New Neal Stephenson Novel: “Fall: or Dodge in Hell”

[unJon]

9 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Is The Rise and Fall of DODO a back handed sequel to Anathem?  They deal with similar themes about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

I didn’t get that impression, though I agree the themes and QM conceit are similar, he took them in different directions from there. I enjoyed DODO well enough. 

[Durckad]

On 1/14/2019 at 2:05 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

To be frank, I agree.  However, maybe it was a set up for this one?

Which is weird because the blurb (I know it's not fair to judge a book entirely on its blurb, but this is the internet and I'm damn well going to make hasty judgments on as little information as possible!) makes it sound like there's very little connection between the two books other than some characters.

On 1/14/2019 at 5:21 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The gameworld story was better than the generic terrorism plot.

Agree 100%.

On 1/14/2019 at 2:55 PM, polishgenius said:

In his defence, this particular one supposedly wasn't his fault: he had two seperate ideas for novels- the gamer thing and the islamic thing I believe were the two halves- and his publisher demanded that he smoosh them together because Neal Stephenson books are expected to be LONG.

This really just sounds like it takes the central character from Reamde and puts it in a whole new thing just jumping off from the electronic world background of that book, so I shouldn't think any faults in the first will manifest here. Especially since Richard was a pretty solid character I thought.

Hm, I did not know that. It certainly puts things in perspective though I can't imagine a Stephenson book entirely dedicated to the Islamic stuff unless it was more interesting, nuanced, and far less bland and stereotypical.