SP: Two-thirds of the way into your novel,
Seveneves – in fact, on page 569 – you do
something kind of crazy. The story suddenly
skips ahead 5,000 years. What’s the idea here?
It took me maybe a week to read the first 2/3's of the book, and about three weeks to read the last 1/3. In many ways, these two parts feel like completely different books, one of which is significantly better than the other.
Also, I was occasionally distracted at the beginning when snippets of dialog from Anathem were reused in the form of exposition in Seveneves.
But, that said, I think the book is worth reading, especially the first 2/3's.
My personal, quick, rough ranking of Stephenson's bibliography:
* Anathem
* Snow Crash
* The Diamond Age
* Seveneves
* Cryptonomicon
* The Baroque Cycle
* Zodiac
* Reamde
* The Interface
* The Big U
It's a ~40,000 word article from 1996 he did for Wired about the laying of undersea fiber-optic cables. I'd say it ranks as one of his best writings, just behind the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon
Oh God, Mother Earth Motherboard was so great. Im really upset I lost my copy of that issue. That was a real treasure to 16 year old me. I'd love to read it again, in print.
I agree with your list mostly except for two points. Reamde should be near the top and Seveneves closer to the bottom. I found parts of SE to be interesting, but in the first part it just becomes a series of characters making more and more unrealistic choices in a survival situation.
I was really into the story until the President shows up. Then for no reason with clearly defined motivations, she starts making divisions that other well trained and selected people start following for no clear reason. It was like Neal knew where he wanted to be in 5000 years, but once he got everyone into space and Earth destroyed he didn't know how to tie them together. So he introduces Julian as a mcguffin to kill the swarm and whittle the survivors to 8 people.
I think you're bending the term 'McGuffin' slightly past its limit. Originally it meant "interchangeable object of pursuit that drives the plot" - a secret document, a special microchip, a stolen diamond etc. Recently I've seen people using it to mean "contrived shift in the plot", but even then it seems wrong to apply that label to a person. Villain or antagonist maybe?
Could you cite any of these bits of reused Anathem dialogue? I've read Anathem countless times, and didn't notice anything other than "plane-change maneuvers are expensive" or something to that effect, which I think is more of a truism than reused dialogue.
"Plane change maneuvers are expensive" is the one I remember off the top of my head, but I do distinctly recall another line elsewhere in the book. Sorry I can't be more specific.
Why bother? It's not like Stephenson invented that sentence. It's a fact, stated in the simplest possible way. If you google that literal sentence, you'll find quite a few uses unrelated to his books.
Want to take a swing at that yourself? I did do some google searches for the phrase in question, and other people have used it online (though I admit all the citations I found in my cursory search date to after Anathem, though that is no guarantee that they are aping it.)
I noticed a lot of parallels between Snow Crash and Anathem. Both had dialogues meant to educate the reader, and there is a little overlap in the concepts explored in both books.
I enjoyed the second part of Seveneves quite a bit, myself, though I definitely feel like it could easily have been expanded a bit, and become a second volume. I will say, however, that the sharp divides between the "races" felt a bit artificial to me, much like the ways the alien species in something like Star Trek are monocultures, for no obvious reason beyond author/plot convenience.
I'm trying to break through the initial wall in Anathem presently. I think part of what's impeding me is that I bought it in mass-market paperback format, and the binding on my copy is egregiously bad; it's shedding leaves like a Minnesota maple in September.
I think he was going for a take on mitochondrial Eve, and what could happen given current/future technology. But I agree, the racial purity hopes and dreams of the seven Eves would have been obliterated about two minutes after the second space baby hit puberty.
Anathem does take a little while to get into thanks to the language, but it's great!
In one of his recent interviews, Stephenson said that he was intentionally playing off the silly trope of Star Trek type aliens that are basically just caricatures of humans with this-or-that trait emphasized. Not that he was trashing Star Trek, just that he was having a little fun trying to make up a backstory about why humans and vulcans can interbreed.
In my mind it's much more like Zodiac. It's not nearly as "smart" as Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon, and at least to me sort of screamed "grocery store fiction" as I was reading it. That said, I could not put it down, and found myself following every twist and turn with a grin.
Not the GP, but I quite enjoyed it, personally. It's probably the least "Neal Stephenson"-ish work in his oeuvre, to be sure — if you come to it expecting another Snow Crash, you're going to be disappointed — but I had fun with it.
The cool ideas it presents aren't as cool as those in Snow Crash or Diamond Age, and when it goes off the rails it does so way worse than the other two. As I recall it's about 70% bad Tom Clancy plot.
I don't think you'd miss much if you never read Reamde. Whereas Snow Crash & Diamond Age (haven't read the other two) really do have fascinating premises & ideas.
I've read Reamde several times. It's a fantastic book. It's an interesting story set in modern times. I actually think it's a little more down to earth than some of his other work, more of a traditional story arc. I'm a huge fan of Anathem and Reamde is a very different style. The audiobook is also really good with a great narrator.
I'm going to read a few reviews of Seveneves before I read it, Reamde burned me so bad. Although now that I know this huge plot point (spoiler warning!?!?).... I don't know which way that tips the scales.
I genuinely don't understand it when people talk about their experience of a work as if their opinions are somehow objective facts. "It was bad" vs. "I didn't like it", for example. That just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm sorry you didn't like it, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the material, itself, or anyone else's experiences of it.
I think that is just a quirk of the English language...
For what it's worth, I also didn't like it - I thought the characters were dry and cliche. Multiple times I caught myself thinking "that makes no sense"...
He cites a few specific issues, like random animal attacks that appear just in time to steer the plot, that are arguably grounds for calling it "bad." Well-written review IMHO.
I assumed all of his books read like this. Stephenson is great at building a world and characters but once the story needs to stumble into some kind of ending, it all gets contrived and uninteresting. (Right now I am stalled at 75% of Snow Crash.)
Stephenson had an Authors @Google talk in 2008 [1], which was mostly about his book Anathem. In it he actually addressed what he calls the "Stephenson can't write endings" meme, as he calls it, at 10:54 going on for about three minutes [2]. I think his endings are just fine, myself, and also think that this whole idea that he can't write endings is just a self-perpetuating meme.
Snow Crash is a much better book if you skim all the stuff about the ancient Mesopotamians. He gets a little off into the weeds with that stuff, and apparently the editor failed to cut things back properly.
interesting... i found that bit one of the most interesting in the book! I also found Snow Crash to be his most readable. I devoured it in just a few sittings!
Also, I was occasionally distracted at the beginning when snippets of dialog from Anathem were reused in the form of exposition in Seveneves.
But, that said, I think the book is worth reading, especially the first 2/3's.
My personal, quick, rough ranking of Stephenson's bibliography:
Haven't Read