Mountebank Blog

I’m a little late, but this week is the American Library Association‘s Banned Books Week. It’s a good time to buy and read a banned book or two! (what time isn’t a good time?) I’ve been wanting to re-read Fahrenheit 451 for a while, and I just discovered that my copy is missing. Probably loaned to a student somewhere, somewhen, and never returned. Which is the best way I know of to lose a book! So I get to buy a new copy. In fact, it might be time for me to indulge in a little Bradbury festival. It’s been a while, and I think I’m ready for a fond re-visiting. The ALA has a list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000, and it’s interesting to see that in that decade, at least, Fahrenheit didn’t make the list. Still a fun list to examine, though.

Locus Magazine Online has a great (but pessimistic!) piece this week–Global to Local: The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers. John Shirley asked Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton to comment on a whole bunch of issues–including war, the environment, information technology and control, and of course, the upcoming US election.

These guys are pretty perceptive, generally, but their visions are really a major downer. I’m not hearing much sense of wonder, not much wide-eyed gazing ahead at the progress and shining future we have in store.

Unfortunately, I think they’re pretty much correct! Especially on the election results. Here’s Ken Wharton:

It’ll be decided by a million Red Queens: swing-voters who are so overburdened with busy lives that they’re running just as fast as they can to stay in the same place. It’s a big decision, with big implications, so you’d hope that these people will take at least a few hours to find relevant information that isn’t spoon-fed from the campaigns. But with no time to weigh how hundreds of complex issues are going to affect their families, a big part of the final vote will come down to gut instinct. Instincts that may have served us well on the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago, but are now all-too-helpless in the face of well-financed Hari Seldons. And unlike Asimov’s legendary character, I’m not convinced that these guys have our best interests at heart.

I loved Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon. I thought he had really fulfilled the promise of Snow Crash–which had some great ideas, some romping and rollicking storytelling, but way too much lecturing. Diamond Age and Zodiac were fun, but just didn’t quite satisfy deeply enough. But in Cryptonomicon, by abandoning (pretty much) SF, Stephenson gave me a massive novel, consistently interesting and engaging, with characters who seemed real, some laughs and thrills, but maybe not quite enough emotional investment.

So when I got to Quicksilver, I was expecting it to be an improvement on Cryptonomicon, and I was terribly excited to read it. Finally, though (and it took me around 800 pages to admit it), I was disappointed. There were long stretches which were (like Snow Crash) too lecture-y, and just plain dull. And the emotional component was, again, missing.

I delayed, for that reason, for a long time before finally plunging into The Confusion. Boy, did I make a mistake! The Confusion is terrific. It seems that Quicksilver was a necessary first step, because with that foundation, Stephenson managed to make The Confusion a total blast. This time he weaves in the lecturing info-dumps much more neatly, and the parallel stories work together perfectly, and I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner. It’s great fun, exciting, and there’s some true emotion, with some cutting irony, and you can begin to care about the characters, and there are some truly grimace-worthy anachronistic puns (“These Vagabond boots are longing to Stray”), and all in all I have to say that I’d gladly read it again, and I’m eagerly looking forward to volume 3, The System of the World, next week.