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mirrorshardNeal Stephenson's latest is good enough that I took it on the Tube with me - a thousand-page hardback. Saying that, though, I do have some grumbles about it.
The biggest of which is the sudden introduction of a comedy Frenchman two-thirds of the way through. This is a serious what-the-fuck? moment - and it really is a comedy Frenchman, not a real one. He claims to be from "Laterre", and he peppers his Orth speech with French interjections just like no real French person ever does. Mercifully, Stephenson avoided the common mistake of American SF authors in writing about the French, and didn't scrawl "ha ha cheese-eating surrender monkey" across his work. (I gave up on an ebook recently partly for that reason.)
Up to that point, Arbre has stood in an ambiguous and uncertain relation to Earth, as befits a book composed largely of ideas, analogies, and mathematical explanations. But at that point, the relationshop crystallizes and oh, it's another planet that can be reached from here. Stephenson may have been trying to subvert the old surprise-it's-us ending, but it just feels far too hackneyed for that. Mind you, it can be reached by sliding through Platonic ideal realms, but it would have been rather easy to explore the ideas of pattern-matching and common metaphysical origins without comedy Frenchmen.
Overall, it's a less dense book than any of the Baroque Cycle, but it's still extremely good. It feels rather rushed in the last third or so, and then the author works out that he's approaching page 1000, better end it quick... so he does. Traditionally.
The biggest of which is the sudden introduction of a comedy Frenchman two-thirds of the way through. This is a serious what-the-fuck? moment - and it really is a comedy Frenchman, not a real one. He claims to be from "Laterre", and he peppers his Orth speech with French interjections just like no real French person ever does. Mercifully, Stephenson avoided the common mistake of American SF authors in writing about the French, and didn't scrawl "ha ha cheese-eating surrender monkey" across his work. (I gave up on an ebook recently partly for that reason.)
Up to that point, Arbre has stood in an ambiguous and uncertain relation to Earth, as befits a book composed largely of ideas, analogies, and mathematical explanations. But at that point, the relationshop crystallizes and oh, it's another planet that can be reached from here. Stephenson may have been trying to subvert the old surprise-it's-us ending, but it just feels far too hackneyed for that. Mind you, it can be reached by sliding through Platonic ideal realms, but it would have been rather easy to explore the ideas of pattern-matching and common metaphysical origins without comedy Frenchmen.
Overall, it's a less dense book than any of the Baroque Cycle, but it's still extremely good. It feels rather rushed in the last third or so, and then the author works out that he's approaching page 1000, better end it quick... so he does. Traditionally.
