Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

First 26 Pages of Neal Stephenson's New Novel "Seveneves" Online

Posted by timothy on from the such-a-tease dept.

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."

8 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Dark And Stormy Night. by Ukab+the+Great · · Score: 4, Funny

    "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." sounds a lot like a sci-fi version of "It was a dark and stormy night."

    1. Re:Dark And Stormy Night. by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, this is the sci-fi version:

      It was a dark and stormy night; the lead sulfide rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of ammonium wind which swept up the streets (for it is on Omicron Theta 1 that our story lies). In other words, a typical day on the dark side of a tidally locked planet.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:Dark And Stormy Night. by Rinikusu · · Score: 4, Funny

      ...

      Go on.

      --
      If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
  2. Re:An Odd Bird by ralphsiegler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The stories i mostly enjoyed, but his sex scenes would bring the human race to an end if young people read them

  3. Re:An Odd Bird by Galaga88 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is Cryptonomicon popularly viewed as not being very good? I enjoyed it, not as much as Snow Crash, but what the hell can compare with that?

  4. Re:An Odd Bird by WTFmonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Most people I know who finished it enjoyed it, but I also know plenty of people who couldn't finish it (which I understand-- the pages describing the broken tooth on Turing's bicycle as a metaphor for a substitution cypher were torturous. And tortuous.).

    I mean, it's not high literature that scholars will be analyzing to death two hundred years from now, but Stephenson's books are generally creative and fun, and I enjoy them. OP's mom was probably at least half troll.

  5. Re:An Odd Bird by MaWeiTao · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:An Odd Bird by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Authors improve with age?

    Some do. For example, in many years time, Stephenie Meyer will be dead.