Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Oh Neal Stephenson, never change. Because who else writes occasionally hilarious punkified SF with a swordsman hacker and a skateboarder saving the world from mind control memes, I ask you?

Wait, no, you can change in a few ways. You can write better endings, which I realize you've been working on in subsequent books. Because this book does not actually end, it just sprints face-first into a brick wall. It's about as pretty as you think it is. Youch. You can also write better romantic relationships, because that one made my eyes water in the really not good way. You can get funnier, which I say only because I know that you have since 1992, because this book is funny, but you have some rough timing and there's something a bit off-center about the delivery here that you have a better handle on in Cryptonomicon, say.

You don't really have to work on your computers, because the way you wrote about programming and hacking in 1992 is so fundamental and universal that it still makes perfect sense. And the really weird thing is that you don't have to work on tightening up your books, because this one was pretty tight by your sprawling, vast standards. This book had sort of a through line, and you didn't toss much out that you didn't pick up again later. And the really weird thing is? It didn't work for you as well as the enormous flood of your later books. Who else can say that, either?

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Reap the Wild wind by Julie E. Czerneda

Reap the Wild Wind by Julie E. Czerneda


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
One of those books I classify as primitive SF. You know, where some agrarian, technologically backward society comes in contact with far more advanced humans. Here, it's tribes of telepathically gifted people, the descendants of colonists, I presume, who live in precarious harmony with two alien races before they are rediscovered by a galactic exploratory force.

I am always uninspired by primitive SF, and this is no exception. Partly it's just not one of my buttons, and partly I spend the entire time making faces over the way the author invariably fails to grasp the implications of all the most obvious historical parallels. Yarg. I tuned out on this one because I didn't want the mental noise, in that way where I paid just enough attention to keep moving forward, and not enough to have anything in particular to say. Lots of internal tribe politics, adventures of exploration, some romantical machinations with honest-to-God soul-bonds. Pretty much a yawn. A decently-written yawn with mildly interesting gender politics, but still a yawn.

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