At 9:30 PM -0400 12/12/2000, William T Goodall wrote:
>I enjoyed _The Diamond Age_ but felt it did a better job of world-building
>in the first half than it did of using the world in the second half.
I could be convinced of that, but I think it was actually more like an
easing off on continuing that process of world-building, as well as
applying a model that I happen to think was interesting (The Fists of
Righteous Harmony as the sort of massive isolationist, quasi-luddite group
that he imagines in his article (written while he was writing the novel)
called "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell." (Hm. Seems that both Sterling and
Stephenson's contributions to WIRED seem to sometimes be products of
research they are doing for their novels . . . Sterling published an
article there on Turkish Cyprus and that's the setting for a good hunk of
his new novel, _Zeitgeist_. Which, by the way, I would describe as magical
realist in which the magic seems to be governed by laws that sometimes seem
just wacky, and at other times look a fair bit like
Postmodernist-Poststructuralist literary theory as they might look when
applied to an imaginary Bruce Sterling novel set in 1999... and it's a good
book somehow, too! :) ).
I still found _The Diamond Age_ pretty strong up until the end, myself, but
I noticed it leaned more heavily on the Primer and characters around Nell,
and less on Nell, toward the second half. However, the ending really
disappointed me . . . the last 20 pages seemed to have been written in a
great rush, OR perhaps in an attempt to gain the kind of distance from Nell
that Nell has from Princess Nell in the Primer . . . but that kind of
mimetic shift is too sudden and not convincingly executed, IMHO.
I dunno if anyone wants to discuss the book any deeper than that, but the
world-building is fascinating to me, somewhat in conjunction with the stuff
in that "Mao Bell" article (which is available online at WIRED magazine)
but also all on its own.
>_Cryptonomicon_ (which I am reading now) appears to be his best yet
>(although it could have been edited better - there are a few mistakes which
>could have been corrected.)
Is that in the trade paper edition? That would be bad. There's a hilarious
segment available online with him reading a segment about a wisdom tooth
from that novel.
Probably from Stephenson's stuff I will next read _Zodiac_ because I have
it, which happened because I looked at the first page and it is just nuts.
Gord
