Stephenson Retrospective

Now that I've spent a month reading Neal Stephenson I feel like I've got some things to say. Too bad that most of those things have already been said in my blogs about his books, which are awesome and should be required reading for functional, 21st century adults.

But part of the reason that I wanted to read all of Stephenson's non-collaborative fiction in chronological (in-universe chronology, not publication chronology) is because there's a level of interconnectedness that I felt the need to explore. Stephenson doesn't have the same crazy level of worlds-almost-touching depth that Stephen King does, but there are elements that clearly cross over from one story to another, even if they're transformed in the transition.

And here's what a chart of that craziness looks like:

And here's what I mean by some of these things:

Shekondar - A name that pops up in Cryptonomicon (the name of the fake band that Chester uses to send files to Randy, as well as a nasty boss in one of their old gaming campaigns), The Big U (the name of the worm/virus/operating system that is responsible for several problems), and Reamde (the name of a character wandering the Torgai foothills after Reamde is released and who is quoted in a company newsletter that Richard Forthrast is reading). Shekondar is not even remotely the same thing in any of these three books but the motif seems to represent computerized mayhem.

The Waterhouses - Drake Waterhouse, Daniel Waterhouse,Godfrey Waterhouse, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Randall (Randy) Lawrence Waterhouse are the Waterhouses we get to meet, though we also get a reference to Godfrey Waterhouse IV who helps to trace the lineage from The Baroque Cycle to Cryptonomicon. They are largely math and science oriented people who get a lot done by managing to be bright and competent.

The Shaftoes - Jack, Robert, Jimmy, Danny, Bobby, Douglas MacArthur, America, Robin, and M.A. Shaftoe are your friendly neighborhood badasses. The family survives by being a little odd and a lot dangerous.

The Gotos - Gabriel, Dengo, and Ferdinand are the Goto family; they are a strange mix of saint and samurai.

Enoch Root - A monk/priest/alchemist who tries to make sure that the world doesn't eat itself whole.

The Crypt - A data haven and means of circulating digital currency that is set up by Randy Waterhouse and Doug Shaftoe with the help of Enoch Root and Goto Dengo; it eventually allows for the decentralization of government and currency seen in Snow Crash which leads to the feeds and matter-building of The Diamond Age.

YT - YT avoids becoming chiseled spam long enough to earn herself a different set of smartwheels.

Kinotypes/Mediaglyphics - moving images that replace letters as a means of static communication; not actually connected but a reasonable suggestion that Hylaean Flow may exist between cosmos.

Earth - Most of the novels take place on Earth and all accept that Earth is a planet that exists in one of the at least five known cosmos. Taking place on Earth is the only thing that Zodiac has in common with the other novels, and the Laterran Geometers are the only solid connection between Anathem and the other novels if you exclude Kinotypes.

And hey, would you like to see another crazy chart? Neal Stephenson has a type for a lot of the characters he writes - which is not to say that the individual iterations are not fun unique individuals to read, just that they're identifiable the way that you can identify "goths" or "jocks" or "geeks" in your day-to-day life. And here's what some of his main character types look like:

I think this chart makes it look less complicated and awesome than his characters really are - especially the Kick-ass ladies; Stephenson doesn't tend to include a ton of female characters in his novels (though most of his novels pass the Bechdel Test, which is pretty impressive) but the women who he does include are really, really cool. Nobody writes a strong female character without falling into strong female character tropes like Stephenson.

Oh, in case you're curious, here's what 7318 pages of genre-defining literature looks like:

It weighs in at 17 pounds.

I really enjoyed the project of going through and reading all my Stephenson but I'm glad it's over, I was ready for a break. The only reason I think that I was able to finish this project at all is because Stephenson has a relatively small body of work - can you imagine trying to do this with King or PKD? You'd go crazy. I'd like to try a similar project with Gibson at some point in the future, though I think I'll wait a while and just dabble until I'm ready to give it a go.

Cheers,
     - Alli

That was a distinctly odd experience

 
I had never read The Big U before picking it up as part of my Stephenson-mapping binge, and now I'm pretty sure I know why. The book is a good satire of college life and has many of the hallmarks of later Stephenson novels, but it's also completely insane and not terribly well organized, something that became a staple for Stephenson when his books started to exceed 600 pages.

It almost feels like I started reading a Stephenson novel that turned into a Phillip K. Dick novel halfway through and decided it wanted to be Heinlein for the last fifty pages. Having read it, I now feel very confused and wish it made more sense but it left my head too fuzzy (or maybe that's just the fever I've got) for me to re-read it immediately.

The book is totally recognizable as a Stephenson work in spite of how jumbled it is - there are recognizable (if early) versions of character-types who repeatedly pop up in Stephenson's later books; there is an awful lot of proof that Stephenson spent a lot of his life learning about and listening to organs; and there are the requisite Hackers Fighting for an Ideal who I love so much in his novels.

The book starts off pretty straight, describing the lives of students at a university, and then quickly devolves into a portrait of what a university would look like if it were drawn by H.R. Giger, complete with slimy tunnels, giant rodents, and a malevolent computer virus.

By the end the story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense but is still fun to read. I'll probably get around to re-reading it again in a few years, but for now I'll be content to let it sit on the shelf gathering dust as I try to make sense out of what it said.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. The Big U. Harper Perennial. New York: New York. 2001. (1984)

If it ain't Barock, please fix it

It's not quite correct to say that Neal Stephenson is prolific, but at the same time it's an almost dangerous understatement. In the 30 years that he's been publishing Stephenson has written about fifteen books, and a book every two years doesn't seem like great shakes when compared to Stephen King or Philip K. Dick's terrifying abilities to grind out novels (56 and 49 respectively that we know of). But, while a book like 11/22/63 requires at least some research and a book like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch requires just a TON of meth, a book like Quicksilver requires a jaw-dropping amount of research and balls the size of a SmartCar just to get started.

Stephenson is described by Cracked.Com's Robert Brockway as a man who "once wrote a book about a virtual-reality bushido master/pizza delivery man named Hiro Protagonist, but has since devoted his entire writing career to meta-history at the expense of all the world's forests" and "who is apparently out to drown the world in his books to avenge some childhood slight."

Stephenson has "only" written about fifteen books, but as near as I can tell at least five of those books are about everything. I know that sounds like an overstatement, but Cryptonomicon is approximately 1000 pages, takes place in two decades and on five continents, and aside from its main plot and characters spends a fair amount of time discussing Chinese currency, municipal building ordinances, RPGs, subsistence patterns of various Native Americans, calculus, the place of technology in mythological structures, and the possibility of mapping the streets of London based on seemingly random data.

When I was researching Stephenson so that I could figure out exactly how much of the universe he's crammed into 15 books I came across the term "maximalism" for the first time and immediately understood it because Stephenson's been showing me maximalism for 10 years and I only just now found the proper term to describe it.

So anyway, that's how Stephenson writes. You thought you were going to just be reading a novel about VR samurai but instead you got to strap in for an exciting discussion of Sumerian mythology and information theory too. FUCK YES.

I'm ashamed to admit it but the first time I saw part of The Baroque Cycle at a bookstore I sneered at it. As best I can recall I was thinking something like "Aw, man, here's this awesome sci-fi/cyberpunk author whose books I love and I'm going to have to stop reading him because he's started writing bullshitty history books." I'd like to go back in time and smack myself in the head for how wrong I was. These books are still sci-fi/cyberpunk(ish) and totally kick-ass, they just happen to take place in the 1600s. Ridiculous anachronism abounds and does wonders to humanize insane geniuses such as Issac Newton and Robert Hooke.

Oh, and the series is freaking enormous. There are eight books in three volumes and each volume is about 900 pages. It's so good. There's so much delicious speculative historical fiction to dive into.

Volume One - Quicksilver

Quicksilver
Daniel Waterhouse is the the son of a Puritan and college roommate of Issac Newton; he tries to find his foothold in the world only to deal with plagues, fires, cut-up dogs, and the King of England blowing up his father. Liberal discussion of calculus, pirates, and the Tower of London included.
King of the Vagabonds
Jack Shaftoe, born low and fighting to stay that way, is drawn into bizarre intrigues and rituals by the lovely former slave Eliza. The unlikely pair ask questions about the nature of money and encounter all sorts of obstacles in their attempt to collect, control, or at least follow, specie. Jack has an unfortunate, though much-deserved, interaction with a large harpoon.
Odalisque
As Eliza's knowledge of finances grows she is caught up in drama all around Europe; Dr. Waterhouse has fallen out of Issac's favor but caught the eye of the King of England (not the one who blew up his father, a different king). Waterhouse and Eliza are wrapped up in intrigues separately and together. Dr. Waterhouse wishes he'd known to hydrate more.

Volume Two - The Confusion

Bonanza
Jack Shaftoe has found himself chained to an oar with a scheming cabal of slaves. They manage to free themselves and scrape up some scratch before improbably becoming food for insects and then royals in India. After losing their gains to a pirate queen they convince her that she should finance a ship for them, then sail to Japan, Manila, and cross the Pacific to end up in South America before braving Europe once more.
The Juncto
All that Daniel Waterhouse wants to do is sail away to America but people keep insisting that he owes a debt to England. Daniel's cohorts in the Royal Society work hard to try to gain political control an Eliza takes advantage of the essentially bankrupt island. Daniel convinces Sir Issac Newton that he might be good at running the Mint as the debate between Newton and Liebniz grows in furor and venom.

Volume Three - The System of the World

Solomon's Gold
Daniel Waterhouse makes it back to London just in time to be almost blown up by an Infernal Device. Jack Shaftoe is messing with money and causing Issac Newton no end of trouble, while Eliza is embroiled in the intrigues of the Hanoverian court because of the death of Electress Sophie.
Currency
Eliza and Daniel work together to improve technology, end slavery, and un-fuck England. Daniel and Issac manage to chase down and capture Jack on the eve of an enormous upheaval that sends Princess Caroline rushing out of the country, but no one but Jack knows what's been done to the Pyx, a box that holds samples of money as a safeguard for the mint. Peter the Great makes a stop in London and terrifies essentially everyone with his size and frustration.
The System of the World
Since Daniel and Issac have found out that Jack was responsible for polluting the Pyx they have been trying to track down the parties responsible for Jack. One Charles White becomes problematic until he is disposed of by a cannon duel, which really only makes him more trouble. Jack is hung at Tyburn before a Mobb that disapproves of the situation at exactly the same time as Daniel is busy acting as Issac's alchemical understudy and fighting off death by arcane means. Everything is an enormous mess, but in the end it looks like London is as much better off for having burned metaphorically as literally.

I have no idea how to review, or even effectively summarize, these wonderful books. They are too full and rich and startlingly dense for me to even say what they're about. I could spend fifteen hundred words describing one percent of this series and then I'd still have only described one percent and you'd have no idea what they're really talking about. But basically they're about an elderly scholar and a middle-aged criminal saving the world with the help of a harem slave, several savants, a watchmaker gone bad, half of the royalty in Europe, and one immortal wizard.

Good luck parsing that. And please read The Baroque Cycle because it kicks three thousand pages of ass.
Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Quicksilver. Harper Collins. New York: New York. 2003.
Stephenson, Neal. The Confusion. Harper Perennial. New York: New York. 2005.
Stephenson, Neal. The System of the World. Harper Perennial. New York: New York. 2005.

It's all about the details, but maybe there are too many details here

The first time I read Reamde I happened to take it to a computer security meeting that I attend each month. If you're familiar with Stephenson or with computer security geeks (read: hackers) then you won't be surprised that a lot of people noticed the book and wanted to know my thoughts on it. The group was well-read when it came to Stephenson but most of them hadn't seen this particular novel before - I let them know that it was generally good but not as heavy on the math as some of his novels are. I was a little surprised by the fact that most of the people there who had read the novel didn't like it; they seemed fine with the technical information, but bored with the story.

I think I dismissed some of their brush-offs as gender-based because one of the guys (but only one) told me that he just couldn't get behind a story where the main character was a tough woman (I think that may have been the last time that I spoke to that particular guy) and I may have projected some of that attitude on the rest of the group, which was tremendously unfair of me because now that I've re-read the book a couple of times I think that it mostly gets dismissed because it's so fucking long.

Now, yes, this is a Stephenson novel and Stephenson doesn't even get out of bed in the morning unless the book he's working on can be used as a doorstop for a Gothic cathedral so no one should be startled to find out that it's about a thousand pages. But they might be a bit startled by how slow some of it goes.

The book is full of complex characters all of whom do interesting things, but it's also full of the travel itineraries of those characters and gives the reader a play-by-play of some characters playing a MMORPG. I'm unwilling to watch people play video games (and even most sports) in the real world - translating these things into a fictional universe doesn't make them anymore interesting, which is problematic because a huge portion of the narrative requires the reader to understand a fictional universe within the book's fictional universe. And the travel bits are just odd - for the most part Stephenson is pretty good at making it interesting when characters move from one place to another, but in this case it's just as frustrating to be in the backseat for a six-hour drive in the novel as it would be on the Ten from LA to Phoenix. I don't get it.

In spite of these issues, the meat of the story is good and I actually really enjoy a lot of what's going on in the book; I just got a little bored here and there, but not enough to keep me from skimming those sections and having fun with the rest of the novel.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Reamde. Harper Collins Publishing. New York: New York. 2011.

The boat, not the star-symbols

Whenever I'm feeling down I use Science Fiction to try to break me out of it. Zodiac is not exactly SF, just as Neal Stephensen isn't really a genre writer, but it does the job in a pinch.

I'm a pretty big Stephenson fan - I've read almost everything he's written (and what I haven't read is on my Amazon Wishlist if anyone is curious) and I uniformly adore it. Most of the Stephenson fans that I know don't really like Zodiac but it makes sense to me in the context of when it was written in it's author's career; when you aren't really a name no one is going to publish your thousand-page love-letter to cryptography, but if you write up an eco-thriller with a side of genetically modified bacteria then you're one step closer to getting your crazier ideas put on bookshelves everywhere. And aside from all of that, it's fun as hell. It follows what has become the classic arc of a Stephensen novel and has all of the wonderful elements that he interjects so beautifully into his fiction - hilariously apt descriptions, asshole protagonists who are aware of the fact that they're assholes, interesting female characters, and a whole lot of shit that is more technical than many readers are comfortable with (in this one it's just a little chemistry - no diagrams or scary math).

Reading Zodiac is like slipping into a big, warm, cozy robe for me. It's familiar, it's relaxed, and I'm probably having a pretty good time. The pacing is a little manic, and it's the fastest-reading Stephensen book that I've encountered, but that's perfect - it's an easy couple of hours that gets your head into a really interesting place with out making you think too hard about depressing shit (though, yes, dissolving dolphins and the state of the Boston Harbor are depressing as all fuck).

I think that everyone should read Stephenson, but even though Zodiac is one of his earliest works I don't think it's the best place to start. Pick up Snow Crash, move on to Diamond Age, and then read Cryptonomicon. If you can get through that you're set and you'll have the foundation to work on the rest of his books and know what you're looking at and who you're dealing with. Yes, he tends to use "types" in his novels, but goddamn if they aren't fun people to hang out with. I like techy-but-socially-awkward guy and tough-as-nails-sarcastic-savvy-girl. They're my buddies, and they're why I keep coming back to everything that Stephenson puts out - he keeps putting them into interesting situations that I want to see them get out of.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Zodiac. Grove Books. New York: New York. 1981.

Zipping around an unsafe harbor

It's only on this reading (probably my seventh or eighth time through) of Zodiac that I'm beginning to realize how much I really like the book. I'm a bit irritated because so far it's the only book in my Stephenson project that I can't directly connect to all of the others, but I guess that's made up for by how much fun I had reading it.

In an odd way the surliness of the narrator (who describes himself as a professional asshole and who is employed in this capacity by a Greenpeace-like organization) and his dry, scientific attitude are the best advertisements I've ever seen for the green movement.

The book is all goofy action and a ramping trajectory that explodes into an intense and overwhelming climax (just like every other Stephenson book I've read this month) but Zodiac is relaxingly simple at its heart - it's just a book about a guy who is hard to get along with but who's trying to do his best anyway.

It also takes place in the least fantastic and arguably most dystopian universe of all of Stephenson's work - Boston Harbor in 1987. The contemptuous and queasy descriptions of harbor pollutants and mountains of garbage no only helps to hammer home the message that "There's a harbor out here, it's dirty" but also makes a sickeningly real backdrop for mostly sickeningly plausible drama.

There are, of course, deep messages that can be found in the novel but mostly you walk away from it feeling like you've had a good time skimming along on the surface. You can choose your depth with each reading have some fun no matter which way you go.

It's probably clear by now that I think almost everyone should read almost everything but the people I really want to recommend this book to are Stephenson fans who are so quick to dismiss it. That, and I want to ask them all a question: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Zodiac. Grove Press. New York: New York. 1988.

The ethics of hacking

After my adventures with reading real stories from World War II (Going Solo and Maus) I decided that I needed to participate in some fictional interaction with the war to end all wars. I know I probably should have looked into more memoirs and histories and soberly and seriously reflected on man's inhumanity to man and all that jazz, but I was just emotionally exhausted and needed some unambiguously good guys to kick ass so I reread Cryptonomicon. It doesn't hurt that the fictional WWII good guys are geeks, and that the fictional modern good guys are focusing on preventing future holocausts either when it comes to feeling better about reading some heavy shit. I'm not sure how much of that last sentence made sense, so I'll just say I like geeks and am very glad that many varieties of geek seem to give a shit about the world.

Which is kind of the defining geek characteristic that's explored through a number of different characters in Cryptonomicon. Geeks are people who notice something wrong in the world (whether it's issues of InfoSec protocols, a poorly programmed operating system, free speech, or the shaky physics of Iron Man) and won't shut up about it until it's fixed, and frequently won't shut up about it until they do the fixing themselves.

Cryptonomicon is a book that it - unsurprisingly - largely about problems of privacy. Stephenson does a really fantastic job of exploring what a dual-edged sword privacy can be; half of his characters are invested in code breaking for what's basically the good of the entire world but who all recognize the issue of applying these same techniques to individuals. The book makes its case for strong crypto but also makes the argument that it's wrong that individuals have to rely on strong crypto or be subject to the same treatment as, say, Nazi communications were in 1940. I'm not going to lie, there's some cognitive dissonance in that. There is a character who cheerfully discards the idea that gentlemen shouldn't read one another's mail because reading each other's mail is how the Allies won the war; he's presented as repugnant, and the idea that a government would examine its citizens private communications is repugnant (and, unfortunately, just the world we live in now), but the point seems to be that cracking is a last resort and the sorts of people who are GOOD at cryptography should keep in mind that they are handling the weapon that could next be turned against themselves.

Which makes it a really good thing that Stephenson (Stephenson in particular, not that anyone else could have done it, but that his name is attached to it as a geek himself and as the author of one of the first major books about web culture) wrote this book. Stephenson is one of the five authors who the majority of my tech friends always bring up (Gibson, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury are the others) as their favorite authors. The InfoSec crew I hang out with have almost all read the tremendous brick that is Cryptonomicon even if they aren't really into reading. It's one of those books that's talked about using the same reverent tones that Christians use when talking about the Bible - it's a must-read, a guiding star, a moral code, an inspiration, and wonderful entertainment to everyone who's ever looked at a computer and seen something wrong that they must make right.

Anyway I enjoy the hell out of it every time I read it and every time I read it it makes me think very seriously about the questions currently surrounding privacy, intellectual property, liberty, free speech, and generally not living in a police state. It's not really what you could call an easy read, it's got some not-too-complicated but decidedly tedious discussions of math, crypto, and random numbers scattered throughout. But those things are all worth reading because it makes you want to be better at the things under discussion (and it's not like it's something as detailed, complicated, and terrifying as the orbital mechanics lectures in Anathem).

So if you're even slightly inclined to check out this odd book about computer geeks, please do. If you're a computer geek who wants to consider yourself a hacker it's almost a moral imperative that you read this book. But don't read it because of that - read it because it's fun.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. Avon Fiction. New York: New York. 2002. (1999).

Dodos died for a reason - they were too slow

Hey so The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. was the first book I started reading this year and it took me until July to finish it because I fucking hated it.

Which is a little shocking considering my well-documented appreciation for Neal Stephenson. Nicole Galland co-authored the book and while it's tempting to blame her for what I didn't like that's not really fair because a) I've never read her other stuff and so I couldn't tell you if I like her style or not and b) most of what I didn't like felt like Stephenson bits that weren't landing.

I really dig maximalism done well but this felt like maximalism done badly - it became a slog, it got boring.

Maybe that was because it was supposed to be a journal and collection of documents and the bits of Stephenson's style I like the most are in the narration. Maybe it's because the majority of the book is from the perspective of a character who I feel is really poorly written. Poor Dr. Stokes. I wanted her to be really well written, I wanted to like her - it's clear she was supposed to be sympathetic but she was written as indecisive and insecure and passive-aggressive in a way that was really frustrating to read.

Also the big bad of the book feels poorly developed and everything sort of dissolves into a nonsensical rush in the last 50 pages. Plenty of people have talked about Stephenson's denouement allergy and the fact that he likes to cut things off right after the climax and maybe this book illustrates why that's the case - everything after the last big action scene was kind of shit.

Anyway, long story (and jesus it was around 800 pages and it was a slog for once I'm sympathetic to people who think he's long-winded and dull) short I didn't like this book and actively resented the time I spent reading it and should have stopped after the first hundred pages didn't grab me because I don't feel any better having finished it except that it won't drive me crazy for not making the effort.

Fuck this book.

Binge-reading some thick stuff

I'm working on a theory here, and it involves reading a tremendous amount of hilarious fiction written about cryptography and general sciencey-type-stuff. It's more fun than you might expect but it can be a little daunting.

Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books. The first time I read it I made the tactical error of leaving it on the black dashboard under un-tinted windows on a 110 degree Southern California day. The glue in the spine of the book broke down into its component elements and left me with about 200 5-page sections of book to read; I carried it around wrapped in an overextended hairband, dropping it a few times and having to furiously reshuffle the mess to make sense of the story. Maybe that's why the book sticks with me so much, but I'm guessing it has more to do with the fact that it's a really cool book.

The novel follows (primarily) three storylines - those of Lawrence Waterhouse, Bobby Shaftoe, and Randall Waterhouse; Lawrence and Bobby's stories take place during World War II, Randy's story takes place in the nineties and all of the stories get mixed together and create an interesting temporal landscape.

This has a lot to do with the theory that I'm working on (that most of Stephenson's novels take place in the same universe and are actually telling the same story over the landscape of centuries in a way that can be tied together with admirable neatness and that leaves the reader staggering in the wake of the author's foresight) so I had a lot of fun tracing some of the more obscure parts of the book than most people probably will. While doing so I still got to enjoy Randy's fumbling attempts at interacting with other human beings and the adaptable attitude of the family Shaftoe.

It's kind of hard to get into what goes on in the story without giving away really amazing parts that you should read on your own. Let's just say that there's a lot of action, some really cool history, and an appendix that will teach you an utterly bitchrod cryptosystem if you have the patience to sit down and learn it (I don't, but I can appreciate that it's rad).

It's not hard to get me all gushy over a Neal Stephenson book, but this one is full of some of my favorite descriptions ever. The way that Stephenson writes Lawrence's interpretation of English manufacturing is completely brilliant and utterly hilarious. The brief but memorable tangent about Randy's search for an orthodontist is sure to tug on the heartstrings and turn up in the nightmares of anyone who has had their own experience with wisdom teeth.

If you're feeling up to reading 1100 pages that take place on five continents and have about 100 distinct and interesting characters then Cryptonomicon is a book to add to your list.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. Avon Books. New York: New York.  2002. (1999)

Gimme that sweet astrophysics

It looks like I'm going to have to update my massive Neal Stephenson post from last year. I'm going to have to do that for the best of reasons: He wrote a new book and I need to figure out where it sits in his universe.

Neal Stephenson is the best. I just love his books. There's not a single one of his novels that I dislike, and a couple of them easily make it into my top 100 best books I've ever read list.

I'm not sure if Seveneves makes it to that select group of truly awesome books, but it's really fucking good.

Since it's a new book I'm not really sure what I can say about it because I don't want to write out spoilers or anything, but I will say that this is a book for science and sci-fi geeks. It doesn't have as much math as The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon, but it's a lot heavier on physics and science than Reamde or The Diamond Are. And I love that about it. There's a ton of discussion about our solar system, about genetics, and about achieving acceleration in a vacuum. There are also a lot of words directed at social sciences stuff, so the liberal arts majors don't have to feel left out - human psychology is a huge part of this novel.

The structure of the book is interesting. It's at least two (and maybe three) distinct novels but they're spaced out instead of shuffled together like the stories in Cryptonomicon. The attitudes that the characters in the latter part of the story have on the characters in the earlier portions of the book are great and terrifying and really make you want to sit down and consider just what exactly history really is.

And also, yes, much major and loud praise should be sent Stephenson's way for writing a massive book about science and space travel that involves so many non-male, non-white, non-straight characters. Hi five, dude. You're doing it right.

Seveneves is a very good book, it's good hard sci-fi, and you should totally read it. But I'm going to stop talking about it now before I get into spoiler territory.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. William Morrow Publishing. New York: New York. 2015.

The bit with the dog always gets me

After reading Snow Crash last weekend I had to spend quite a bit of time cuddling my puppy. Even when the universe you're reading about is full of bright neon and filthy streets and a strange future, there's just something about the feelings of dogs for humans and humans for dogs that will always resonate with anyone whose heart isn't made of ceramic.

Snow Crash is an unbelievably great book. I know I harp on Stephenson a lot and think that everyone should read his work, but I'm fucking serious about Snow Crash. You can't claim to be into sci-fi in this day and age if you haven't read Snow Crash because it's one of maybe three books written since 1980 that's really changed the sci-fi landscape. And fuck the sci-fi landscape, it's one of maybe ten books written in the last few decades that's changed the literal landscape that all of us inhabit. It's kind of like Star Trek - without Star Trek to aspire to we might still be using wall-mounted phones and 3D printers would be something that we couldn't imagine, much less assemble in our garages. Without Snow Crash the entire internet might not have blossomed into the crazy pornfest that we all know and love and video games would still be mouldering in 8 bits.

And we might not have this whole argument going about net neutrality (which is almost too depressing to even get into) because the neutrality argument would have gone out the window decades ago if people like Stephenson hadn't warned us (meaning the general population, not serious techies) about it first.

In a lot of ways Snow Crash is one of the most amazing, kick-ass, eerily-predictive books ever. It's also a story about a digital samurai, capitalism run rampant, liberty, and a healthy dose of Sumerian mythology. But it's also a simple story about people, and for at least a few pages it's about a dog who thinks of himself as Fido and the nice girl who he loves.

It's not every super-slick sci-fi history lesson that can make me cry like a baby, but this one sure does. Stephenson covers a lot of wonderful ground and makes a brilliant and terrifying universe for us to peer into, but he also tempers it with simple things that all of us can relate to; feelings of love and loss, the relationships that teenage girls always seem to have with their mothers, and the pants-shitting fear of totalling a mafia-owned pizza delivery car.

Cheers,
And read it, seriously.
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. Bantam Books. New York, New York. 1993. (1992)

Becoming educable

Stephenson's novels teach even though they're only fiction - they teach history and mathematics and human nature and philosophy. Anathem teaches all of these things except for history, and even then it does teach history; it's just that it teaches history that isn't exactly ours.

I don't connect with Anathem the same way I connect with most of Stephenson's other work; part of this is because I just haven't read it as many times as, say Cryptonomicon, but part of this is because so much of the book is focused on philosophy instead of story. It's all interesting, philosophically speaking, but I spend most of my time reading wishing that there was a little more to the story.

It's not, by any means, a bad book. Anathem is, however, a very dense and somewhat slow book. Having now read it twice I'm interested in reading it again, but I think it'll be a few years before I find myself peeling back the cover.

I like being taught by the books I'm reading, I like learning, but it seems like most of the things that happen in Anathem happen only to teach the reader, not to advance the plot.

The book is totally worth reading, and what story there is is very interesting and takes place in a fascinating world, but don't expect a goofy pace or as much of the wonderful humor that is usually so characteristic in a Stephenson novel.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. Anathem. WM Morrow. New York: New York. 2008.

Shine on

I have to confess that I'm pretty sure I stole this book. Arclight, I doubt you're reading this blog but if you are please remind me to take you over to the bookstore and get you a new copy someday.

I stole Diamond Age because I haven't been able to let it go - I'm hooked on it and it and so I try not to cling too tightly to it. I read it every couple of years and in between readings it kicks around in my brain and won't let me go. A lot of my life in the last decade has been trying to emulate Nell, partially because she's a total badass, mostly because she's a girl who used a book to make herself into a better, stronger person.

Diamond Age is pretty much the best princess story that will ever be written. It is, of course, more than just a story about a princess - and the princess starts her life as an incredibly poor, illiterate little girl locked in a slum apartment - it's also a story about technology and culture and consciousness and conflict.

It also has a pretty cool metaliterary thing going on that I really dig - reminds me a bit of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler in some places, but without the pretension (though I will say that being an avid reader of Stephenson made it a lot easier for me to get through Calvino at first).

There's a lot going on in this relatively little book, but it's less tedious than a lot of Stephenson can be and doesn't get off on nearly as many tangents; there are still about twenty characters to be tracked through the pages, and they do all sorts of interesting, divergent, and confusing things, but it tends to stick to telling the story in one decade (as opposed to the two centuries of The Baroque Cycle, the five decades of Cryptonomicon, or the two millennia of Snow Crash) so it's not as hard to parse as some of the other books I've been reading this month.

Anyway, if you're sick of Disney princesses or struck by the damsel-like nature of Joss Whedon's "strong female characters" you'll probably like Diamond Age because it's full of women who are strong while still being realistically flawed humans who don't wait around to be rescued.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. Bantam Books. New York: New York. 1996. (1995)

Good short stories and bad fans

Last year, when I was hanging out and shepherding drunks at a technical conference, I ended up having a conversation with a dude who had a James Joyce quote tattooed on his arm and my evening went to shit. Now, I'll say again: a dude with a Joyce tattoo made my evening of making sure people didn't puke in a hotel lobby worse than it already was. I was talking about how much I love cyberpunk and SF as a whole, holding the copy of Anathem that I was rereading, and this dude plopped down in the middle of the conversation to drop a criticism about Stephenson (while admitting that he'd only read one of Stephenson's books and saying he didn't think he would find any more depth to the writing if he went further) I admitted that I was enough of a SF nerd that I might be biased and made mention of my Dune tattoo in a self-deprecating sort of way; this cockwad went on to state that he hadn't ever read much SF but loved real literature enough that he'd gotten a Joyce tattoo ("On my arm, where people can see it, because there's no courage in getting your ideology someplace where it will remain hidden," he said, cementing his image in my mind as like, seriously, the worst human being at the party.)

Instead of pulling the "you're just a fake geek girl" on me (which is hard to do when you're at a computer conference that I've attended for the last decade) this taint knocker pulled the "fake lit girl" (which he didn't realize was ALSO not a great plan, considering my BA in Literature). Our conversation proceeded to the point that I told him I was impressed he'd gotten a tattoo by someone who once said "You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you" to show to the world, and that I really liked that someone who literally wrote his manuscripts in crayon was considered such a bastion of western literature. Surprise, surprise, smug mister Joyceypants had never read Joyce's letters.

And here's what's really unfair: I hadn't read any Joyce (except some of his hilarious and explicit letters) at that point because I'd met too many Joyce fanboys who were just like this stupid Buttpimple and figured that if complete assholes liked these books this much I probable wouldn't enjoy them. There are so many people out there who feel like they need to be some kind of GATEKEEPER to keep the PLEBEIAN HORDES away from the VAUNTED AND HONORABLE LITERARY TRADITION by belittling genre fiction and implying that you're just not smart enough to understand the POWER and MAJESTY of the TORMENTED ARTIST.

People who think this way about books: FUCK YOU. Books are for everyone and everyone can like disparate things and value all sorts of writing. And for the record there's nothing wrong with the fact that Joyce enjoyed buttplay or was fixated on shit or that he wrote in crayon (he had severe glaucoma and couldn't see pen or pencil well enough later in life to write with them) but it's great to let a little air out of the kinds of shitheads who think that they're special because they like "real" literature. 

Anyway. I read Dubliners this week and it was fantastic. It was simple and austere and I felt like it did a great job of transporting me to its time and place. I can see why Joyce is lauded for his descriptions and his subjects - there's an underlying tension to all of the stories that seems to speak of a world sick of itself and longing for something that it can't even imagine. And, while I've not read Ulysses, I'd like to make the point that Joyce's writing (at least in Dubliners) was incredibly accessible. There's nothing here that's difficult to understand or arduous to read through, but there's a lot that's funny, sad, and highly relatable. Don't let bullshit gatekeeper fanboys discourage you from participating in good stuff. It's a jerk move for anyone to claim that their consumption of something is better or purer or more meaningful than yours - whether that thing is literature, comic books, video games, or My Little Pony. Everyone has a right to enjoy what they want to and I'm really fucking tired of the "fake fan" mentality that chases people away.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Wordsworth Classics. Ware: Hertfordshire. 1993. (1914).

Action, adventure, and overexposure to Muppets

I've been meaning to read Treasure Island for years but have just never really gotten around to it - I think it's another of those books that I initially started to read before I was a teenager or speed-read and completely forgot before I was a teenager because I know I'd sat through at least the scenes that take place at the Admiral Benbow but I could recall essentially nothing else about the book.

What I could remember was just a whole lot of Muppet Treasure Island. It was actually really hard for me to see Long John Silver as anything other than a Tim Curry character, so it kept jarring me when he was described as large and blonde in the book. The Muppets are amazing, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I feel like a lot of my interactions with the books are as a direct and highly colored result of my consumption of the kid's version. Treasure Island is an adventure story, for sure, and probably one that is fairly appropriate for somewhat young children, but there's a whole lot more violent murder in the novel than I recall encountering in the Henson adaptation.

It's a decent book, by the way, and a fast little read, but it's far from the best R. L. Stevenson I've ever encountered and it doesn't even rank in my top five pirate/treasure stories (for reference my top three pirate/treasure stories are all written by a DIFFERENT Stephenson - Neal). The story really does seem to be written with a young audience in mind, and there's never enough drama to really put you on the edge of your seat or worry you for the fate of various characters. In fact, if anything, there's FAR too much foreshadowing and forewarning because Stevenson uses Jack, our protagonist and narrator, to interject things like "he wasn't long with us, as you soon shall see," liberally throughout each chapter. All of that contributes to a low-pressure story with not much other than the quick pace to pull you along. It's not bad, not really, and you can't really fairly call this story boring, but Treasure Island is predictable and the style of narration makes the story more low-stakes than it honestly deserves. I had a lot of fun reading it but in the future I might as well stick to the Muppets.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Adventure Classics. Naples: Florida. 2001. (1881-82).

Like Stephenson without the scifi

Maximalism is a term to describe literature that I hadn't heard until a couple of years ago and I have no idea why it didn't occur to me that it applied to Michael Chabon. While I haven't read Wonderboys I know that one character criticizes another for the fact that he was incapable of editing details out of his book - she accuses him of not making any choices.

Telegraph Avenue is actually only the second Chabon novel I've read, the first was a copy of The Yiddish Policeman's Union that I had picked up as a free book on a buy-two-get-one-free sale and actually now that I think about it the only reason I got Telegraph Avenue was because I found it at the 99 Cents Only store.

Good news: It's totally worth a dollar.

I really enjoyed reading the book it just seemed to drag a lot. I wasn't as interested Archy, the central figure of the novel, as I was in all of the characters surrounding him but I'm sure that was intentional. Archy is a lost man who doesn't know what to make of his life while the people around him are all very sure of what they want. His wife wants to make midwifery and intimacy with pregnancy more accessible to women of color than it is to her granola-infused customers; his father Luther wants very very badly to make a sequel to the film that was the centerpiece of his glory days; his business partner wants to sell records and keep a sense of community; his business competitor wants to create an empire. Archy is lost while being surrounded by people who know exactly what they want and that contrast serves to make ALL of the characters more interesting.

There's a lot going on on every page, and a lot of cool details, but it sometimes the writing felt like it was showing off for the sake of showing off. There's a whole chapter that is about ten pages long and all one sentence and it almost made me tear the pages out of the book. That's some Hawthorne bullshit right there and I will not stand for it.

But other than some ostentation and a drifting center the book is a fine read and, again, totally worth the dollar I paid for it.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Chabon, Michael. Telegraph Avenue. Harper. New York: New York. 2012.

German engineering

 
Stephen King keeps doing this thing where he writes really awesome books and then I read them and then I'm done reading them and I'm sad. Not because the books he writes are sad (though sometimes they are) but because I'm all out of new book to read. Whenever a new Gaiman or Gibson or Stephenson or King book comes out I'm incredibly giddy right up until I realize that it's all gone and I have to wait for the author to write some more.

I suppose this is a problem that many avid readers have.

When I first found Mr. Mercedes I nearly bought it on the spot while trying to kick myself for not knowing that King had a new book out. I resisted the temptation for both the purchase and the kicking and waited until my mom gave me a Barnes & Nobel coupon which I then combined with a member discount and a gift card. I may really love reading but I'm also really cheap.

But anyway, the book.

The story is fun, and pretty fast-paced. Mercedes is somewhat shorter than many King novels, coming in at just over four hundred pages, and the story isn't any more expansive than it ever has to be so it's surprisingly trim.

Some of the King trademarks seem to be missing; the characters aren't as aggressively developed as King characters often are and I think that takes away a bit from the novel. There's also something a little bit strange going on with diction with one character in particular that is potentially offensive, though I think it may just seem offensive because the character isn't as deeply developed as secondary characters usually are in King's hands.

It's also pretty clear that the main character's confusion about computers is shared by the author. Crumbs in the keyboard won't cause a screen to freeze and I don't have any idea how you'd get peanut butter in a CPU (most people who are technically incompetent enough to smear peanut butter on computer components are too technically incompetent to get access to the part of the box that has important components in it). That lack of knowledge is troubling because there are at least a few characters who are supposed to be good with computers. King admits in the acknowledgements that this is his fault and his fault alone but it is still distracting.

Other than those minor problems the novel is, by and large, very good. There's a lot of control, chaos, darkness, and madness explored here. The contest of wills between a retired cop and a supposedly retired mass murderer is fraught with suspense and, I will admit, nearly kept me home from work so that I could read it in one sitting.

Well worth picking up if you're a fan of King, and by far a better book than some of his recent efforts.

Also, look at how awesome that cover is!

Cheers, 
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Mr. Mercedes. Scribner. New York: New York. 2014.

Learning to live with death

 For years now people have been telling me that I need to read Terry Pratchett and unfortunately it just kept getting pushed to the back of my mind over and over and over again. It felt like jumping into Stephen King for the first time - there's so much that he's written that I didn't know where to start. When Pratchett died in 2015 someone asked Neil Gaiman on Tumblr what they should read first if they wanted to read Pratchett's work and Gaiman recommended Mort. I bought the book that day and it sat on my shelf for two years while I worked through things higher up on the to-be-read list.

Now, I'll say straight-up that I liked the book, but I don't think I'm going to end up with a Pratchett collection the same way that I have a King or a Gibson or a Stephenson collection - I've got nearly all those other guys' books and have read almost all of their books somewhere between five and seven times at least. I liked Mort, I had a fun time reading it, but I think Pratchett might be an almost-perfect author to use my library card with.

Mort was a rapid read, lasting just a couple of hours. The writing is simple but bitingly funny, the universe is expansive and fascinating, but unfortunately I still don't really feel like I know enough about it to sink deeply into it. The book did make me want to read a lot more Pratchett, I enjoyed the mythology of the world and the tone of the writing enough for that, to be sure. But I feel like I want to do a deep dive into the Pratchett that's out there before I make a commitment to buying dozens and dozens of books.

Anyway. Mort. It's a funny book about Death, Death's Apprentice, Wizards, and how everyone has to follow rules in some way. As a first look at Discworld it's enough to tantalize but not enough to really get to know the place. I was pretty happy with most of what was happening in the novel but it did feel a bit clunky in places, most of which had to do with romances feeling really stilted.

I hope to explore more Pratchett in the future, I hope I enjoy return visits to Discworld, and I agree with Gaiman - Mort is a good book to get your toes wet and see if the Pratchettverse is worth exploring.

Cheers,
     - Alli

You can buy Mort, which was published in 1987, by clicking on this sentence.

A promise to myself to stop reading shitty "humor" books

Twede's Diner is the restaurant that was the set of the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks. Every time I go to Washington I make a point of stopping at Twede's and having a cup of coffee and taking some time to stare up at the imposing misty ridge that is Mount Si.

Twede's is an okay diner, it's not great. They really want to capitalize on the fact that they were the set for a cult hit TV show and I've got no problem with that. It's their table reading I've got a problem with. They've got "funny" books on their tables, where the word "funny" is a goddamned lie.

There's a particular breed of awful comedy book that's ubiquitous at diners and greasy spoons close to touristy spots all across America. I know I've run into these things on road trips, usually at a shack that sells burgers and happens to be close to an absurd statue of some kind. I guess they're put on tables to entertain weary travelers who have become numb to the company of their companions and need something non-taxing to look at while waiting for a burger and avoiding playing yet another fucking road game. The problem is that these books are all fucking stupid and Mifflin Lowe's I Hate Fun is one of these books.

This is my husband's book, and since it was published about thirty years ago and I'd be shocked if it was popular enough to have been reprinted I'm guessing it was an inherited top-of-the-tank reader from the apartment he lived in when we started dating. It's full of bite-sized sections describing how various types of "fun" activities are actually physically risky or involve dealing with idiots or just take too much time and effort. It's an activity guide written by Marvin from The Hitchikers' Guide to the Universe, basically.

I can see where this kind of thing might be amusing now - a writer could easily sit down and shit out an essay or so a day that sneers at camping or dancing or sex and getting it in a spread-out format might be okay. But two hundred pages of this kind of shit is a bit much, and that's coming from someone whose favorite activity is bitching about books.

And I Hate Fun really suffers from being a product of its time. Even as recently as ten years ago no one would have been startled by, say, transphobia in a countertop joke book. But I was startled to run across two obviously transphobic jokes in the first five pages of the book, with plenty of examples of homophobia, misogyny, and a few "was that a rape joke?" moments tossed in for good measure. What makes it even more startling is that the book's tone reaches for erudite and civilized - too good for petty things like camping or dancing or going to the theater - but these punching-down jokes made it sound like a Southern Baptist trying to talk like a New York ad exec.

The overall tone of the book is amusing, I'll give it that. I was generally content to smirk along with the continued attitude that just staying home, not bothering to socialize, and reading a book because the outdoors is terrible is the safest and best entertainment option. It was a bit obvious, sure, and it was stretched way too thin to justify a whole book, but there was a kernel of cynical schadenfreude that would have made I Hate Fun into a much better essay than a book.

Anyway. Don't read this book. It's awful. And while you're at it avoid shitty humor books in general. You'll know them because they're basically the only books in the "humor" section at your local book store.

As a side note, finding funny books is damned near impossible. I'm certainly not the first one to notice this or comment on it but we have done the "humor" section a grave disservice. Wacky political quotes, collected newspaper comics, and anything that describes itself as "knee-slappingly" "gut-bustingly" or any other variety of "body-part-damagingly" funny is less than we deserve. I vote for a "funny novels" section or "authors with a sense of humor" section. So here are some books that I thought were actually funny: I've laughed aloud at least once in every Neal Stephenson book I've ever read (and the Baroque Cycle is very funny for quite a lot of its 1700 page run time); I literally cried laughing several times while reading David Wong's John Dies at the End; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is funny in the saddest way you can imagine, as is anything written by Camus; Hunter S. Thompson is reliably amusing and exhausting; Jane Austen is ridiculously funny, she doesn't have a single novel out there that doesn't have at least one tremendously amusing side-story. That's all I can think of right now, but hopefully I'll be able to read more funny books to give my opinions on if I stop spending time reading shitty books like I Hate Fun.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Lowe, Mifflin. I Hate Fun. Price Stern Sloan. Los Angeles: California. 1991.