Something everybody loves that you don't (or that you love that nobody else seems to) for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_rck
I am a day behind--whoops!
I think the answer I am going to give, to the positive permutation of the question, is the books of Neal Stephenson. I am immediately going to put in the caveat that I've "only" read The Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and Anathem, but when you think about the length of a typical Stephenson novel--and the sad fact that most people don't seem to make it all the way through the Baroque trilogy, sob!--that is still pretty respectable.
The line I most often hear about Stephenson is that he is bad at endings and women, and while I obviously can't speak to his earlier books, I think both books disprove that idea to some extent. The Baroque Trilogy has many awesome female characters, for example, starting with but by no means limited to Eliza, and The System of the World is both an excellent book with a conventional plot structure in its own right as well as one long ending to a thousand-page epic. And the female characters of Anathem at least play active parts, even if the actual protagonist is male.
But what I love about Stephenson most is that he's so smart and so funny. The number of times I laughed out lout while reading the Baroque Trilogy was in the dozens--he has a way with quips, particularly in the first and third books, that is hilarious, though the Star Trek joke in Anathem was hilarious too--and also just a bravura way with words that I think is really great. Some people have said to me that they find Stephenson's prose style boring. I also like Thomas Pynchon and China Miéville, and in the end there's no accounting for taste. And while Stephenson may not be a Virginia Woolf or a Joseph Conrad in terms of prose style, he does have a style, and moreover, he's astonishingly smart and astonishingly good at explaining very complicated ideas very clearly. The part in Quicksilver where they escape Blackbeard with calculus--let me say that again, they escape Blackbeard with calculus, oh excuse me Sir Isaac, I meant fluxions--is a case in point. Anathem, where the characters run around doing all kinds of complicated trigonometry and orbital mechanics with not much more in the way of tools than were available to Euclid, with the crucial exception of their prodigious scholastic tradition and the minds they use it with, is another excellent example.
Anathem is another example of the ways in which Stephenson isn't afraid to channel that intelligence towards speculation--informed speculation, but speculation nonetheless--about science and technology, though I'll say no more about Anathem because it's all major spoilers.spaiku said to me once that The Diamond Age is the only work from the cyberpunk age that got the way we live now right (and I think that's true if you take a mulligan on William Gibson, whose novels came true in pieces and who then stopped writing science fiction), so this isn't precisely a new trick, either.
Talking of The Diamond Age brings up the other reason people tend not to read Stephenson, namely the very questionable racial politics in some of his books. I called The Diamond Age "the masterpiece of techno-Orientalism" in my Ph.D. exam, which is a characterization I stand by, and I'd really rather just pretend the Mongoliad books or whatever the fuck they're called don't exist. In its dealings with the Ottomans Quicksilver in particular suffers from some of this, but in drawing on history and also research Stephenson is insulated from some of the more pernicious effects of unconscious attitudes. It's a shame that such a learned guy can't get past his own privilege or ignorance or whatever, and I certainly can understand why people would avoid Stephenson on this account. But at least these four books, and some of his others about which I've heard good things, are ones on which I want to play the "this author is problematic but I like them anyway" card. I actually heard him speak at my university once, and he struck me as actually quite humble, which might come as a surprise to some people. I would have liked to ask him a question about some of these points, but the Q&A moderation was terrible and so were the moderator's questions. Don't let physicists ask writers about novels, people. Just say no to that.
Anyway, I commend The Baroque Trilogy to anyone interested in the Scientific Revolution, 17thC Europe, or London; I walked around the city this summer with scenes from the books playing through my head like some kind of multimedia installation. And I commend Stephenson to your reconsideration, if you're so inclined.
Oh, if you want the answer to the other half of the question, because they just came up on a playlist: FUCKING MUMFORD AND SONS. ALL THEY DO IS GROAN MELODICALLY. SHUT UP MUMFORD AND SONS. WHY
the_rck I am a day behind--whoops!
I think the answer I am going to give, to the positive permutation of the question, is the books of Neal Stephenson. I am immediately going to put in the caveat that I've "only" read The Baroque Trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and Anathem, but when you think about the length of a typical Stephenson novel--and the sad fact that most people don't seem to make it all the way through the Baroque trilogy, sob!--that is still pretty respectable.
The line I most often hear about Stephenson is that he is bad at endings and women, and while I obviously can't speak to his earlier books, I think both books disprove that idea to some extent. The Baroque Trilogy has many awesome female characters, for example, starting with but by no means limited to Eliza, and The System of the World is both an excellent book with a conventional plot structure in its own right as well as one long ending to a thousand-page epic. And the female characters of Anathem at least play active parts, even if the actual protagonist is male.
But what I love about Stephenson most is that he's so smart and so funny. The number of times I laughed out lout while reading the Baroque Trilogy was in the dozens--he has a way with quips, particularly in the first and third books, that is hilarious, though the Star Trek joke in Anathem was hilarious too--and also just a bravura way with words that I think is really great. Some people have said to me that they find Stephenson's prose style boring. I also like Thomas Pynchon and China Miéville, and in the end there's no accounting for taste. And while Stephenson may not be a Virginia Woolf or a Joseph Conrad in terms of prose style, he does have a style, and moreover, he's astonishingly smart and astonishingly good at explaining very complicated ideas very clearly. The part in Quicksilver where they escape Blackbeard with calculus--let me say that again, they escape Blackbeard with calculus, oh excuse me Sir Isaac, I meant fluxions--is a case in point. Anathem, where the characters run around doing all kinds of complicated trigonometry and orbital mechanics with not much more in the way of tools than were available to Euclid, with the crucial exception of their prodigious scholastic tradition and the minds they use it with, is another excellent example.
Anathem is another example of the ways in which Stephenson isn't afraid to channel that intelligence towards speculation--informed speculation, but speculation nonetheless--about science and technology, though I'll say no more about Anathem because it's all major spoilers.
spaiku said to me once that The Diamond Age is the only work from the cyberpunk age that got the way we live now right (and I think that's true if you take a mulligan on William Gibson, whose novels came true in pieces and who then stopped writing science fiction), so this isn't precisely a new trick, either.Talking of The Diamond Age brings up the other reason people tend not to read Stephenson, namely the very questionable racial politics in some of his books. I called The Diamond Age "the masterpiece of techno-Orientalism" in my Ph.D. exam, which is a characterization I stand by, and I'd really rather just pretend the Mongoliad books or whatever the fuck they're called don't exist. In its dealings with the Ottomans Quicksilver in particular suffers from some of this, but in drawing on history and also research Stephenson is insulated from some of the more pernicious effects of unconscious attitudes. It's a shame that such a learned guy can't get past his own privilege or ignorance or whatever, and I certainly can understand why people would avoid Stephenson on this account. But at least these four books, and some of his others about which I've heard good things, are ones on which I want to play the "this author is problematic but I like them anyway" card. I actually heard him speak at my university once, and he struck me as actually quite humble, which might come as a surprise to some people. I would have liked to ask him a question about some of these points, but the Q&A moderation was terrible and so were the moderator's questions. Don't let physicists ask writers about novels, people. Just say no to that.
Anyway, I commend The Baroque Trilogy to anyone interested in the Scientific Revolution, 17thC Europe, or London; I walked around the city this summer with scenes from the books playing through my head like some kind of multimedia installation. And I commend Stephenson to your reconsideration, if you're so inclined.
Oh, if you want the answer to the other half of the question, because they just came up on a playlist: FUCKING MUMFORD AND SONS. ALL THEY DO IS GROAN MELODICALLY. SHUT UP MUMFORD AND SONS. WHY