(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 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.