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Sneak Peek At Neal Stephenson's "Anathem"
Shawn M. Smith writes "Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle) has a new novel coming out in just a couple weeks — Anathem. Boing Boing has an excerpt from the amazing glossary (including a definition for 'bulshytt') so take a peek at a copy of an abridged glossary of neologisms and language-bending goodies from the book."
I read all 3 Baroque books, and I don't know why but I found them immensely entertaining while everyone else I know stopped somewhere in the first book (which in subsequent publications was itself turned into 3 books). They were like a kid's serial novel from the 1800's or something. Like reading an entire narrative based on all the "150 years ago in Scientific American" sections. The only thing that frustrated me about the books at all was not knowing whether I actually knew any accurate history after reading them, since large portions of the events and characters are fiction with enough reality thrown in to make it interesting. (Kind of like some of the Illuminatus Trilogy that way.)
E pluribus unum
(She's done with the book, I plan to pick up her copy soon.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Here's an opinion to add to your dissenting column:
The Baroque Cycle is brilliant. Well worth the read. The philosophical argument that the differences between Leibnitz's worldview and Newton's still infect the discourse of modern american politics and religious thought - that alone is brilliant enough to make it worthwhile. On top of that, it's also damn fun.
While I agree that the Baroque Cycle trilogy was a more difficult read then Cryptonomicon I felt that it stood on it's own as a good and accurate historical fiction.
I thought that describing the diseases available at the time was interesting. We get kidney stones, they get bladder stones, which do not pass and will kill you.
The scene where Westinghouse is going through the flea infected rooms during the plague in order to pick up some experiment for Robert Hook was really creepy. (You could hear them ticking off your boots...)
Yes there was more to digest, and didn't have as much action/adventure it did have a fair share.
How about the intelligence test, where they were trying to get through a country. They were taken to the side one by one and shown a gun. If they knew what the gun was, they were immediately drafted into that countries army. If you were intelligent you would feign ignorance and be rejected for use in the armed forces.
There was a lot of good stuff in those books. You just can't read them over a weekend.
My belief is that Stephenson still hasn't found a way to finish a novel properly, so he keeps writing them longer and longer, trying to find the ending.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"