I have to agree there. I think sometimes Neal Stephenson tend to get too focused on the “science” at the expense of the “fiction”. I suppose it’s fine if you’re into that, but most of the time it seems to be he’s forgotten he’s writing novels.

Oh! Nice post by the way. You should review novels more often.

I laughed at the silmarillion/morgan freeman comment, but I’m a lapdog of sorts that would find that sort of thing hilarious. I’m totally with you on the big book thing. It gets to the point where I’ve started to think that perhaps the authors are compensating for something. Bigger isn’t always better, in any sense, and in most cases, bigger is worse.

Poetry is about saying the most with the fewest words, or that’s how it’s supposed to be. I know that these novels are works of prose, but do they really want their work to really be worth so much less, word for word, then a kindergarten students first haiku? Because that’s what it seems to me.

Duckspeak has its place, but it needs to be used with some sort of broader message in mind, otherwise you’re playing Dr Suess. Hell, Doctor Suess probably has more message in his work then some of these authors.

Lord of the rings seems like a monolithic tome, but it’s 6 books (The trilogy is actually a sextet, as each of the 3 books are split into two, about the size of the original The Hobbit – just mentioning that for people who don’t know, I’m sure most people who would respond to this comment would know though). Even Tolkien, who created a fully realised world wouldn’t put his opus out and call it a single book.

Robert Jordan put out what was probably the best of the giant tome novels, and honestly, I couldn’t get through more then a couple of those. It wasn’t that they were bad, I’ve read much worse stories, I just fell out of sync with the story and it’s difficult for me to get back into a series without reading through it from the start (hence why I’ve read the first harry potter book 7 times), and the first books weren’t good enough to read a second time with a hopes of catching the train to lala land all the fans of the story are raving about all the time.

If they want to crucify you for your opinions Spoony, I’ll hang right next to you, because I think gargantuan novels with no place to go should be put on display as examples of how NOT to write a story.

- Matthew, Realising the Irony in posting a comment almost as large as the blog entry decrying volumous prose :P

In Isaac Asimov’s novel Nightfall, he did the same thing, almost. He had an earth-like world that wasn’t earth. But you know what he did instead? He added a preface that said it wasn’t earth, and they DID have different words for everything, but including those words would be silly and retarded. So he said he would just call things what they were called on earth.

The only books that I have read over a thousand pages and not been board at all by were two works of chinese classic literature.
The Three Kingdoms, which is about the political and milltary destruction of the han empire and the wars and plots of Liu Bei Cao Cao And Sun Quan to unite the land once aaon, in the name of the emperor under thier control.

And Outlaws of the Marsh a book about well pretty much REVENGE! Great stuff.

He wants to separate himself from the casual reader. The only book I really loved by Stephenson was Snow Crash. Everything else is pretty long, and isn’t the easiest thing to read.

i am sorry to say the longest book i have read is the janson directive by robert ludlum and infortunatly it is only 625 pages long
but i’ts great
damn a 1000 is it the dam encyclopedia

To complain about long books seems to be the next big thing everyone has to rant about… and it is so superficial…
Well, I could tolerate that in your last “review” (Baroque Cycle), or if your would review “modern” fantasy literature, but Anathem?

Stephenson is a nerd like you and me when it comes to details, and he has refined his skills since Cryptonomicon. Keep on Anathem at least to the “Convox”, and if the story does not hook you up then… all hope is lost ;)

I have to admit that I enjoyed the Wheel of Time series, but that might be because I listened to it as an audiobook and the narrators were really good. Yes, it was slow at times, but something was always happening and I liked most of the characters(Faile can die in a fire, though).

After reading Snow Crash, I have no desire to touch anything that Neal Stephenson has written. The world and the characters were good, but the plot was beyond crazy(neuro-lingustic programming[from ancient Babylonia, no less], no thanks) and the second half pretty much fell off the deep end.

Jovian boogle-hoops? Why not the often lethal Mercurian Boomerang Spoon?

Just have to respond to Altorins comment about LotR being six books though. Tolkein never intended LotR to be a 3/6 book series, he wanted it released as one whole novel, but the publishers resisted until he gave in and allowed them to split the book up.

Slashberries!

…sorry, that just… amused the hell out of me. Is it gay fruit sex?

*cough* Anyhoo. Yeah, the longness of some stuff can be daunting, but I read inhumanly fast, so it’s not usually a problem for me. But… er. Well. I guess I’m faster to put a book down because of boredom or disliking it.

@LT:

To complain about long books seems to be the next big thing everyone has to rant about… and it is so superficial…

I don’t think it’s the length of the book that’s bugging Spoony, but the fact that he finds it long and uninteresting.

If you can’t get into a book even a couple hundred pages will seem to take an eternity to sludge through. If you’re engaged in the content a thousand page book will feel like a pamphlet.

To be fair, some books need to be long.

Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc. need top be 1000+ pages. Especially the in the case of the latter, there are too many characters and events to cram into a succinct 200 pages and achieve the same results.

What’s bothersome are long books that are too dry. My classic example of this is Moby Dick, which is about 500 pages of dry reading. Melville will spend approximately 2-4 pages advancing the plot to every 40-50 ppages he spends rambling about ANYTHING HE WANTS (how to build half a boat, what the different species’ of whales are, etc.) That’s what it sounds like Stephenson is doing. That’s boring.

If you can write an 800 page book and keep me interested the whole way through, I’m not going to complain the book is too long. If I struggle to read 50 pages, that’s whenit’s a problem.

Sounds like he is doing the one thing all new writers are told to avoid as if it will bring about the black plague … the making up stupid words for common shit. Frankly if its a piece of bread then call it a piece of bread its not a mulvuk, now if the piece of bread is coated in some lsd crap that makes you shit out gold and is common place in the world then by all means call it a mulvuk but for god sakes don’t call a movie a speely because you want to be cute. Frankly I give writers a couple of pages if they start making up stupid ass words for common things their stupid ass book goes in the trash (it doesnt even get to claim shelf space with the rest of my oh yes I read that wink wink books).

in response to the Doctor’s comment.

Yeah Cao Cao and Lui bei and Sun Quan are cool, But I use Lu Xun In Dynasty Warriors :D

I agree. There’s some sort of stupidity when someone is lecturing in a fiction book. I don’t aim to get some sort of learning experience from fiction novella (I thank you), I want entertainment. I’m a highly educated individual that me know nothing that me can’t likey.

This review was double plus good, brothers.

I laughed so hard!! I have barely any clue at what is REALLY going on, but damn, was this mini-review funny. I always thought that writing a book with a future language would be pretty cool, but I never thought of READING a book like that…I feel silly.

<3 Spoony

Sounds like hes trying to make A Clockwork Orange.

I have to agree with spoony here. I don’t think it’s so much that these books are long, it’s that nothing happens. An tom clancy fan would tell you how sheer awesome executive orders is, and that’s 1200 pages. And in it, all kind of crazy crap happens. Thery’re Called plot points! Executive orders, is not only 1200 pages, it’s in size 10, singlespaced, Times New roman. But it’s almost movie quality story telling. Not to mention, Tom clancy has a habit of mixing up good and bad endings, so their is actually suspense. So long books can be good, but SMEG HAS TO HAPPEN.

Why is everyone comparing near 1,000 page books to book sets that are near 1,000 pages?

The lord of the rings set is actually 3 books, contrary to the ones bought today with all three rings books and ‘The hobbit’ under one cover.

A single book that goes on for 960 pages should not be telling one story (or even one part) IMO, but I guess it is this authors style. All I can say is look at some extremely popular book trilogies and you’ll notice they are three to five 200-300 page books, not three to five 1k page books.

I Imagine that if the definition stuff is true, that a re-read value would be pretty low just because it will feel like being explained/taught how to tie your shoes when you already know how.

Hey, at least his stuff is sinking in heh heh …. seriously, that book screams Major Suckage …

An exceptional writer can make small, subtle events mean a lot, but ANYONE can ramble on for ages if they need to. I hold David Eddings as a prime example of that…

Even if you think you have what it takes to make the subtle meaningful and compelling [i]you need to know your audience![/i] If people expect a high-paced plot then that’s what you have to give them or reconsider your genre and writing style entirely.

It all comes down to what you’re good at pretty much. Some of my favorite books are by Dan Simmons, chief among them Song of Kali and Hyperion. Not to claim that the story is slow-paced in them exactly, but his later attempt at writing a more action-priented Epic (a pastiche of the Illiad) was, in my eyes, a complete failure. His most recent work (that I know of), The Horror again returned to the more subtle style of previous books, and it’s far superior.

So my point is that these writers may wish they could write a certain type of fiction, but more often than not they can’t deviate far from the style that gave them success in the first place. Writing an epic work of hundreds upon hundreds on pages while trying for a subtle style didn’t seem like the best idea in this case.

Also, inventing words just because is, to me, just sort of childish if it serves no other purpose than trying to create an aura of mystique. It’s artificial and will only serve to confuse the reader (or let those rabid enough to learn the exact definitions of everything form circle-jerks on forums).

I warned you that Anathem wanted you to learn a new language. Face it, Neal’s kinda a one shot deal. Snow Crash and Zodiac were the best he had.

Hey Battlefield Earth was 1200+ pages and that is one of my favorite books, and no i am not a Scientology nut job. As for the Three Kingdoms post, well i have done everything expect read the book, i even have the big 54 VCD Chinese show. And if i didn’t love the content so much it would have put me to sleep.

The Wheel of Time series is all about events. He looks at people mainly from the outside and never psychoanalyses them in narrative. Doing that it generally makes me tired pretty quickly as I do enough of it myself, so I like his style of writing, letting the world and events do the talking. And there are a lot of those. LoTR is easily dwarfed by the scope the WoT series develops in the later books, and in book 10 so much has to happen at once that it’s very difficult to get through. Luckily he found inspiration and pacing again in book 11, the last book he wrote before he died. I have gone through this series twice, but I had read it for the first time maybe 5 years ago. I read pretty quickly so I can finish one of the books in a week, or 3 to 4 days if I’m really determined. That still means it takes a long time to get through them all, but everything that happens feels so epic that it just keeps me interested.

As for the words thing, fuck that. It’s absolutely ridiculous to make up new words for things just to be different, because you’re ignoring the fact that THE WHOLE LANGUAGE WOULD BE DIFFERENT. So if you’re using English anyway, you should use the original words. It does work on a limited scale for things that are invented during the book, but even then taking it too far just gets annoying.

Oh, and I like for books to leave me to feel like I’ve learned something (or been enriched in some way – I know that sounds cheesy) – and good fantasy novels usually do. But if it feels like you’re being lectured then they’re laying it on way too thick.

Wow I’m only like 90 pages into Homeland and already there’s been betrayal, tension between families, training, and fighting

Here’s the Asimov quote from Nightfall that someone mentioned earlier:
“…it seemed simpler and more desirable to use these familiar terms… (than) to invent a long series of wholly (alien) terms. In other words, we could have told you that one of our characters paused to strap on his quonglishes before setting out on a walk of seven vorks along the main gleebish of his native znoob, and everything might have seemed ever so much more thoroughly alien. But it would also have been ever so much more difficult to make sense out of what we were saying…”

Sounds exactly right.

This may be the only time I may disagree with you on your thoughts on Anathem Noah. I read the entire book and found it to be very serviceable as far as plot went (coming from someone who couldn’t finish Quicksilver either). I think it all comes down to personal tastes, but for a book that is going to take place on an entirely different planet, I truly wanted to be transported to a different place and I feel Stephenson delivered in that regard. The different words used I think also contributed a great deal to the immersion and gave the planet and its culture a much more authentic feel. I wanted to know everything there was to know about that world and I think the over 900 pages covered it rather nicely (unlike his other works after Snow Crash and the Zodiac).

Overall I feel this was the first “long” book that Stephenson actually did a good job in writing, and maybe you should give it a another chance next time (if you’re willing to read through the first two-hundred pages or so). But, that’s just one opinion, I can’t tell what books you can and can’t like.

I’ve always felt that having made-up words for certain things is a given – foods, animals, occasionally technology – because these things won’t have much of an Earth-based analogy. But if you’re going to do that, provide us with a comparison so that we can feel more grounded: “The fruit looked like a purple spherical banana and tasted like beef in gravy”; “the animal had five legs, one on top of its head, and its face reminded him of his Uncle Norris”, that kind of thing. You’re still getting the impression that you’re on an alien world because, hey, who ever had a fruit that tasted like meat, but the reader can still relate since there’s still a reference point there for them.

I’d give China Mieville’s stuff a read if you haven’t already, starting with Perdido Street Station. There’s a lot of detail, but it adds more to the overall depth of the book than the author showing off his artistic mivonks, and much of it does play into the actual story. That or The Diamond Age, since that was probably the last book Stephenson got right.

Good lord you’re all pussies! I read 950 page books in two fucking days if they are good enough. Granted I need to go without sleep on one of them to get the job done. But still, I say y’all are wusses!

Such, Nonesuch. Interweb Tough Guy.

Such, Nonesuch. Interweb Tough Guy.

As an aspiring writer, I was wondering about this very subject, myself: just how far should I go in establishing a new world. Although it can help to draw you into a world, I’ve never been a fan of the idea of creating new, arbitrary words to describe things that already exist (or butchering a language to establish a heavy accent, i.e. “Giff me a ‘alf-penny, Guv, an’ I’ll be sure t’ shut me gob ’bout th’ dollymop wot I saw in yer deadlurk”). It’s just tiresome to write and even moreso to read.

No one should need an interpreter to read a story written in their native language.

Sounds like one to miss, I hate anything long-winded! On a side-note, smeg is a real word, or at least it’s short for a real
word; Smegma. I won’t go into detail about what it means but a quick Google should reveal all :)

Sounds like one to miss, I hate anything long-winded! On a side-note, smeg is a real word, or at least it’s short for a real
word; Smegma. I won’t go into detail about what it means but a quick Google should reveal all :)

On a somewhat related note, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess was fucking awesome.

“a book so dense I can actually see small particles of matter breaking off my sandwich and orbiting the dust jacket”
this! :D good one.

Contrary to what some people believe, LOTR was always meant to be ONE book. Tolkien said so himself. Not three, not six. One book. The publisher divided it.

Anyway, I enjoy long books. If it’s good, I don’t care how long it is. Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos were great and they’re close to 1000 pages each. Egyptian Sinuhet was bloody long and I still read it as a kid, the same with IT by S.King (awesome book that.).
But it has to be enjoyable, books like The Historian or Strangle&Norrel just dragged forever and were boring quite often.

“a book so dense I can actually see small particles of matter breaking off my sandwich and orbiting the dust jacket”
this! :D good one.

Contrary to what some people believe, LOTR was always meant to be ONE book. Tolkien said so himself. Not three, not six. One book. The publisher divided it.

Anyway, I enjoy long books. If it’s good, I don’t care how long it is. Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos were great and they’re close to 1000 pages each. Egyptian Sinuhet was bloody long and I still read it as a kid, the same with IT by S.King (awesome book that.).
But it has to be enjoyable, books like The Historian or Strangle&Norrel just dragged forever and were boring quite often.

For a book like Anathem you really should have finished reading it before writing up a review. Yes its long, and a problem with Anathem is it doesn’t really get started until about 300 pages in, about the length of any other novel.

I really hope you’ll finish it because many of your complaints (the rewording for example) will all make sense when the book is done.

Sounds like Neal was able to swing a “Patience Worth” deal with his publisher…and that’s never good.

As for the idea of making one’s own language, that’s fine to some extent, but there has to be either some grounding in English (so as to give the idea that the words are the best translation of the actual terms) or terms used so consistently exacting that it helps with the immersion into fiction–and these should be rare enough to make the reader understand that “we’re dealing with alien thought processes”, so to speak.
For example, in my own stories about the world Vissatree, a telephone is called a “nobird”–as in it sends the message instead of a bird. And as the world has two races, each with a different number derivation, their common numbers, while sounding alien, are nothing more than an amalgam of a 4-derived system and a 10-derived system.
In short, a little “alienness” in the language is okay…but if there’s so much that the book needs its own translation guide, then it’s a wee bit overdone.

Sounds like Neal was able to swing a “Patience Worth” deal with his publisher…and that’s never good.

As for the idea of making one’s own language, that’s fine to some extent, but there has to be either some grounding in English (so as to give the idea that the words are the best translation of the actual terms) or terms used so consistently exacting that it helps with the immersion into fiction–and these should be rare enough to make the reader understand that “we’re dealing with alien thought processes”, so to speak.
For example, in my own stories about the world Vissatree, a telephone is called a “nobird”–as in it sends the message instead of a bird. And as the world has two races, each with a different number derivation, their common numbers, while sounding alien, are nothing more than an amalgam of a 4-derived system and a 10-derived system.
In short, a little “alienness” in the language is okay…but if there’s so much that the book needs its own translation guide, then it’s a wee bit overdone.

If you want an example of a long book/series with a zillion of themes and many “made up” (as in borrowed from arab, hebrew, and whatnot) words, I strongly suggest you try out thew Dune hexalogy from Frank Herbert. You can skip the last book (Chapterhouse:Dune), as it gets really pulp sometimes, but the rest have a very strong narrative/plot element, some that may not necessarily be evident in the first reading (examine Jesica’s position towards her son in the first novel, for example), and tackle huge sociological themes. Read them, now:)

Or for non-fiction (sort of, at least), I suggest Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses/Last Sigh of the Moor (sic?). You can try and tackle “Midnights Children”, but that suffers a bit from the “I want to tell everything” complex.

Stephenson is a bit too overhyped for my taste.

Well, I’m reading it, english is not even my first lenguague and I can keep up with the futurespeak.

But its true, it’s not necesary to tell the story, and Stephenson editor needs to do his fucking work.

Well, I’m reading it, english is not even my first lenguague and I can keep up with the futurespeak.

But its true, it’s not necesary to tell the story, and Stephenson editor needs to do his fucking work.

a good reference for a book series that is 2000+ pages long is the “Sword of Truth” saga reasons
1. its got magic, sex, violence, and a guy who can make things blow up just by looking at them as the main character
2. it may be pulp, but its very creative within its cliches
3. from the wikipedia, “As of 2008, 25 million copies of the series’ books have been sold worldwide, and the series has been translated into more than 20 languages. A television series adaptation of the novels, titled Legend of the Seeker, is currently being produced by ABC Studios and broadcast via syndication.”
nuff said

Neal started with punchy sentence fragments and writing meant for a comic in Snow Crash. Each of his books became more bombastic than the last. I read the last book of the Baroque Cycle and liked it. Then I tried to read the first book in the trilogy which starts with a completely unnatural conversation between a man just-arrived-in-America and a boy about European political figures. It was clear to me Neal had done alot of research for this book and found the subject-matter thoroughly interesting. It wasn’t clear to Neil that he should spread this information throughout the book where needed instead of thinking someone’s going to memorize all the characters at the start like he’s cramming for a test. 

My advice for reading Neal is if you don’t find a paragraph entertaining: skip it. Alot of his writing is just revelry in the wordplay of storytelling. So if you enjoy the speech it’s fun to listen and if you can suspend the long sentences in your mind there’s often a punchline to reward you. I enjoyed Anathema more than the baroque cycle. The whole book is building to the real gem which’s a metaphysical conception of consciousness unwrapped in the last part of the book and demonstrated in the final chapters. It’s really cool and I found it worth the parts where the book drags. For once, the ending of a Neal Stephenson book’s the best part.