King, Stephenson & Pynchon

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Mackin [mailto:paul.mackin at verizon.net]

> I prefer King to Stephenson. King just makes shit up. No intellectual  
> pretension. Stephenson relies on actual preexisting ideas and  
> history, but doesn't bother to get them right. And this is not poetic  
> or creative license. It's not bothering.
> 

a) Stephen King - I've read more of his books than I'll admit to (including all 7 of The Waste Land, except at the very end where he asked the reader not to read what Roland did next, I started to read on but he started with "Sigh, okay..." or words to that effect, and I actually stopped there) and rather enjoyed them.  Haven't done _any_ analysis of them ... maybe there's something there ... maybe not (I'd like to spend some time on that sometime after acquiring a better critical faculty)-- maybe there's a unique spin to the stuff he makes up?

b) Neal Stephenson - has a certain flair of his own.  I see him more as a Kilgore Trout/Jules Verne/H G Wells type of writer (once he got past the juvenilia of The Big U, which however had some very fun stuff in it) - taking an idea and working out its social consequences.  He's much more explicit and plain-spoken than more literary authors.  
I think his ideas are valuable and interesting, his grammar is correct, and his books have some passages that I can't help but experience as very moving --- but I'm not at all uncomfortable calling Snow Crash and Diamond Age science fiction, and Cryptonomicon and System of the World historical novels.

Pynchon he certainly isn't (people have had to make up genres to describe P's work, haven't they?), but just as a non-jeweler might see a resemblance between 2 similarly-colored gems - both write long books using big words and have attracted intelligent fans (-: