Steviepinhead
Posts: 532 Joined: Jan. 2006
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Quote (C.J.O'Brien @ Dec. 12 2008,14:09) | Quote | I'm reading Anathem, the new opus from Neal Stephenson, the author of Cryptonomicon and the "System of the World" books. It's amazing how many issues that are au currant in our little science-creationist skirmishes that NS manages to render into lively fiction... |
Yes, good stuff. I've been reading it, too... almost done.
What did you think, Stevie? (I'm assuming you've finished it by now) |
I finally finished Anathem, the latest from Neal Stephenson.
That makes it sound like it was a hard slog, which is far from the case. As always, reading a Stephenson book is quite enjoyable and inevitably thought-provoking. Finishing a Stephenson book can be less so, however. I have been less than enthralled with the endings of Cryptonomicon and the "Baroque Cycle" trilogy, for example. After all kinds of fascinating and intricate build-up, the grand climaxes have, for me, fallen a little flat.
Such "realistic" endings may be more modern, less contrived, or whatever. But, while I don't mind realistic damage, loss, cost, consequence -- however it might be worded -- in my fiction, and don't require the author to contort the incident, characters, and motivations simply to arrive at a predicatable "happy ending," I also don't necessarily look to find humdrum, everyday, back-to-earth, life-doesn't-always-work-out finales, either...
In short, Anathem had a more emotionally-satisfying ending than some of Stephenson's previous extravaganzas. <Possible Spoiler Alert!> Of course, to achieve this, Stephenson had to carefully weave his principal players through a batch of polycosmic timelines. In any number of those "other" cosmic timelines, the fate of his principal players was, undoubtably, less satisfying to the captivated reader...
I certainly enjoyed Stephenson's play with words in his two invented languages of Orth and Fluccish, as well. Not quite as challenging as Tolkien's thoroughly-worked out imaginary languages, but fun to grapple with over the course of the volume.
Just because this book was big and fat, I laid it down about two-thirds of the way through to concentrate on several other reading projects, including -- most recently -- Orr and Coyne's Speciation and Janet Browne's exemplary life of Darwin, Voyaging.
I'm only partway through each of these, but am enjoying both quite a lot: http://www.amazon.com/Charles....dbs_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/Speciat....&sr=1-1
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