WWAWD Neal Stephenson?

[Not bad]

I'm working my way through his books sort of chronologically.

The Big U - Haven't read
Zodiac - Reads pretty good
Snow Crash - PFG
Interface - Decent
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - PFG
The Cobweb - Decent
Cryptonomicon - PFG
Quicksilver - Halfway through, and it's been a slog to be honest witcha. I don't think I'll read the rest of the Baroque cycle if this one doesn't pick up.

 

[DanFielding]

I tried with both Snow Crash and Seveneves but there’s too many infodumps for my liking. It seems like every 5 pages the plot grinds to a halt so he can give a detailed description of some piece of technology.

 

[Carl Winslow]

I made a thread bout cyber punk and talked about him a little.

Snow Crash is cool, but there is a detailed sex part with a underage girl that is really odd.

 

[diane]

which is the one where there is a perpetual war between various factions of nanobots that leads to air quality warnings depending on how bad the fighting is on a given day? that always stuck with me.

 

[guest]

He’s a sperg who can hold it together for long enough to write some decent shit but then sometimes get that quicksilver garbage you just have to tap out because it’s 8 million pages of horseshit.

Do yourself a favor if you read seveneves and just quit when it jumps to the future. I’ve never seen a good book so haphazardly ended before. It like he had a deadline that he forgot about and had to write the whole second half in two weeks. It was super retarded.

Reamde started out OK and just got progressively more silly as it went on. Like Breaking Bad times a thousand.

Snowcrash and Diamond Age read pretty good. Cryptonomicon was decent too.

 

[Not bad]

He’s a sperg who can hold it together for long enough to write some decent shit but then sometimes get that quicksilver garbage you just have to tap out because it’s 8 million pages of horseshit.

Do yourself a favor if you read seveneves and just quit when it jumps to the future. I’ve never seen a good book so haphazardly ended before. It like he had a deadline that he forgot about and had to write the whole second half in two weeks. It was super retarded.

Reamde started out OK and just got progressively more silly as it went on. Like Breaking Bad times a thousand.

Snowcrash and Diamond Age read pretty good. Cryptonomicon was decent too.

Not being able to tie things up seems to be a continued pattern then, because books like Snow Crash and the Diamond Age end pretty abruptly too. He doesn't conclude the story as much as he just stops writing at some arbitrary point.

I think the charm of his books is in all the tangents, while the story is just a framework to brainstorm inside. With Quicksilver it feels like he goes way overboard though. I'm hundreds of pages in, and I still don't know what it's about or why I should care. If you write fiction you at least need to create some urgency to pull the reader along.

I finna head on to Anathem for now.

 

[Harry Powell]

He’s a sperg who can hold it together for long enough to write some decent shit but then sometimes get that quicksilver garbage you just have to tap out because it’s 8 million pages of horseshit.

Do yourself a favor if you read seveneves and just quit when it jumps to the future. I’ve never seen a good book so haphazardly ended before. It like he had a deadline that he forgot about and had to write the whole second half in two weeks. It was super retarded.

Reamde started out OK and just got progressively more silly as it went on. Like Breaking Bad times a thousand.

Snowcrash and Diamond Age read pretty good. Cryptonomicon was decent too.

Seveneves really heated me up when he did the time jump. First of all I hated that one bitch and they should have killed her. Her progeny led to nothing but future strife and she was an evil cunt. Second of all that latter half should have just been a condensed prologue if he was going to write the book like that.

I believe Snow Crash is a near masterpiece. I just don’t understand why YT had to be 14 years old. Alternatively if you’re going to keep her that age to have a “cool teenager”, find another way for her to immobilize that dude other than the dentata.

 

[guest]

Not being able to tie things up seems to be a continued pattern then, because books like Snow Crash and the Diamond Age end pretty abruptly too. He doesn't conclude the story as much as he just stops writing at some arbitrary point.

I think the charm of his books is in all the tangents, while the story is just a framework to brainstorm inside. With Quicksilver it feels like he goes way overboard though. I'm hundreds of pages in, and I still don't know what it's about or why I should care. If you write fiction you at least need to create some urgency to pull the reader along.

I finna head on to Anathem for now.

I have no idea but my best guess is that he gets another idea that he wants to write about and gets bored of what he’s working on so he just ends it quick and gets on to the next one. I think Anathem is another one I bailed on too, when it got to the point where it was never going to be worth the slog, like quicksilver.

 

[guest]

Seveneves really heated me up when he did the time jump. First of all I hated that one bitch and they should have killed her. Her progeny led to nothing but future strife and she was an evil cunt. Second of all that latter half should have just been a condensed prologue if he was going to write the book like that.

I believe Snow Crash is a near masterpiece. I just don’t understand why YT had to be 14 years old. Alternatively if you’re going to keep her that age to have a “cool teenager”, find another way for her to immobilize that dude other than the dentata.

Yeah I wish he would have just stopped after the present day and put it aside and came back to write the future stuff as a sequel later on. Or just an epilogue maybe. Having it up front would kind of ruin the suspense. That’s the one book I can really see them making a series out of but hopefully they’d be smart enough to get rid of

Spoiler

the stupid submarine and cave people, who could never have survived.

I agree the YT fuck scene was kind of weird just because she’s young but for whatever reason it didn’t give me a pedo vibe like you get with some other authors. Maybe because I’ve read enough of his other shit to know it’s not something he goes back to regularly like a creep. Just making her 18 instead of 15 almost seems worse like you’re purposely drawing attention to it, and it’s not like 15 year olds don’t fuck. It’s just part of her character and I was OK with it without really being able to fully explain why.