(urth) OT: Anathem

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Sep 15 21:32:55 PDT 2008


Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> writes:

> I haven't read the Baroque cycle be Stephenson, but "Snow Crash"
> continues to top my list of favorites.  It's like Thomas Pynchon and
> William Gibson had a baby.

I adore Stephenson in general, but he's a very different writer than
Wolfe.  I've not read Anathem yet (I just got my copy last Friday), but I
can't imagine it being any sort of direct or even close rip-off of BotNS,
nor was that the impression I got from the segment Stephenson read or from
the subsequent discussion and Q&A.  I don't think Stephenson could write
such a book if he tried.

Stephenson at his best is a sort of insane infodump of fascinating trivia
crossed with incredibly dry geek humor and the sort of crazy ideas that
engineers and computer people come up with at 2am when they're exhausted.
He doesn't have anywhere near the narrative complexity and levels of
partly revealed detail as Wolfe.  He instead sucks you into his world by
showing you all the shiny bits that he thought were just fascinating.
Hiding stuff isn't really his thing.

Snow Crash is great stuff, as is Cryptonomicon and Zodiac (an
underappreciated book), but read one of his books before getting lots of
them.  Some people bounce off his writing style pretty badly.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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