In his book "Pattern Recognition" he spends the first page and half describing jet-lag in such brilliant manner that you feel like you just experienced art.
Unfortunately I feel his plot/stories never seem to hold up.
I will always consider him an artist. Something to savor. I've always felt that it was superior to true 'literature' in that each word is a morsel that adds to the whole and not up to the interpretation of the reader.
"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
It's an apt metaphor. Your internal clock is in a different time zone than you, and each day it comes a bit closer, until you and your internal clock are at last in sync.
Souls don't exist, but the metaphor of something slower catching up to you is nicely done IMO.
You also spend those days feeling utterly unlike yourself, in a new environment that is perhaps subtly, perhaps radically different than home. You feel distinctly unmoored and if there could be a collective unconscious psychically linking us to those around, then surely it must take a little while to get plugged into such a thing.
Most of my co-workers who have met me in person would describe me very differently to the few co-workers with whom I share the same continent. Jet lag changes my personality so significantly.
For me, it's the casual way in which he introduces new concepts and words, not breaking the flow of the sentence, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine their meaning as the story unfolds and paints a fairly convincing picture of the near future.
The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.
Ironically, this is something that I know has turned a ton of people off cyberpunk.
I suspect there's a deep bifurcation between people who are intrigued by mystery (e.g. new language) and people who are made uncomfortable by it.
When it's done right though, it strikes that good mystery novel tone for me: enough detail and context to be tantalizing and whet the intellectual appetite, but not so little or so much as to break disbelief or flow.
It is indeed an incredibly hard balance to strike, and I'm one of those people turned off from a lot of other science fiction where it's done ham-handedly. What Gibson nails so consistently is literary naturalism: his made-up words sound like things people would plausibly say without feeling ridiculous; he's a master forger of linguistic currency.
Someone once told me that early electronic music was good, because it was composed by non-electronic composers searching for a way to extend the art.
Science fiction feels very similar. If you read the earliest stuff (including subgenres like cyberpunk), you get authors who were looking to go beyond. Later, you get a mix of them and trend writers.
To me the thing that he does well is break down where understanding comes from: (1) pre-context, (2) "literary naturalism" (great phrase!), (3) context, & (4) post-context.
Sometimes, it's not critical that a reader understands 100% of a concept exactly where it's introduced, and by establishing less than that, tension can be created.
I guess it's treating your reader as another character in your writing, and understanding that just as your in-fiction characters have different levels of understanding at various times in the plot, so can your reader.
Personally, it feels very satisfying when a piece of understanding clicks into place later, and I hit 100% on (insert new concept here).
A lot of early cyberpunk also works because the authors were explicitly following noir/hardboiled styles, which are pretty straightforward and easy to "hang a story" on to. Some of the weaker sci-fi I've read fails to have any coherent structure and is instead just a jumble of random (but interesting) ideas.
It won't, sorry. A lot of 70s-80s sci has aged really badly - not because of technology turning out differently but because the stories were built around stock characters that were cliches at the time they were written.
I also found ringworld pretty unreadable. But I guess thats mostly because I find the world that is being built too hilarious and unbelievable. It lacks a sort of seriousness that cyberpunk usually doesn't.
This didn't start with cyberpunk, though. In fact it is a hallmark of your average pulp-era SF story to abuse neologisms mercilessly (often in combination with Deus Ex Machina and other cliches).
The New Wave in the 70s consciously broke with the past by (among other efforts) eschewing neologisms, but writers (and editors) in other periods/subgenres have, generally, gone for a balanced approach.
That "causal way" is one of my deep pleasures reading short stories. The format's constraints discourage authors from spelling everything out. Assumes reader is smart, leaves more to the imagination.
The opposite of Andy Weir's The Martian, which is the best technical manual I've ever read about potatoes.
The opening two sentences stick with me, with respect to apt jet-lag description:
"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
Stephenson occasionally fields questions about his endings in talks. Here's one of them, from his Google talk for the Anathem book tour [1]:
Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.
A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.
But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things.
...
So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about.
I don't mind Stephenson's endings. I feel like there are to many authors out there that write until they lose interest in the story then force themselves to bang out another 50-100 pages in order to give the story a 'proper' ending. Steven King comes to mind, I find most of his longer books just reach a point were the stories momentum just stops and feels like it is being dragged to the finish line.
I've read a fair bit of Stephenson, and have never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings. I enjoy reading his stories enough that I still read (and have re-read) them. Maybe it's that I want more from the characters, or an epilogue lunch at shawarma palace (or, more appropriately, Uncle Enzo's Pizza) where they show things returning to normal.
The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
> I've ... never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings
It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
Crypto's ending is still better than Snow Crash's (though I prefer SC overall). Someone sent me a great meme yesterday showing the back half of the horse fully drawn and the front half barely a stick figure of a horse and the back half said "Stephenson starting a book" and the front was "Stephenson finishing a book." I dunno if I've ever seen a truer meme in my life.
I love the first chapter of Snow Crash, it brilliantly establishes the world, the tone and (the) Protagonist. There’s a breathless pacing that makes it incredibly fun to read aloud. The rest I can do without.
It is also a possibly a (sort-of) sequel to Snow Crash.
There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash;
> "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
> "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
> "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
I would not have people start with that book. It's easy to get confused. It is very tough to get through some parts (unless you've read it multiple times and are a super-fan).
I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve).
I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
Anathem has easily his most complete ending, where there's even something of an epilogue after the plot threads are wrapped up, but sadly a lot of the stuff after it was a bit of a regression either in quality of ideas or of ending or both.
(Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)
At least that one ended in a burst of new threads for my imagination to chew on; the second half of Fall slowly dwindles into the petty, boring squabbles of gods, leaving a ton of more interesting questions unasked and unanswered.
Yikes! I'd decided to take a pass on anything he's written unless it received unanimous critical acclaim after slogging through Seveneves and not even finishing Reamde, so it's kind of sad to hear that things aren't getting better.
The beginning of Seveneves is pretty bad, but the rest of the book makes up for it. It's as if the first part of the book exists soley to set up the plot and characters for the second part of the story which is where the interesting bits are.
I’m convinced the ending (and other parts) of Cryptonomicon were inspired by A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, but I have no evidence to support this claim.
Huh—I'd have said Cryptonomicon's the only one of his I've read that didn't turn into a directionless mess halfway through, and/or have a bad ending. Also read The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Anathem.
I just finished _Reamde_ and was, overall, fairly satisfied with the way the story built towards the conclusion. It moves in unexpected directions, but I enjoyed the entire ride.
I keep hearing & reading enough good things about that one that I'll likely check it out eventually. I kinda swore him off after The Diamond Age gave me the novel but unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author, but if/when I backslide on that Reamde will probably be what does it.
Reamde is basically gun porn (in the same way Seveneves was orbital dynamics porn) with a protracted hostage situation for plot tension and some videogaming/spy craft stuff thrown in for flavor. Not really sci-fi IMO.
I was angry at him for taking such an excellent start to a novel, and then spending... what, 300, 400 more pages, just wasting it.
I think the part where the anger really took over, as my main feeling toward and about the novel, was a scene he wrote that exists only to have one character explain another character's motivation "to them"—but actually to us, because we'd spent the last 1/3 or so of the novel with a character whose motivations and behavior didn't seem consistent, like Stephenson had recycled the early-in-the-book character straight into another role that was actually a whole different character, without explanation, without transition, without foreshadowing, without the character themselves seeming to reflect on their own change (which might have justified this scene), without doing the work to make it fit. Moreover, and as a sign of just how "whoops better patch that up without actually putting in any effort" that was, the explanation is entirely lame and unconvincing.
It felt like a chapter that got inserted because test readers or his editor went "WTF?" about all that, and it was just so, so lazy and bad, and retroactively made the treading-water-and-pointless-but-not-offensive middle section of the book worse, to know that, no, it wasn't going somewhere good, Stephenson just wrote it poorly and now, at the end, he's lazily writing his way out of his own mess, rather than fixing it.
(this is the scene between—and I'm a little fuzzy on the characters, as this was years ago—the Chinese emperor-dude and the father who tried to get an off-books Primer for his daughter, from the beginning of the book, with the scene in question occurring, IIRC, near the beginning of what you might call the last act)
I've read all, and Anathem and the Diamond Age remain favorites. They had clearer direction than Cryptonomicon to my mind, which meanders a tad more. I recall a chapter with characters reading a memo/email from a guy explaining his stockings fetishism.
I’ve found Stephenson a mixed bag, I enjoyed his early work, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and Reamde was fine. However Ive struggled to enjoy his more recent work, I’m usually excited to see a book coming, but recent works seem to lack something for me.
I gave up on Stephenson at Quicksilver. I didn't like Cryptonomicon, but liked his previous work so I gave Quicksilver a try. It's very rare that I don't finish a book, but I didn't finish that one.
Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.
Now that you say it, I think his later books spend too much time on "putting you into the world" and not enough time of actually interesting things happening in the world for my tastes.
I lived that series. I think his books depend on how much time you can devote to them. If you can read for hours on end the. They are great, you can really immerse yourself in them. They are not books you can read a few pages of every now and then.
The same with Seven Eves. Absolutely amazing book, but you better enjoy it while you're reading, the end feels like your book has missed the last pages.
Makes me think of the common saying when comparing two writers: 'X tells a better story, but Y tells a story better.'
Gibson is pretty deep in the 'tells a story better' category.
I found Neuromancer to be quite a frustrating read, as if the author is trying so hard to be cool. I understand that he invented a whole sub genre which is cool but for me the engagement with the characters was zero and the introduction of new ideas without context made me feel as lost as one of his characters.
Interesting, Neuromancer is by far my favorite Gibson book. I feel like I'm generally very sensitive to authors trying to hard, and I dont get that vibe, although I think I can see how it can be construed that way.
Neuromancer was (i think) a ground up creation of that world Sprawl/BAMA etc. Personally I always find characters / places the best when you experience them as they are and don't get the explanation, which when attempted is inevitably less interesting than what you might imagine. The later books in the sprawl series (Count Zero I believe and another one whose name I can't remember) felt much more one dimensional to me.
I agree on the later books of the first trilogy (last one's Mona Lisa Overdrive) - they didn't leave as much an impression on me as Neuromancer did. Following trilogies were probably much more pre-organized than the first.
Hmmm. It'd be a neat litmus test for you to read The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon. Those are books from a very different time/aesthetic compared to Neuromancer but, in their own way, also defined their genre by being so tryhard they became sublime. It'd be interesting to see if you have a similar reaction to either of them--have you read those?
I wish Gibson would exclusively write short stories or even aphorisms. His brilliance is in how he builds a world in offhand comments. The overall narratives tend to be boilerplate sci-fi, unfortunately. I've read the first ±50 pages of Neuromancer a few dozen times, but quickly lose interest in the story after the narrative really gets going.
I think it would be hard to do what he does and also have tidy plots. I love thinking about his relationship to the Matrix; I believe his take was correctly something in the realm of -- "I mean, this is obviously me but also perhaps better in most ways" (especially as it followed Johnny Mnemonic)
I've read most of his stuff and I'm not sure if I love or hate his writing. For one, I can't read any of his books just once. He seems to love having the reader confused for the first half of the book and lift the fog in the second half. If I really want to make sense of the story, I have to do a second reading and only then does the first half make any sense.
I just got Agency and this time I think I'm going to read as many plot summaries as I can find before I dive in. Maybe I can make sense of the book in one pass that way.
I was disappointed with Agency, it had almost a Dan Brown feel of a character grabbed and going and doing one thing after another to advance a narrative that doesnt pause long enough to let you question if it makes any sense. It does still have a Gibson-created world with lots of allusions that you have to piece together (this is one reason I like Gibson). When I read it, I didn't realize it was a sequel / second book in that world, so I don't know what more is obvious if you've already read the first book
I enjoyed Agency, having said that, there's a significant plot thread that is just resolved in a very offhand and uninteresting manner. There was a lot of similarity with The Peripheral as well, and there's what feels like forever in the middle where nothing happens except characters shuttle repeatedly between different locations without really knowing anything or doing anything actually significant. None of the viewpoint characters do all that much or have much 'agency'. All of the actually interesting stuff is happening offscreen.
I suppose it's strange to say I enjoyed it given those criticisms, but I do like his writing, and there are some fun ideas hidden in there too.
That's a recurring aspect of every single Gibson novel, arguably; the protagonists are mostly passive observers while other characters do things, usually behind the scenes.
Gibson's plot always follows this template. Some big shot with limitless financial resources hires the protagonist to do/find/learn something. The protagonist mostly just travels and chats with various people. Meanwhile, some kind of intrigue happens on the sidelines, but the main character actually ends up not doing anything that affected the plot. One of the few exceptions is Case who, while being a passive travel companion for most of the book, actually helps execute a hack.
In The Peripheral, this is taken to an extreme. Flynne doesn't do anything. The book starts her witnessing a crime. After that, she simply passively observes everything else. Flynne doesn't even control her own movements; at several points she's transported to a new location for her protection. And most of the action happens behind the scenes, and characters report back with progress on what's happened. It's such a weird novel.
As an aside, I read Agency when it came out, and today I couldn't remember a single thing about it. I can vaguely remember the plots of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. From there it gets fuzzy. Looking back at his output (which I've read everything of), I find his books simply got increasingly less interesting and less memorable over time. His prose still shines, though.
There is a quote about Gene Wolfe’s writing that you can never read one of his books, you can only re-read it. Some people really like that type of writing, and some don’t.
I personally can’t imagine reading a plot summary before reading a Gibson, part of what makes his books interesting is looking back and realising which little incidental detail was the true pivotal thing in the book.
In his book "Pattern Recognition" he spends the first page and half describing jet-lag in such brilliant manner that you feel like you just experienced art.
Unfortunately I feel his plot/stories never seem to hold up. I will always consider him an artist. Something to savor. I've always felt that it was superior to true 'literature' in that each word is a morsel that adds to the whole and not up to the interpretation of the reader.