OT: Anathem

brunians at brunians.org · 17 Sep 2008, 03:17 · 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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:17:00 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) OT: Anathem
In-Reply-To: <653514.58165.qm at web63903.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References: <653514.58165.qm at web63903.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <13581.67.142.130.42.1221621420.squirrel at brunians.org>

Swanwick is great.


.


> 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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Urth Mailing List
>
>
> To post, write urth at urth.net
>
>
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
>       _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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