(urth) instant new fan

[David Stockhoff]

On 12/19/2011 6:40 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes<danldo at gmail.com>
>> Daniel Petersen wrote:
>>> Looking forward to taking a big
>>> bite out of his oeuvre, but, recommendations notwithstanding, I'm still
>>> totally puzzled about how best to begin to tackle its voluminous bulk!
>> You could do worse than to start at the beginning. _Snow Crash_ is a
>> very funny book, if you can deal with the kind of humor that names a
>> book's main character "Hiro Protagonist." Others really like _The
>> Diamond Age_, but it didn't do much for me. I recommend going to the
>> recent _Anathem_, a dark alternate-world novel.
> Actually, /The Big U/ was the first. I found it intermittently amusing, but a lot of people didn't find it amusing at all. I second the recommendation to start with /Snow Crash/.  I haven't read /Anathem/, and I agree with Dan'l about /The Diamond Age/.
>   
> On Antonin's comment, I'm both a Gibson and a Stephenson person, though I like /Neuromancer/ better than anything by Stephenson that I've read.  Likewise I like both /The Lord of the Rings/ and /Bored of the Rings/, though I haven't reread the latter since I was a teenager.

Snow Crash and Diamond Age both seemed to me like skilled but hollow 
attempts to accomplish obvious goals. As though a teacher had assigned 
the writing of novels with certain plot points, topics, elements ... a 
feeling one sometimes gets from computer games.

His short story more or less set in the same world as Diamond Age was 
brilliant, however. And I loved the hoplite officer.