I read The Confusion mostly by dogged determination, and still have not quite finished The System of the World for all that I'm a Stephenson fangirl.
I'm reading Anathem now and kind of gritting my teeth. At least in the first chapters, it's like if A Canticle for Leibowitz were written by David Eddings. I liked Stephenson better when his worldbuilding didn't rely on a twenty-page introduction insisting that the very Earthlike world was not Earth, no, really not.
I think he's another author who has what I used to term Stephen King Syndrome: that he is very good at a particular subset of what he does, but he has convinced himself and everyone else that he doesn't need an editor. And for him particularly, he is very good at what he's good at so that it would take somebody with lots of skill, patience and backbone to say, "This part here? This habit here? Fix them or cut them."
Either that, or I really do wish that the entire Baroque Cycle is really the encoded form of an entirely different (and shorter!) novel, that I just don't have the tools to access. If that is the case, then he's welcome to play god as much as he likes, because that would be amazing. But I kind of doubt it, if the hand-waviness of the cryptography in Diamond Age was any indication. (I haven't read Cryptonomicon, and although I have it, I think I'll go read something else ... like James Joyce!)
I was made much happier by the hand-wavy yet evocative technology of The Diamond Age. I was a bit bothered by the black-box nature of so much in that book, but found it preferable to his new habit of explaining simple ideas into the ground. There was a five-page exchange in the beginning of Anathem over the fact that characters from different social classes used different made-up words for the same technology.
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I'm reading Anathem now and kind of gritting my teeth. At least in the first chapters, it's like if A Canticle for Leibowitz were written by David Eddings. I liked Stephenson better when his worldbuilding didn't rely on a twenty-page introduction insisting that the very Earthlike world was not Earth, no, really not.
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I think he's another author who has what I used to term Stephen King Syndrome: that he is very good at a particular subset of what he does, but he has convinced himself and everyone else that he doesn't need an editor. And for him particularly, he is very good at what he's good at so that it would take somebody with lots of skill, patience and backbone to say, "This part here? This habit here? Fix them or cut them."
Either that, or I really do wish that the entire Baroque Cycle is really the encoded form of an entirely different (and shorter!) novel, that I just don't have the tools to access. If that is the case, then he's welcome to play god as much as he likes, because that would be amazing. But I kind of doubt it, if the hand-waviness of the cryptography in Diamond Age was any indication. (I haven't read Cryptonomicon, and although I have it, I think I'll go read something else ... like James Joyce!)
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