(no subject)

[cerusee]

Cryptonomicon was kind of a letdown after The Baroque Cycle, not least because of the frankly distasteful sexual politics--there is, at best, one vaguely sympathetic and remotely interesting female character in the entire book, and even she is totally subsumed by the book's portrayal of women as receptacles for ejaculate, in an irritatingly vivid and memorable passage near the end, which pretty much became the dominant image of the book for me--but I remain in awe of Stephenson.

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that both you and heron are recommending Diamond Age to me; I vaguely recall seeing someone complain that the ending of that one had ruined Stephenson for her in terms of his female characters. Still, I don't think he could get significantly worse than Cryptonomicon on that front, and I trust your feminist sensibilities. Steampunk, yum!

Have you read The Baroque Cycle? Eliza is an amazing character, and I'll forgive Stephenson a lot for creating her.

[herongale]

I second the recc on The Diamond Age. There is introduced in that book a technology that I would have KILLED to have as a little girl. D:

IMHO, Cryptonomicon really should be read before The Baroque Cycle, just because the later is a damn sight more like a masterpiece, and all of Stephenson's prior works pale in comparison. (Also, although it feels right to go back in time and see the same names over again, I would imagine that jumping forward into the future, the way you did, would make the name-similarity/descendant thing seem more like a cheesy plot device more worthy of David Eddings than of a truly world-class writer such as Stephenson).

At this stage in the game, I love all of his stories. But you started from the very best and are working downwards, so I do worry that some of the other stories of his that I love so much will seem like a let-down in comparison. Still, it makes me happy that you are reading his stuff: I just knew you'd adore The Baroque Cycle. ♥

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I think you're right that everything else I read is going to pale next to The Baroque Cycle, but I can't really bring myself to regret having read it first--if I ended up not reading any more Stephenson at all, at least I would have read the best and worthiest. And while Cryptonomicon will probably suffer more than the unrelated works, it might be better that I didn't read it as his first work--the women in Cryptonomicon bothered me a lot, but not nearly as much as they would have if I hadn't already seen that Stephenson can write a phenomenal female lead (not to mention a male lead as purely likable and sympathetic as Daniel Waterhouse).

Ooh, Eddings, low blow. I have, in my time, loved Eddings, but he deserves that for having written the same series twice and tried to pass it off as the repetition of a mythic cycle within the lifetime of one set of characters. There's nothing sadder than an author trying to disguise a weakness in his or her writing by having the characters excuse it.