge, he befriends Isaac Newton; later he becomes sort of a grad student and chief bottle-washer to the Royal Society. He starts out as naive observer of London politics, but over a few decades, gravitates into the intrigues of both the Court and the European intelligentsia. Just as Lawrence Waterhouse befriended Turing in Cryptonomicon, Daniel Waterhouse orbits Newton and Leibniz. It seems to be the fate of Waterhouse men to be brilliant thinkers eclipsed by the geniuses of their age.

Jack Shaftoe is a legend in his own time, a thief and mercenary who propels himself around Europe on sheer balls and avarice. He bumbles into and out of ridiculous scrapes, including an ostrich-chase at the Siege of Vienna that results in his rescue of the slave-girl Eliza from a Turkish harem. Eliza's business savvy draws the pair back across Europe to Amsterdam, where Eliza becomes entwined in both the Dutch stock exchange and the court of Versailles.

Cryptonomicon readers will remember the improbably long-lived Enoch Root, who shows up occasionally to nudge the plot along. Most of the story takes place between 1655 and 1689, but it opens with Enoch in Massachusetts in 1713, interrupting Daniel's efforts to found MIT by presenting him with a summons from England. Daniel spends the next several weeks being chased around Plymouth Bay by the pirate Blackbeard, only to have his plot thread left dangling with no apologies. Either it will be picked up in the sequel, or Stephenson is attaining a new degree of sadism.

Where Cryptonomicon was about secrecy and deception, Quicksilver is about revealing the hidden and the unknown, and the free dispersal of ideas and money. Stephenson uses quicksilver as an unsubtle symbol of the scientific discovery that was beginning to percolate through the known world. He highlights the dichotomy between the religious viewpoint, of a world that began in perfect knowledge and order and has steadily decayed since the Fall, and the scientific viewpoint, of a chaotic world that is slowly being brought into order and the reach of understanding. Much of this understanding was accomplished through the efforts and correspondence of the Royal Society, which operated in a state of excitement, enthusiasm, and confidence that they would decipher the mechanisms of nature: an attitude not unlike that of the dot-com startup era, but fueled more by wonder and less by naked greed.

Lesser writers dump blocks of expository prose into the narrative; Stephenson shamelessly shovels it into his dialogue. As a result, much of the dialogue is stilted, and the banter is painfully odd. You get used to it. Some bits are more blatant than others, such as a dialogue between Waterhouse and Newton and a Jewish prism-merchant, in which Stephenson trots out a brief overview of European coinage of the time, while cycling through a catalogue of synonyms for "Jew."

So, is Quicksilver worth the effort? On the one hand, it's an insightful look at both the Scientific Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. On the other hand, it's got plague, pirates, astronomy, sex, explosions, daring rescues, religious strife, and the profound effect on European history of stockbrokers and syphilis. It's a terrific book, but don't expect it to resemble Stephenson's prior books in anything but ambition and length.

You can purchase Quicksilver from bn.com -- the official release date is September 23rd. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.