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First 26 Pages of Neal Stephenson's New Novel "Seveneves" Online
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."
Authors improve with age? In my experience that's not true at all. There seems to be a range during which authors are at their optimum and even if the actual age range varies from person to person. The consistency is how the decline manifests itself.
Too many authors shift from storytelling to exposition in their later years. Instead of describing a compelling narrative into which thought provoking concepts are intertwined they get totally fixated on those themes. So you get a book full of exposition in which virtually nothing happens until the very end; it's a book full of people talking instead of doing. It seems exacerbated by sticking to the same universe but I've seen it happen with unrelated novels by the same author.
I always bring up Frank Herbert and the Dune series as a case study for this phenomenon. It's not that there aren't facets of the later books that aren't interesting, but as a novel those later novels are not as engaging as the first, even when they had the potential to be so much more. And it seems that first novel is usually the best.
I'm in the middle of it at the moment. It's not high art or anything but it is a terrifically exciting read. It's the kind of page turner Dan Brown might write were he both technically and narratively competent.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
I'm on my fourth reading of the Baroque cycle. It's a fantastic read if you're the kind of reader that can keep two dozen characters clear in your head.
He does get loquacious in the details but as a true geek he understands that the details are important.
I don't think Cryptonomicon's ending was bad, I think it was missing. "I sorry Neal, we're just going to stop adding paragraphs once the book hits 1000 pages."
Neal had said in interviews that there were supposed to be three interconnected storie lines, not the two that made it. The third stoyline was to be in the future dealing with the effects of the first two, that's where the ending would have been.
Anathem was pretty brilliant. The first 300 pages seemed really boring at the time, but later you realize that they have to be there.
REAMDE is why I will probably read his new book. There were several times (especially in the first hundred pages or so) when I was laughing my ass off. Neal Stephenson is a good writer. There, I said it. (Oooh, what a limb I'm going out on!)
He's less of a good story-maker, and I think people who complained 20 years ago about him not being able to end a story well, would probably say he hasn't improved. I'm not sure I was all that excited by the story of REAMDE either. So either fuck the story, or just enjoy whatever you can within it. But that aside, the guy has a wonderful way with words and throughout REAMDE I kept thinking "I've missed this guy," since I hadn't read him since Cryptonomicon. Just get him talking.
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