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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."
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.
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?
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.
Authors improve with age?
Some do. For example, in many years time, Stephenie Meyer will be dead.