Neal Stephenson's The Confusion Released

Jon Lasser writes "Neal Stephenson's 'The Confusion', second volume of his Baroque Cycle is released today. I received an advance copy and have a book review up here. The hypertext site for the trilogy is here. The short review: if you liked 'Quicksilver', this one is better; if you didn't, don't bother."

Comments

Re:Still haven't finished Quicksilver

[squidfood]

When I got Cryptonomicon, I put off reading that until I had a 15 hour flight. I got through the bulk of it in the 30 hour round trip.

I took Quicksilver on a 12-hour flight, and at hour 4 I was fervently praying for it to alchemize into a different book.

One the way back I bought three Terry Pratchetts in the airport instead.

The Neal Stephenson mini-HOWTO

[Onan The Librarian]

I'm assuming you mean you don't know who Neal Stephenson is, and/or why his work should be interesting to /. readers. His famous Snow Crash is a novel with about half its storyline taking place in a higher-tech cyberspace. Various other NS works and activities put him on /. readership radar, including his non-fiction "In The Beginning Was The Command-line..." (in which he espouses Linux with the memorable analogy with the Hole Hawg) and his novels dealing with the favorite post-cyberpunk theme of The Impact of Technology on Society (tm). I'm a fan, have read most of the novels, and even got all the way through QuickSilver. If any of this interests you, I'd recommend starting with Snow Crash for the fiction, and I think you can find some of his non-fiction on the Web. Btw, his Cryptonomicon was "echt geek", with a pretty good story and another memorable character (Bobby Shaftoe).

Visit Neal Stephenson on the web at:

[trickofperspective]

A somewhat more focused website than the link provided above (which essentially just recreates the wikipedia with references to the events of Stephenson's books).

Turing -- persecuted because of his sexuality

[sdedeo]

The weird ickyness kind of pervades your post here, but the ordinary viewer might be interested to know that Turing was hounded by the British government because of his sexuality, and forced to undergo weird pseudoscience injections of estrogen.

If that isn't a creepy tragedy that inspires sympathy (and also a fascinating story), I don't know what is. Scientist saves country, is slightly off-beat, is forced into suicidal depression by same government because of said off-beatness.

Meanwhile, if you want to watch persecuted Christian characters, why not go with the other fifty million people and watch Mel Gibson's film?

Metaweb

[Bullet-Dodger]

Didn't see it mentioned so, The Metaweb is Stephenson's wiki about Quicksilver (presumably information on the rest of the trilogy will be added). It's very interesting, has all kinds of information on the people and ideas in the book. Especially the annotations, add a lot of interesting background and details.