Zula has taken a job at a company responsible for a globally popular video game, founded by her billionaire uncle. Her boyfriend Peter has entered into an illegal transaction with someone he doesn’t realize is connected to the Russian Mafia. Everything goes south, and Zula and Peter are abducted. What follows is a book with a giant scope. It’s an international suspense thriller that takes a multitude of interesting main characters to the limits of their capabilities. Stephenson manages to linger on lots of small technical details in a way that’s interesting, and while still making a real page-turner with characters we care about for over 1000 pages.
I’ll add that I’ve had this book on my reading list for a really long time (it was written in 2011). I love Stephenson, but something about the wording of the synopsis on the library site (probably from the dust jacket) had me always passing it over when it was time to choose the next book. No need to have, this is a great book - I really enjoyed it.
Its Neal though.
I enjoyed Seveneves and have Snow Crash lined up. Might take a look at this also.Snow Crash is an all time classic sci-fi novel imo
I cannot recommend Cryptonomicon to you enough if you haven’t already read it. It might be his best work in my opinion.
Snow Crash is incredible too though. That book deploys language with so much swagger, which is probably how I fell in love with Stephenson.
I was hugely influenced by Snow Crash in my youth, particularly the elements of neurolinguistic hacking and Sumerian mythology.
I only more recently in life became fascinated by Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, only to then realize that Snow Crash and those elements that I loved in it were deeply influenced by it.
Thank you, I didn’t notice the typo. Corrected now.
Very different. Let us know how you like Snow Crash, and this one if you read it.
Of Stephenson I read Anathem, that I adored, the Necronomicon, that I felt was definitely flat but readable, and Snow Crash, that I barely finished but did not enjoy. Do you have a comparison to his other works?
The setting is Cryptonomicon-adjacent (specially through its sequel, Fall), the flow of the story is in between Cryptonomicon and Anathem. The book can be read standalone without having read any of his other novels.
With Fall, however I really had to struggle to finish it. No comparison to the others imho.
I had a lot of trouble getting into Snow crash but about 1/3 in it really hooked me.
Hmm, other than the writing style, I don’t think any of them are much like the others. I understand there’s a sequel to this one, so I’m going to guess it’s similar. It’s difficult for me to make a recommendation for you because I really liked Snow Crash, so our tastes are different, and there’s not enough to go on about what you didn’t like about it and others.
I’ll add that Seveneves is another of his books that I personally enjoyed, but I know other people who it didn’t resonate with.
I love talking about books, so i will expand on my previous comment.
I felt Snow Crash was a pile of random ideas, half added for shock value. While Anathem developed a background world that really rooted the characters. It felt the ending was again fairly random, but the rest of the book had a fairly structured narrative and the conclusion was nicely foreshadowed. In the Cryptinomicon (errata on the previous comment) the love story was completely shoe horned and built on nothing, as was the general resolution of the present time line. The depiction of most characters was shallow.
I’ve read Cryptinomicon and remember enjoying it, but it’s been so many years that I’ve lost most of the details. Just read the Wikipedia page and it all seemed familiar, but it didn’t all come back.
I will say that there are some legitimate complaints about Reamde. For one, there’s multiple romantic pairings of characters, and that felt a little too pat to me. For another, it becomes clear that there’s going to be a confluence of story streams that becomes a bit predictable - not necessarily the details or resolution, but the fact of it.
Those complaints didn’t stop my enjoyment of it though.
Thanks! I might look at it next time I have to fill up my reading pile
Neal Stephenson is my favorite living author and regularly re-read some of my favorites - Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Seveneves, and this one.
I think Reamde is the most accessible Stephenson book - in a way it masquerades as a sort of thriller you’d buy in paperback at an airport, but things get truly bonkers.
I think it’s my favorite of his more recent (post baroque cycle) works.
It really is a shame so many tech bro assholes also read Stephenson growing up and got all the wrong ideas from him.
Agreed, he’s great; I really enjoyed all the ones you mentioned. My favor living/writing author is Adrian Tchaikovsky, but Stephenson is way up there.
And yeah, the tech bros running around like they’re creating his vision are gross.
Only a fucking dumbass dipshit loser like Elon Musk could read Snow Crash and decide they want to be L Bob Rife instead of Hiro motherfucking Protagonist.
Amazing what a total lack of empathy will do.
Tchaikovsky is brilliant! Would you mind recommending another series of his besides the Children of… - that one I already finished (even with the new one out earlier this year).
The Children of Time series is so great - I think it ranks up the with the very best SF series of all time.
I very much enjoyed Service Model. It’s much lighter than the series you just read, but really good; here are my notes for it:
- Charles, a high-end robot valet, finds that he has murdered his master, though he doesn’t know why. To find the answer, he heads to Diagnostics, leaving the grounds for the first time. He finds civilization has collapsed, with robots like himself at various levels of functionality. He also meets The Wonk, who believes Charles has become sentient. This book is a treasure. Fans of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams will find something to love here.
Not at all light would be Shroud, but it’s truly fascinating. Notes:
- A ship tasked with prepping solar systems for resource stripping to support human expansion in the galaxy encounters a moon putting out tremendous radio signals and goes to investigate. Tchaikovsky shows again why he’s becoming my favorite author. Really interesting life forms mixed with really interesting human interactions. Great book.
Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong with him. Looking through my notes, the one I liked the least was City of Last Chances, which is the first of his Tyrant Philosophers series. I continued the series and it’s really grown on me. It’s very different from the Children series, including in that it’s fantasy, not SF.
I could go on, but I’ve probably overdone. Oh, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I started a thread about him around the beginning of the year, so you might be interested in other peoples’ comments.
Thank you, this was exactly what I needed!
The only fantasy I could stomach so far was the Discworld series and Game of Thrones. For some reason I get hung up on magic otherwise.
Thanks for notes, I gave the first lines a quick skim (I try not to watch trailers for movies either, rather go in blind based on word of mouth or hype), and I think I’ll give Service Model a shot, then go into Shroud when I’m ready.
And great Stephenson thread as well, btw. I’ll be coming back to this in the future.
Awesome - let us know how you liked them.
I try to be very careful in my notes/reviews not to give anything away that isn’t basic to the premise or revealed in the very first part. Like you, I hate to have important things spoiled for me. That makes it hard to give much in the way of details for some books, which is why some of my blurbs seem a bit cryptic or superficial.
Termination Shock is probably the Stephenson that is most like Reamde in the sense of feeling like a limited scope thriller while still touching on insane big picture stuff. Unfortunately, it does indulge in Neal’s ethos of “megaengineering projects will be a net positive if we just get out of the visionaries’ way”.
Also,
Tap for spoiler
They did my boy Laks dirty.
I haven’t read that one. Understandably, there’s quite a lot of climate fiction being written. Much of it feels important, but the underlying existential dread isn’t very enjoyable. KSR’s Ministry for the Future was really good though.
Ministry was indeed excellent (I listened to the audiobook)