8 ms·
Thought you meant you were Neal Stephenson for a second! Quick question: If I haven't read the book, but want to, are there any spoilers in the article?
by skizm 9y ago
Thought you meant you were Neal Stephenson for a second!
Quick question: If I haven't read the book, but want to, are there any spoilers in the article?
- aetherson 9y agoThere are spoilers for like the first few chapters, that's it.
- rtkwe 9y agoThere's one bit that could be a pretty big spoiler for the last book too.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 9y agoYou should definitely read the book, however. Hell, his entire corpus is one “whoa” after another. Still, Seveneves < Anathem, in my jumped up not so humble opinion!
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoIf you're interested in knowledge (broadly defined) then Anathem must be near the top of the list of your reads.
- turk184 9y agoI guess I'm not, then.
- wrinkl3 9y agoAnathem is probably Stephenson's best novel, and I say that as a huge fan of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash. I've actually found his last few novels lacking, still struggling to finish The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. and REAMDE. I do wish he'd stop trying to reverse-engineer RPG settings and got back to his post-cyberpunk roots.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago> The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Thanks; I'm a little surprised I missed that!
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoREAMDE - don't take it seriously. The author basically just took a vacation and wrote a mindlessly fun action book. If you read it as such, it's pretty good. It's definitely written from a Western perspective, but it does have some pretty astute insights about East European mentalities and culture (I say this as someone straddling the fence between West and East culturally). DODO is not pure Stephenson. The personality of the other writer (Nicole Galland) quite clearly changes the atmosphere. It's the first NS book where characters' emotions are actually given some attention, and the first where female characters are described from a first-person perspective (in a way that's convincing).
- 2sk21 9y agoREAMDE was surprisingly good and I learned a lot about gold farming in the process.
- Cerium 9y agoAs a fun adventure novel I loved REAMDE. It very much improved the experience that I had just spent a week in Xiamen before I started reading it!
- wrinkl3 9y agoFunnily enough, one of my big gripes with REAMDE so far has been that Neal doesn't seem to get the Russian mentality at all. I'm not familiar enough with the Hungarian culture to judge Csongor, tho.
- 2sk21 9y agoAnathem > Cryptonomicon > Snow Crash > all the rest I have read through Anathem at least three times and still enjoy it with each reading.
- 9y ago
- tripzilch 9y agoI loved Snow Crash (top 5 personal favourite book) and Cryptonomicon (I haven't read Seveneves yet), but I didn't like Anathem that much? (POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW) Especially the sort of quantum-ex-machina "twist" near the end was kind of off-putting to me. Everything so far was very well crafted and researched, but this part was a lot like "yeah multiple universes or something", but I'm not sure if it even works that way, if true. Also I found the constant back-translating of scientific discoveries and theorems with-a-different-name kind of tedious. I caught a lot of them, but many also not and I kept feeling like I was missing out on some cool references. Even though (IMHO) I have a pretty broad general knowledge of most important scientific/math theorems. There were some other bits I didn't like but that's personal taste. I loved the humour in Snow Crash (so much better reading than Neuromancer) and the hi-tech thriller action stuff in Cryptonomicon. Anathem seemed kind of slow, building a whole world and such (as I said, matter of taste, I don't get quite as excited about world-building in fiction/fantasy books, unlike many people).
- RUG3Y 9y agoThe characters in Seveneves feel like an afterthought that Stephenson needed to fill out a book about a cool idea he had. I personally found it uninteresting. Cryptonomicon is my favorite work of his.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoAnathem is the last book of his I read, and my favorite so far, partly because he suddenly remembered how to write endings. Does his later stuff continue that trend, or does he return to the "just sort of stops" style of Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon?
- aedron 9y agoSeveneves is in two distinct parts (near future and far future). Let's just say the last part is ... different than the first part.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoThe first phrase in the book is a massive "spoiler". Well, kidding, sort of. But no, there are no major spoilers in the article. A few very minor ones. Go ahead and read the book.
- dwhabcdefg 9y agoIMHO it's a pretty fun book, great for a long train ride. However it's a little problematic in places, with some weirdness with eugenics and the role of women's reproduction. Trying to be vague to prevent spoilers.
- usrusr 9y agoYeah, that part seemed a little forced, as if he was working backwards from the title, to accidentally arrive at the good stuff that comes before that in the book. Which makes it a good read nonetheless.
- grey-area 9y agoYes. The moon blows up in the book. Sorry to ruin it for you.