Cryptonomicon and Neal Stephenson

[esbern]

This book is hilarious. I'm not too far into it and its taken me forever to read (i'm only on 209), but i like it.

Neal Stephenson is the author. Anybody have any more recommendations by him?

[Keepcoolbutcare]

SNOW CRASH!!!

The Diamond Age

Zodiac

And if you're bored, the 2,800pg. System of the World trilogy.

yeah, I'm a fan.

[sandyboy]

god i hated Cryptonomicon, utter wank

i finished it out of 'on a plane with 15 hours to go' boredom, every fucking page was shite

[ZombieZoneSolutions]

i really enjoyed Cryptonomicon, but it would have been just as sucessful as a trimmer book...

but man oh man, what a book! definately one of the more memorable reads i've had of recent note...

so, keepcool, is the SYSTEM OF THE WORLD trilogy a must read? i have to admit, i've been afraid to succumb due to it's length! i mean... nearly 3,000 pages? daaaaamn.

[Keepcoolbutcare]

Zombie, tough call.

The first 300 pages of so of Quicksilver are a bit tedious. I say a bit because, well, that's honestly what I thought. Some interesting characterizations, nice to see the dread pirate Teach, but I was wondering if I should plow on.

But when "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe and Eliza are introduced, the book shifts to another level. If you enjoyed "Marine Raider" Bobby Shaftoe let me tell you that he's got nuthin' on his ancestor.

It's with The Confusion that I got sucked in...see this is an adventure, excitement, fucking balls to the wall book that ALL middle trilogies should aspire to.

And by this point you really have no choice, you gotta see how he ends all of this with The System of the World. And while this book focuses more on Waterhouse, all the exposition from Quicksilver begins to make sense. Waterhouse grows a pair, and becomes the character you always hoped he would be.

So, short answer, no, not a "must read".

Long answer, HELL YEAH! I must say I now know more about the Royal Society, the rise of banking cartels, Leinbniz vs. Newton, alchemy (Enoch Root shows up big time in all three books) and several other fields than I did before I plunged into these.

[Bob Samonkey]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. But you guys already knew that cause I got the idea to read it by coming to this forum...

I love the way he describes things.

[Keepcoolbutcare]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. But you guys already knew that cause I got the idea to read it by coming to this forum...

I love the way he describes things.

sweet, another fan!

There is so much awesome contained in those many pages - marine raider Bobby Shaftoe, haiku, Enoch Root, the correct and proper way to prepare cereal, "morphine seeky", "they'll be an umlaut in you later", Alan Turing, computing, code breaking, the unkillable Goto Dengo, Yamamoto's last thoughts, beards and what they mean, dividing an inheritance with vectors, sushi, prime numbers, van Eck Phreaking, uboats, Bishoff, the dour nature of your typical Finn, UNIX, vast sums of buried gold...

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

The "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiqette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours.

A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Russian engineer to design you a shoe, and he'll give you something that looks like the box the shoe came in. Ask him to design something that will slaughter Germans, and he turns into Thomas fucking Edison.

EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING
Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, notionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril—you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business.

i forget, but have you read SNOW CRASH Bob?

that's my, and many others, favorite of his work...

[Pacino86845]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. But you guys already knew that cause I got the idea to read it by coming to this forum...

I love the way he describes things.

sweet, another fan!

There is so much awesome contained in those many pages - marine raider Bobby Shaftoe, haiku, Enoch Root, the correct and proper way to prepare cereal, "morphine seeky", "they'll be an umlaut in you later", Alan Turing, computing, code breaking, the unkillable Goto Dengo, Yamamoto's last thoughts, beards and what they mean, dividing an inheritance with vectors, sushi, prime numbers, van Eck Phreaking, uboats, Bishoff, the dour nature of your typical Finn, UNIX, vast sums of buried gold....

I've just started this, having finished Oil! finally... this post is what brought my attention to Cryptonomicon, and two chapters in I'm really glad I took heed.

[Keepcoolbutcare]

I've just started this, having finished Oil! finally... this post is what brought my attention to Cryptonomicon, and two chapters in I'm really glad I took heed.

yAy, another fan!

[magicmonkey]

The Mongoliad, the new joint venture with Greg Bear! More over at Boing Boing.

[stereosforgeeks]

I started Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Vol. 1 this morning. Ive heard it sort of a spiritual prequel to Cryptonomicon so Im excited!

[Pacino86845]

Whatever my opinion's worth re: Neal Stephenson, this is coming from someone who thinks Cryptonomicon is by far the best thing Stephenson's written (from what I've read, which also includes Snow Crash and the first 1.5 books of the Baroque Cycle)...

But I couldn't get past the second book in the Baroque Cycle (out of eight books). The first book I'd thought really had its nice moments, particularly whenever Newton or Robert Hooke were around, but dragged in spots. Still it mainly served to set things up which was neat enough... I can barely remember what book 2 was going on about, it felt like the story was going to take forever to build up to anything, but perhaps it's the scale of the story that got me to ultimately give up on it. Maybe my attention span isn't what it used to be. Maybe it was never up to snuff. But then again I breezed through Cryptonomicon, so maybe the Baroque Cycle SUCKS!!!

Curious to see what you think, though. When you say vol. 1 though, do you mean book 1 or the volume that includes the first three "books" of the series?

[stereosforgeeks]

Whatever my opinion's worth re: Neal Stephenson, this is coming from someone who thinks Cryptonomicon is by far the best thing Stephenson's written (from what I've read, which also includes Snow Crash and the first 1.5 books of the Baroque Cycle)...

But I couldn't get past the second book in the Baroque Cycle (out of eight books). The first book I'd thought really had its nice moments, particularly whenever Newton or Robert Hooke were around, but dragged in spots. Still it mainly served to set things up which was neat enough... I can barely remember what book 2 was going on about, it felt like the story was going to take forever to build up to anything, but perhaps it's the scale of the story that got me to ultimately give up on it. Maybe my attention span isn't what it used to be. Maybe it was never up to snuff. But then again I breezed through Cryptonomicon, so maybe the Baroque Cycle SUCKS!!!

Curious to see what you think, though. When you say vol. 1 though, do you mean book 1 or the volume that includes the first three "books" of the series?

Cryptonomicon was great and definitely more mature than Snow Crash though I like Snow Crashs punk rock sensibility.

Im only 40 pages in so far (this mornings reading) and Im very curious about Root so its got me hooked so far. We'll see though. I normally try to stick with things even if they do drag. Especially if im already a fan of the author.

Vol. 1 includes the first 3 books. It seemed like the cheaper way to go about it.

[Ribbons]

Thanks to all the badass dudes and killing machines who recommended Cryptonomicon. Just started it this morning and finding it highly readable.

[TheButcher]

Skydance Reunites ‘Apollo 13’ Team For Neal Stephenson Sci-Fi Novel ‘Seveneves’

EXCLUSIVE: Skydance has set the Apollo 13 team of writer Bill Broyles, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer for an adaptation of bestselling author Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Seveneves. Grazer and Howard’s Imagine Entertainment is producing the ambitious adaptation.

The 2015 book centers on a catastrophic event that renders Earth a ticking time bomb, and nations band together to devise a plan to ensure the survival of humanity in outer space. Five thousand years later, their progeny — seven races now 3 billion strong — embark on another audacious journey to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

Skydance’s David Ellison, a big Stephenson fan I’m told, is also producing this with Dana Goldberg and Imagine’s Erica Huggins. It’s the latest big swing for his company, which is reshaping after raising $700 million in new financing in March (that included $200 million in equity from a group of investors, and a $500 million line of credit from J.P. Morgan Chase). The new emphasis is away from co-financing and more toward funding projects generated internally — and not just at Paramount. Sony Pictures stepped up to co-finance Skydance’s Mars mission film Life, which Daniel Espinosa will direct with Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson. Ellison did the Dean Devlin-directed Geostorm with Warner Bros.

Next up for Skydance is the July 22 release Star Trek Beyond and October 21 release Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, with Paramount. Geostorm will be released January 13, and Life is due on March 24, 2017.

Howard and Grazer’s Imagine just teamed with National Geographic Channel for the channel’s first scripted series Genius. The anthology drama — telling the stories of the world’s most brilliant innovators — is from Imagine TV, Fox 21 TV Studios, OddLot Entertainment and EUE/Sokolow, and Howard is set to direct the first episode on Albert Einstein.

Broyles most recently created the upcoming History series Six.

Neal is repped by Darhansoff & Verrill Agency and ICM Partners, latter of which brokered the deal.

[TheButcher]

Ron Howard books a seat on the Cloud Ark with Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves'
This is a massive property, and even with a full 700,000 (or so) pages to explore his ideas, the book ends feeling like it has established a larger world and an ongoing story.