OT: Anathem

Russ Allbery · 16 Sep 2008, 04:32 · from 2008-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rra at stanford.edu (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:32:55 -0700
Subject: (urth) OT: Anathem
In-Reply-To: <CBCFDA04-ED4F-4F1C-934D-55BE2B4FE7D7 at gmail.com> (Lane Haygood's
	message of "Mon\, 15 Sep 2008 23\:07\:53 -0500")
References: <39ed084f0809141908h4ee0b508oc6c0b1d6baf89abe at mail.gmail.com>
	<81c420fa0809150655n78fcb8edy962294747fac784b at mail.gmail.com>
	<44fb53d10809150841u565213cei1784a5112a21e7dc at mail.gmail.com>
	<39ed084f0809151140h9e0652fjff92ad0cdc6331ff at mail.gmail.com>
	<2f8557150809151154n176b532fl70cd27089a115b75 at mail.gmail.com>
	<9527.67.142.130.23.1221530199.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<DA32BD89-756E-48D1-A383-45F20E7DF766 at gmail.com>
	<9769.72.171.0.141.1221537830.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<CBCFDA04-ED4F-4F1C-934D-55BE2B4FE7D7 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <87bpyolngo.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>

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/>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net