LE Snowcrash

[Daniel Harper]

I own Diamond Age but haven't read it yet. Ditto for the entire Baroque
Cycle, although I read most of the first one before Life Intervened and I
had to set it down.

It helps that I read Cryptonomicon before GR. And that I am generally more
of a fan of Stephenson's nerdy but straightforward style than Pynchon's
postmodernism. While GR is a better book overall that Cryptonomicon, the
latter is clearly an easier read.

(And it has a fake Unix-based operating system!)

On 7/30/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>  Daniel Harper writes:
>
> > Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ owes a lot to GR, and I'd be willing to bet
> he at least
> > thumbed through M&D before setting forth on the Baroque Cycle.
>
> Fer shure... and I suspect Barth's Sot-Weed Factor and/or Giles Goat-Boy
> as well. For me it's a classic case of the anxiety (and injustice) of
> influence: I enjoyed S's Snow Crash and Diamond Age on their own terms, but
> Cryptonomicon and especially the Baroque Cycle (which left me cool for long
> stretches of the first book, and which I bailed out of a short way into the
> second) suffered in my estimation precisely because of the standard set by
> Pynchon. Unfair, but there it is.
>



-- 
...the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are
words...
--Daniel Harper
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