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Much as I love Neal Stephenson's novels, I really wish he'd stayed around at the writer's class he surely took until they had learned how to wrap up books and w
by lb1lf 4y ago
Much as I love Neal Stephenson's novels, I really wish he'd stayed around at the writer's class he surely took until they had learned how to wrap up books and write endings; more often than not, I turn the page on a Stephenson novel only to find it was the last...
(While I exaggerate a little, his stories do not end as much as END - I would be thrilled if he could spend a few pages wrapping it up in the end before leaving us waiting for the next title...)
The yarns he constructs are definitely entertaining enough for me to cope with this very minor annoyance, though.
- mayoff 4y agoNeal Stephenson discussing the “Stephenson can't write endings” meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal_stephensons_response_to_a_question_on_how_he/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal...
- haroldl 4y agoIt's clear he can do it: the ending of Anathem ties up everything very neatly and it is hard for me to imagine any major events happening in the characters' lifetimes that would rival the plot arc they've been through.
- lb1lf 4y agoThat sounds great; I have had Anathem on my bookshelf for years after life got in the way just after starting it; I had planned to finally read it this fall. Your observation makes me look forward to it even more, thank you!
- dwater 4y agoI like about 2/3 of Stephenson’s novels and Anathem took some work for me to get into. It really gets moving several hundred pages in and then the last 1/3 makes it all worth it.
- DIVx0 4y agoIt took me a few tries to get past the first 1/3rd of Anathem but once I did, it became one of my all time favorite books. Stephenson paints a rich rich world which I have often thought about outside of the major plot points of the book.
- ghaff 4y agoIt's one of those books where you have no idea what's going on for the first chunk of the book--and probably don't really realize what's fully going on until close to the end. Reading a book in at least partial confusion can be taxing and hard to hold interest. (Though I certainly liked Anathem quite a bit overall.)
- MichaelCollins 4y agoI don't think Anathem had a good ending per-se; rather the whole novel sets up a gimmick revealed at the end that explains away the lack of a good ending. It's still my favorite Stephenson novel though.
- sdwr 4y agoYeah, first half of Anathem was captivating, second half went off the rails.
- wizofaus 4y agoGoing by the comments on this thread, it's hard to believe everyone's talking about the same book... (which I haven't read, and I'm now torn as to whether I should!)
- sdwr 4y agoYeah it's wild! Second-guessed myself a tiny bit after seeing all the conflicting views. Minor spoilers: I loved the world-building and mystery in the first half, the main character lives in a post-apoc monastary, tons of great details and tidbits. It felt vibrant, deep, reminded me of Redwall and the 5th Harry Potter, with the sexual repression and small-scale rebellion against authority. He leaves the walls in the second half and stuff happens, I forgot most of it. The journey part felt like an afterthought. Something something aliens, really didn't feel earned or connected.
- noSyncCloud 4y agoIt's doesn't go "off the rails" at all, it completely and satisfactorily explains everything. It goes fast but it's good. I highly recommend it. You won't want to miss the worldbuilding, it's absolutely incredible.
- majormajor 4y agoI'm not sure "the whole novel sets up" and "gimmick" work together there. :)
- majormajor 4y agoAnathem is one of his few books with a denoument. It's not super long, but it's nice to have some scene hinting at where things are going next after the main crisis is resolved.
- bitwize 4y agoFraa Jad, being able to dimension-hop like Arbre's Rick Sanchez, probably has a few cool adventures left in him.
- sanderjd 4y agoI really felt this with Seveneves, which was otherwise one of my favorites of his. That book (or series maybe...) was nowhere close to over.
- baggsie 4y agoOne of my all time favourite books too. I'd recommend 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson if you've not read it - it's in a similar vein / world to the third part of Seveneves.
- sanderjd 4y agoThanks so much for the recommendation! I love Kim Stanley Robinson - Aurora and the Red Mars series are some of my all time favorite books - but have had trouble getting into the one of his I'm on right now (The Ministry for the Future). So I'm very pleased to get a different recommendation.
- John23832 4y agoLOL man I was looking for this comment. I cannot upvote this enough. He needs to cowrite something with Andy Weir. One can start, they collaborate on the middle, and then the other finishes.
- isoprophlex 4y agoFantastic idea, but PLEASE let Weir be the one to finish!
- m_mueller 4y agoOh man, I could already imagine a much extended Project Hail Mary…
- stuartbman 4y agoCame here to say this. Both Seveneves and Fall have long unending psuedo-epilogues which add little to the main story, but also don't really wrap anything up satisfactorily either.
- ghaff 4y agoMy issue with Seveneves is the first part (two parts I guess) was a pretty first-rate thriller then hard to believe transition to equally unlikely and not very interesting IMO outcomes which, as you say, weren't really wrapped up either.
- aoanla 4y agoI think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which forms the second part. (Part of the problem being that... there's really not a good reason for it - Stephenson's grasp of biology is much worse than his grasp of computing technology.)
- ghaff 4y agoOh I pretty much agree. There's a good argument that the whole first part of the book was to get him to a point where he could write the story he wanted to write. But, if so, there were probably better ways of getting to that point. And, even if you accept how they got there, the last part of the book just wasn't very compelling for me.
- usrusr 4y agoI kind of liked how openly seveneves seemed to be about building some fantasy world for stories (or perhaps even for some video game or p&p rpg, with a number of clearly cut out character classes?), then getting gloriously sidetracked in the background explanation story and finally accepting that the world just built isn't remotely as interesting as that background explanation story. It's as if at some point half way through he realized just how much he was being "typical Neil Stephenson" and decided to go with it, to ten-up himself. That last part almost seems like a form of trolling, the smallest viable story to claim "I had you on a sidetrack all the time and you did not even notice"
- narrator 4y agoBesides his endings, his couples intimacy scenes are also absolutely awful and the women can be cartoonish. He makes up for everything with his worldbuilding skill though. Authors lean heavily on the parts of writing they're good at. For example, I've been reading Asimov's foundation, and he almost ignores characterization and describing any of the locations in the book. The whole thing revolves around the plot.
- epberry 4y agoGood observation. I wonder if this is a reason the TV adaptations have been tough. Plot seems best enjoyed in written form whereas world building shines on screen.
- vsl 4y agoThe TV series is almost entirely disconnected from the novels. It’s like they picked and used some minor details at random and that’s it. It was bizarre.
- mgarfias 4y agoI _HATED_ Foundation as a kid. Only now do I realize that Asimov basically wrote a history book.
- bostik 4y agoRewrote. Foundation has been described as a condensed retelling of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Terminus is an outlier and an observer in a universe that goes through the convulsions of the slow, but inevitable breakdown.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago"Decline and Fall" has been an inspiration for maybe the first book. Being that it started the series, it set the pieces for the worldbuilding, but not the narrative of the whole saga. The later books are way more exploratory in how a society can / should be reconstructed. That being said, it's still 1950's science fiction. Good writing, but nowhere near the complexity of Stephenson's worldbuilding or G.R.R.Martin's politics / narrative threads.
- scbrg 4y agoWay, way back I ran into a comment on Slashdot saying essentially: Neal Stephenson doesn't really do endings. At some point, he just declares victory and stops writing. (not an exact quote, though the second sentence is probably very close to the original) I thought this was a hilarious observation, and shared it with my coworkers. This then became our standard phrase when we decided that a task wasn't really worth more development hours. So, should we spend another day polishing this, or do we just declare victory? So thanks, random Slashdot poster 20 years ago, for contributing to our company culture for a few years :)
- ghaff 4y agoI've certainly run into "Let's just declare victory and move on" in many different contexts. And it really is a pretty good philosophy for many situations.
- scbrg 4y agoI see, thanks for letting me know :) I'm not a native English speaker, and my main use of (spoken) English is with other non native speakers (such as my multinational dev team back then), so I'm sure there's a lot of common expressions I haven't run into. This is apparently one of them. And yes, sometimes it's definitely a good philosophy.
- sidibe 4y agoThe beginnings of his books are pretty difficult too, since he just drops you into a world with its own vocabulary and weirdness that takes forever to understand or in the case of Seveneves does many hundreds of pages of infodump details on how they build their space stuff. I guess the middle parts and ideas of his books are usually a thrill enough to make it worth the other parts.
- mercutio2 4y agoI said this about Neal Stephenson on Slashdot about 20 years ago, but… I don’t think it was particularly original thought at the time, my guess is you probably weren’t inspired by me :)
- alibrarydweller 4y agoI think in the last decade or so he certainly learned how to end (REAMDE had like 90 pages of climax) but I'm not sure the reader is actually better off for it. Seveneves denouement is almost its own book with its own characters and the end of Fall and Termination Shock just left me wanting to know the next development in their respective worlds.
- bsder 4y agoIt ain't just Stephenson who can't write endings. This seems to be a general failure mode of science fiction and fantasy writers from the last 4 or 5 decades. The reason I forgive Stephenson is because he can write a genuinely smart character. One the most infuriating things is reading a story where the "smart" character is clearly what a not-so-smart writer thinks a "smart" character is. Fantasy and alternate history is more prone to this than sci-fi, thankfully.
- robswc 4y agoYep! I love his works but both Cryptonomicon and Snow crash, its like... oh, that's the end? lol. I get its an artistic decision, because he clearly can write endings but I can't say I'm a huge fan of it. It can be ok when pulled off well (i.e. Sopranos) but I'm always thinking "this would be perfect with just one more chapter, at least."