(urth) OT: Anathem

[Fred Kiesche]

Greetings:

Like Swanwick, got bored with Sterling, Gibson is getting increasingly borderline with me.

As for Stephenson, it's a split. I couldn't get through Snow Crash (but bought it recently to try again) and haven't tried Diamond Age. 

Cryptnomicon caught my attention and I read it in a day or so when I was supposed to be attending a conference. 

I loved The Baroque Cycle. I've bought it in hardcover, trade paperback (to bring on vacation) and in electronic format (twice, the second time to get it in a more "universal"--for me--format, to be able to use it in multiple eBook readers).

But what of Dos Passos?



F.P. Kiesche III  "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Blogging at The Lensman's Children and TexasBestGrok!

--- On Tue, 9/16/08, Dave Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com> wrote:
From: Dave Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) OT: Anathem
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 8:12 PM




  
I'm a fan of Wolfe, Stephenson, Gibson, and Pynchon. (Not to
mention Sterling and Swanwick -- have we ever discussed Swanwick here?)
Anyway, "Go figure."



Pynchon's most accessible novel is "The Crying of Lot 49." It has many
of the themes he elaborates on in later novels (conspiracies, weird
sex, technology, drugs, paranoia, nerdulent infodumps), but is short,
funny, and to the point. "Gravity's Rainbow" is an incredible novel,
but it's a hard slog for most people (you can tell the ones who gave up
because they only talk about the "Banana Breakfast" scene, which occurs
very early in a very long novel). I liked "Mason & Dixon" but found
it overlong, and haven't managed (so far) to get past the first hundred
or so pages of "Against the Day." "V," though, is readable and (again)
comparatively short.



I like Stephenson a lot, and am reading "Anathem" now (and avoiding any
potential spoilers). Like most Stephenson novels, it's starting
somewhat slowly. I have read "The Baroque Cycle" twice and enjoyed it
even more the second time. This is not unlike how I approach most of
Wolfe's work: I've probably read "The Book of the New Sun" six or eight
times at least, and still find new stuff each time. I disagree with
Adam Thornton's comparison of "The Baroque Cycle" and "Gravity's
Rainbow." Superficially it is accurate, but in practice "GR" is
profoundly pessimistic and while it is vaguely about "how the present
came to be" (and for Pynchon, that means the technological,
deracinated, conspiracy-theorist, dehumanized present), "BC" is
optimistic and about how the modern world and worldview was born and
propagated (in a fairly short space of time in the 1600s). Thus, in
spite of its setting and ostensible format ("historical novel"), "BC"
is an SF novel, whereas "GR" is a modern or post-modern "mainstream"
novel.



I am looking forward with anticipation to "An Evil Guest." (My wife
discovered it inside our storm door as I was typing this message -- no
doubt it fell from space in a leaden casket).



To further broaden the topic, I just finished "House of Leaves," by
Mark Danielewski (sp?), another doorstop of a book, full of
typographical foolery and unreliable narrators. It was creepy and I
enjoyed it.



-- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha



David Duffy wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, Adam Thornton wrote:
  

  

  

On Sep 15, 2008, at 9:25 PM, brunians at brunians.org wrote:
    

    

    I've had other people say similar things to
me, but I don't see it as all
      

*that* good. But then I don't really like either Pynchon or Gibson
either.
      

      

    
    

Seriously: the Baroque Cycle is _Gravity's Rainbow_ only set after the
30 Years' War rather than after WWII.
    

    

Speaking of which: how many other hard-core Pynchon fans are there
here?
    

    

  
  

Well I just finished _Against_the_day.  I avoided M&D as too long
(read all his others), but got sucked in by the first chapter of
_AtD_.  I like and have read everything of Stephenson's, but I was glad
to reach the end of the Baroque Cycle ;)
  

  

Turning back to Wolfe, Pynchon is interested in a lot of the same
things -- I think here of power and violence and pulp literature (_atD_
has a few Lovecraftian episodes as well as all the edisonades/westerns)
and a hard science background that is deliberately held lightly -- but
slightly different politics...and more on-screen sex...and his puns are
probably better.
  

  

David Duffy.
  

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