Anathem is a philosophical science fiction novel. It tells the story of the planet Arbre through the eyes of Erasmus as he and his planet face a time of uncertainty and decisions.The community Erasmus belongs to values ideas - especially philosophical and metaphysical ideas. Part of the fun I h...
how long has it been since Stephenson wrote a pure thriller? Zodiac? never? and how many thrillers go 1044pp. the notion is fast, the action is non-stop. how could this work at that length? but it does. it moves so fast there are sparks on the rails. and there's no orientation period, not much La...
This was probably the best of The Mongoliad trilogy, though I didn't enjoy as much as I enjoyed the prequels included in the kindle editions of the three books. The trilogy follows four main events: the Khan's circus in Hunern, the Shield Brethren's quest to kill the Khagan, the happenings in the...
At this point, I think it's fair to classify myself as a serious Neal Stephenson fan. That being said, not everything in this collection appealed to me. However the forward to Everything and More, Arsebestos, the Salon Interview, Metaphysics in the Royal Society and the Slashdot Interview were we...
This is a loooong trilogy, and that's coming from someone who quite enjoyed Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy. The Mongoliad makes the Quicksilver trilogy look simple and concisely written. There are interesting characters and stories being told, but even so it gets really slow going and felt like...
I was really disappointed at The Mongoliad series and book 3 was a total let down. Book 1 was awesome, but the two later books was a total waste of time. It seems like Neal Stephenson and company lost focus after writing book 1. I thought that book 3 would never end because all you ever read is t...
One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt to boil the story down to its essence.During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japane...
Deeper into the wordy quagmire that is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. As with Quicksilver, this volume contains a considerable dose of magical moments dissolved in a nearly impenetrable sea of overdone gibberish. It’s brilliant gibberish, but not brilliant enough to make this book shine the...
He may be over it by now (as I have not read any of his more recent work), but I’m convinced that at the time he was writing Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle (of which Quicksilver is the first volume), the first thing Neal Stephenson did every morning right after getting out of bed was to sham...
The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious". but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American colleg...
I love fiction set in the Victorian era. Sexually-repressive mores and cool, arrogant superiority aside, the Victorians embody a sense of order and etiquette that often escapes us these days. They had protocols for social interaction—protocols embedded in unfortunate distinctions between classe...
This is a wonderful political adventure novel, with a thin vein of science fiction running through it. If all political thrillers were this smart, snappy, funny, and thought-provoking, I would read a lot more of them. Or perhaps Clancy is a real knee-slapper and I just don't remember. But Interfa...
Disliking this book seemed quite impossible. After all, it had all the necessary ingredients: the pervasive air of nerdy geekiness (or, perhaps, geeky nerdiness), an unexpected take on linguistics, a kick-ass female character, a parallel (virtual) reality, a hefty helping of (admittedly, overexag...
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.- Neal Stephenson, "In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line"What a fun read. It's about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is...
With this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from one set-piece action scene to another that is typical of Stephenson's endings, I thought he actually succeeded at tying everything up in this one. I...
Such phenomena happened too slowly for the mind to discern them as happening at all. During the last hours of A+1.335, something like that occurred in the cloud of lunar debris that had been hanging in the sky for the last seven hundred days. Later they would watch the movies of it in time-lapse,...
At four in the morning, I got up, destroyed the rest of the cake and chased it down with two cans of Jolt. Got a scuba outfit all ready, tromped around on top of the boat to get people awake and moving, then got into the best Zode with Artemis and we took off. At the last minute Fisk woke up and ...
Bob Shaftoe Dundalk, Ireland 6 September 1689 My lady, I am speaking these words to a Presbyterian scrivener who followed our regiments down from our points of disembarkation around Belfast, and has hung out his shingle on a hut near Dundalk camp. From this, you may draw what conclusions you wi...
"The book does not even bear mentioning?" "Not really." "It looked like an antique of some sort. Quite valuable, no?" "A fake. That sort of thing is popular with us. A way to build an impressive-seeming library without going broke." "Ah, that explains it," said Mr. Chang, growing more satisfi...