Locus Interviews Neal Stephenson

Embedded Geek writes "Locus, the trade magazine of Science Fiction, has an interview with Neal Stephenson in their August issue. Excerpts can be found here. A teaser: 'The world of the 'Baroque Cycle' happens to be 99% factual history, or as close as I can come to it, but what readers of this kind of fiction are looking for is the ability to become immersed in a different world. That's why there is a big crossover between historical fiction and SF.' An interesting read for his long time fans or anyone just wondering what all the fuss is about." So this is a teaser for a teaser, but this makes me want to shell out the $8.

Comments

Baroque Cycle

[JTWYO]

I've really enjoyed Neal's previous books, but I find the Baroque Cycle books to be a little too long-winded and exposition-heavy. It's almost like he suffered through all this research to write the books, so now he's going to make the reader suffer through it too. I just didn't find the first one to move very well under the weight of all that explaining.

I still consider Snow Crash to be a classic, though, precisely for how light on it's proverbial feet it is.

Re:Baroque Cycle

[0111 1110]

I wasn't too thrilled with Snow Crash. I did read it though. For me Cryptonomicon was his great work. I have read that book so many times and was breathlessly awaiting the "prequel", Quicksilver. What a letdown. It didn't have any of the spirit of the original. None of the humour or the witty, clever conversations. I found it to have no redeeming features. I was shocked. I haven't bothered to even skim his latest one.

What annoys me far more than any long windedness is the characters themselves. Particularly that female, beautiful, intelligent, clever, wise, and otherwise completely perfect human creature that became some kind of main character by the name of Eliza. Grrrr. Sounds to me like his wife was doing the writing or something. Soon after "meeting" her I longed to see her die a grisly death.

I had liked all of his previous female characters, but Eliza was a totally one dimensional PerfectFemale. Yawn. She was also totally portrayed like a modern American Woman which is very very far from the reality at the time. Actually some of his other female characters in the book don't fare much better. Eighteenth century my arse! I wouldn't be surprised if they were all just carbon copies of his wife's basic personality.

Re:Baroque Cycle

[Daleks]

I never touched Baroque Cycle because Quicksilver made me want to stab my eyes out with a dull spoon. Eventually I just snapped after Stephenson felt he had to described the cityscape of London for the zillionth time. Cryptonomicon was fun, but it's as if he took the worst of that book and magnified it to create Quicksilver.

Re:Baroque Cycle

[TheAcousticMotrbiker]

I wasn't too thrilled with Snow Crash. I did read it though. For me Cryptonomicon was his great work. I have read that book so many times and was breathlessly awaiting the "prequel", Quicksilver. What a letdown. It didn't have any of the spirit of the original. None of the humour or the witty, clever conversations. I found it to have no redeeming features. I was shocked. I haven't bothered to even skim his latest one.

To each his own &c &c.
The whole royal society bit can be a bit too geeky I guess, but I found both books an excellent read

Good author

[bgackle]

I think I'd read anything by a guy that is able to make a mathematical plot out of the main character's labido.

That is a great article..

[joeldg]

I think my favorite part of that article was this:

The analogy (which I've used a lot before) is to the electric guitar. Thomas Edison made electricity into a consumer product and developed the light bulb, probably anticipated washing machines and stuff, but he sure didn't anticipate the electric guitar! That was far too weird of an idea. No one could have predicted that the descendants of slaves could have adopted this and come up with what would become the dominant form of popular music in the whole world. That's the kind of thing real societies do with real technology. One of the things Gibson has achieved is that he put some of that into his world. We've got information technology. How is it going to be used, not just by engineers who design products but by regular people who pick this stuff up and turn it to their own weird ends? Spam is another thing kind of like the electric guitar, though it's much darker, less palatable. Clearly the people who originated the technology never in their wildest dreams could have imagined that everyone on Earth who has e-mail would get 30 penis enlargement advertisements a day!

From my HA profile here

great stuff..

Re:That is a great article..

[GuyFawkes]

Thomas Edison didn't do dick because he was a Direct Current freak, Tesla was the man.

Such an apalling and fundamental error tells you everything you need to know about stephenson's ability as an SF writer.

SF needs to relearn brevity

[rhysweatherley]

I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but the Baroque Cycle ... got 2/3rds into Quicksilver and put it away. I liked the story in the abstract and where he was going with it, but it was *way* too long at getting to the point.

I'm seeing more and more of this in SF - three and four part stories, each part longer than a novel used to be. Huge world-building sure. But do we really need to know about the characters every bowel movement? Move it along people!

I blame the book shops in part for this: they make more money off trilogies than standalone novels. But I fear that it is destroying the art of good storytelling. Snow Crash (a single novel) was intense. Quicksilver was glacial.

Re:SF needs to relearn brevity

[AzureWraith]

Don't publishers and authors also benefit from more books? And why would a trilogy bulk up the individual books of the series?

Re:SF needs to relearn brevity

[peacefinder]

I think Snow Crash and Zodiac show that he can write concisely. But in the Baroque Cycle, he has definitely chosen not to.

I just finished The Confusion last week. Quicksilver was an awfully slow read, but it was also packed with information. It turns out that a great deal of the apparently-irrelevant exposition in Quicksilver is necessary context for the second volume. I expect even more of it will become relevant in the third volume.

He could surely have told a more brief or lively tale, but I don't think the end result would have been so fulfilling as this is for me. But then, I like long, fiendishly complex books.

Things in The Confusion that I especially enjoyed: (Possible spoilers)
* King Looie (as Jack would call him) is portrayed as a very cool fellow, supremely confident. It's an oddly humanizing portrait of such a potent historical figure.
* The explanation for why Minerva is so fast.
* Eliza's revenge... it's breathtaking in its subtlety.

In the Beginning...

[FiloEleven]

...was the Command Line has got to be one of the best informative essays I have read. Nominally he's talking about operating systems, but he manages to throw in Batmobiles, Disney World, quake-proofing San Fran, and the venerable Hole Hawg drill. Quite entertaining even if you've already got the knowledge.

See? Now I'm reading it again instead of sleeping.

Another opinion piece

[Calroth]

I've always thought of The Baroque Cycle as Stephenson's masterpiece. Much like other masterpieces, it's long, inscrutable, and not meant to be read by mere mortals (insofar as a mass-market novel can be). It's long-winded, but if you can slow down and relax enough to read it, it's rewarding. However, readers of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon have reflexes of lightning (as do Slashdotters), which is why they don't tend to like it.

As some sort of thought experiment, I gave Quicksilver to one of my friends, with the intention of giving her Cryptonomicon later (since most people have read them the other way around). She got bored and gave up on it.

I found Quicksilver to be long and tedious, but The Confusion lifted things; Stephenson even wrote a half-decent ending! So here's hoping that The System of the World is as good or better.

Stephenson and Pynchon

[stevemm81]

I keep thinking there's an amazing parallel between Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon. Both wrote a couple of fairly easy to read, shorter humorous novels (OK, Stephenson's are much easier to read than Pynchon's, but you get the point...)Then, they both wrote long but excellent novels involving math, sex, World War II and a million other things; obviously, Cryptonomicon was influenced by Gravity's Rainbow.

But then, they both started writing long, excessively cute historical/science fiction about the Enlightenment. Pynchon had Mason&Dixon, which, for those who haven't read it, featured Vladimir&Estragon versions of the surveyors, in addition to every historical figure from that era, some anachronisms and other weirdness (a talking dog, a Feng Shui master...) a "Reverend Cherrycoke" and some other not-so-funny jokes like that.

Similarly, Quicksilver, which I could not even begin to penetrate, makes the mistake of being too cute, yet simultaneously dry, with all the Harvard/MIT references and every possible plot from the era (Leibniz/Newton, pirates, Ben Franklin, puritanism, etc.) I think I might have been able to finish it if it weren't for all those references to the "Massachusetts Institute of Technickal Arts."

Re:If you said, "Who?"

[plover]

I think Snow Crash started with one of the best hooks ever. Yeah, it deteriorated a bit with the whole falabala thing but it was still a really fun read. He had a lot of brand new ideas in that book, and wrapped them up in a lot of good humor. And he tied it close enough to reality that I'm hoping he's wrong about the future of America.

Like I said before, I considered The Diamond Age my penance for enjoying Snow Crash so much. (Penance is not a good thing, lest you think I enjoyed it at all.) It had some good sci-fi nanotech ideas, but pointlessly delved into funky religions, as does a lot of his writing at some point or another. Since I consider all religions quite offensive, and fervent believers of any faith to be slime equal to the Taliban, I find a made-up religion that's clearly designed to shock mainstream Christians even more offensive than usual. Note my choice of the word "offensive," not "interesting." The two concepts are not interrelated; at least not to me. Anyway, the book was tedious, and I vaguely remember bothering to finish it, hoping it would come back to something interesting. Nothing but disappointment there.

Cryptonomicon was OK, but it was a five-page plot wrapped in a 220 page story that was then action-packed into a 900+ page novel. At least it lacked the bullsh!t religious overtones of his other works. But Neal sure has a penchant for overstuffing a pair of covers. He either gets paid by the word, or gets serious kickbacks from the pulpwood industry. The guy definitely needs a more ruthless editor.

As for Quicksilver, well, it's an interesting setting, and I enjoyed a lot of the book. I consider it his second-best behind Snow Crash. Again he brings a couple of whack religious nuts into the story -- however, this time it's based on the historical reality of the powerful churches of the time, rather than some made-up tribal drum sh!t. I'm able to tolerate these fruits insofar as they add to the historical flavor, but I really don't have to get into their rituals to get to know them. And I really don't like seeing them ever take center stage. Other than that, the book had interesting ideas and a captivating setting. It certainly gave me more of an appreciation of the early scientists, and how much we really owe them for their groundbreaking work.

So yeah, I know I should read more than I do. Yikes, I just checked my shelf for the books stacked after Quicksilver. There are over two dozen technical books, nine history books (WWII and codebreaking, mostly,) four current events / political books, and three home improvement books. Sheesh. I need a vacation that doesn't involve tiling a bathtub, laying a brick walkway or siding a house.

Re:Yes but ...

[sllim]

Do yourself a favor and wait at least 6 months between finishing Snow Crash and reading Cryptonomicon.

Crypto is an amazing, incredible classic book that will blow your mind. You will feel smarter for having read it.
However it is as different from Snow Crash as one can get. So much so that if you are freshly done with Snow Crash you probably won't like Cryptonomicon.
This isn't a put down of either book.
But rather a compliment to the author. That he can write 2 distinctly different books that are both legendary among there fans yet are so different as to spoil a person.

Care To Expand A Bit On Your Criticisms?

[Silburn_Luke]

As someone who's just finished reading Quicksilver (and thoroughly enjoyed it BTW) I'm intrigued by some of your criticisms. I know a fair bit about the Smoke (and been living here for a while) and I thought he got the London bits down very well, especially for a non-native and a foreigner, but I don't know that much about Cambridge (neither Cantab. or Mass.) - could you give a bit more detail on how he got Cambridge/Trinity wrong IYO?

Also which bits of the history were especially Americanised or silly? I'm by no means well read in the period, so I'd like a better idea of where you think he went off the rails there.

Regards
Luke

Re:The meaning of "baroque"

[lidocaineus]

Just because a book has a huge amount of pages doesn't mean it has to be "long". Long, in this context, means arduous and painful. There are plenty of long volumes (page count wise) that don't feel long (arduous and painful).

In other words, what the grandparent is saying is that the book was written like crap by an author who is in love with his supposed wittiness (which doesn't show itself as much as he thinks it does). I'd have to agree.