stupid hope and a penchant for pulp?

and why do i have the funny feeling that if i’d only read one, you’d have said that was insufficient for me to form an opinion?

I admit that getting through The System of the World, in my opinion the slowest of the Baroque Cycle, took me a few weeks and I spent most of that on the first 300 pages.

When I read Snow Crash, I was taking a linguistics course, and the “linguistic” ideas about language in the book jumped out at me immediately as a failure in research, but I thought it was a fun idea, anyway, and I liked the story built around it.

I find that I can suspend my disbelief fairly easily when reading Stephenson, but it seems like not everyone finds it so.

Zodiac was a great book, too.

Better, Braudel didn’t add anachronisms to make his Silly Valley fan crowd feel as though the world had always revolved around them. When you find a prefigurement of this decade in Braudel, which you probably will, it’s a lot more trustworthy.

I’d say the main character there isn’t a Mary Sue, although he is the usual underachieving hero-geek; insofar as he get new rewards it’s because he’s worked or even changed for them. I think Zodiac also does a decent job of realistic but not internal female characters; Zode-dude may not understand them, but what he observes is based on the assumption that women have internal consciousness connected by reason to their goals, and not necessarily connected to his goals.

That’s where the ‘non-player-character’ women in the doorstops fail; I haven’t decided whether Eliza is a NPC, but the poor woman brought out for Waterhouse’s leveling-up sex video certainly is.

What exasperates me is the constant implication that all three (science, economics, and warfare) have always beeen the work of men who were, in accidental and inherent characteristics, just like West Coast computer nerds are now.

I could not agree more. Some other commenters have stated that his characters don’t seem like Mary Sues. What they don’t get is that Stephenson is obsessed, nay, consumed with the idea of the quirky brilliant man. In the Diamond age it was the guy who did the groundbreaking nano work who got straight Cs in high school but learned more than all his classmates in his own scientific experiments in the local creek. In Cryptonomicon (the part I managed to finish) it’s the guy who does the groundbreaking crypto work who everyone at first thought was dumb because he was so brilliant. The idea that someone might be brilliant and do great work and not be some out-there, Feynmann-like, Val-Kilmer-in-Real-Genius type guy is one Stephenson is not interested in.

It’s simply wrong to say that he doesn’t plot. His plots are certainly not simple and straightforward, and do not always have an obvious payoff, but lots of stuff happens in his works. I love the scene in Quicksilver where Shaftoe escapes from shackles in a stable of a French nobleman and enters the house to find a costume party—with everyone assuming he is in costume, playing the character of himself, the famous Vagabond, which the nobleman intended to play. We had been set up for that scence for quite a long time, as we learned how Shaftoe was a vagabond of some repute whose actions always took on legendary proportion afterwards. But that scene was quite legendary without needing to be transformed by storytellers! How is that not plot? Do contemporary literary writers plot? Really? (I write this as someone with an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, but who loathes the artistic pretensions of those in that field).

Of course, I love Tristram Shandy and other novels that digress, so perhaps Stephenson plays to my preferences. My course in 18th century literature was by far my favorite literature course in college. And I love 1,000 page novels, too; why does everyone want books to be short? And works on a grand scale—why does everyone nowadays want to work in miniature? Sometimes it’s useful to get the sense of much of the whole, of the movement of many pieces across time. But it’s more than that. Stephenson does present a vision of history that I have never gotten anywhere else—perhaps you all have, but I don’t read engineering and economics that much, it’s not an area of expertise—and I feel that I learn from reading him. Especially about the importance of this sort of history. And as someone wrote above, he has a sense of the interconnectedness of all these strands of knowledge and history that is quite impressive—most people don’t have enough broad interdisciplinary knowledge to see the connections that he sees. Who has time to study all these different sorts of fields? What sorts of academics—at least the average ones—see these connections? It’s not the sheer amount of facts—it is the way they are put together. I’m sorry, I think the guy is brilliant.

And I think too he will be around for some time. Many people who might like him have not yet even heard of him—there are many non-science fiction readers, like me, who might cross over to read his books, but have no idea who he even is, yet. If you look on Amazon, the aubrey-matarin series readers (I’ve tried but never read them) are praising the Baroque Cycle. There are quite a few of them. And there are other categories of readers as well out there as well, I believe. who just might not know about his books.

A Bullet in the Head says things about honor, revenge, and sacrifice that Naked Killer does not, even though the original subtitles of the latter had the line “I still have time for the gastric lavage” and no John Woo movie does.

Setting aside Raymond Chandler here as a special case, Dashiell Hammett did things with the conventions of hard-boiled PIs that Mickey Spillane never did, and is a better writer of the same kind of stuff.

Wil McCarthy and Linda Nagata write better sf than Stephen Baxter does, both for their prose skills and for their grasp of human nature and characterization. Both can portray no-good boring shitheads without makign them the examplars of the whole race.

Simon and Garfunkel made better folk pop than a lot of other folks doing the same kind of thing at the same time, by virtue of superior craftsmanship and talent in the performance.

Stephenson is working in a well-established style. The big book full of exegetical ramblings and world tour is…well, take a look at Moby Dick, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum or Illuminatus!. It’s a kind of thing a lot of writers like to tackle.

Since you say “books”, plural, I assume you have read more than one of them in order to be able to make such a judgement. Why did you read any more after the 1st, if that was your opinion?

Cranky

“Science fiction, by the way, is still fiction. An author who merely wants to write about ideas can write non-fiction (which Stephenson does a bang-up job of, IMO). “It’s about ideas!” is not an excuse for things like bad plot, cardboard characters, leaden dialogue, etc.”

Yes yes yes, no excuses, it should attempt hold up to all the standards, yes. But the reality is is that it often doesn’t. SF is notorious for those faults, so now you know not to be surprised by them, be pleased when they are overcome, and enjoy its strengths.

You don’t go to a Jackie Chan movie for character development or plot, but for kick-ass acrobatics.

however, having said that, i’ve been thinking about snowcrash recently – i picked up kripke’s little book on the private language argument, and it struck me that i was seeing almost exactly what was described in the book. reading the first chapter i had the disturbing impression that wittgenstein had infected kripke with something that had stopped him from thinking clearly, and that kripke was now doing his utmost to pass the confusion on.

I can believe that this is what Stephenson thinks he’s showing in the Four Doorstops, but it’s not new, and if it’s going to be shown in novels instead of history there ought to be some novel-goodness.

What exasperates me is the constant implication that all three (science, economics, and warfare) have always beeen the work of men who were, in accidental and inherent characteristics, just like West Coast computer nerds are now. (This assumption requires similarity among West Coast geeks, which is, I suppose, why the women in the doorstops are as thin as paper – they’re aren’t Real characters because they aren’t like the Ur-Geek.)

Of course I’ve been reading less sf in general in recent years, and on the whole am tending toward tight, often )(but not necesarily) short books.