![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bedtime Books
However, I keep meaning to write my thoughts on the last two books I finished, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and then William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
Both are major geek authors. Gibson made his mark in the 80s by creating the cyberpunk subgenre in Neuromancer, while Stephenson came along in the 90s with cyberpunk and more, including a long essay on operating systems called In The Beginning Was The Command Line. I hadn't read any of Gibson's work before, however, while from Stephenson I'd read both the ...Command Line essay and Snow Crash.
I had an oddly mixed reaction to Cryponomicon. It was interesting and entertaining, and managed to hold my interest through switches between the perspectives of four different people in two different time periods half a century apart. It may be the only major novel to contain a Perl script. The characters run "Finux" on their computers, an obvious reference to Linux™. These and many other things give the geek reader something to recognize with a feeling of being in the know, but it all ends up feeling somewhat forced, like Stephenson stuck all that in as geek candy. Reading it was like watching someone trying to push all the right buttons in me, even when they really were the right buttons for me.
Another aspect of this soon became clear. Cryptonomicon isn't just a geek book. It's a geekboy book. All the protagonists whose perspectives we see are male. All but one of the major characters are male. The minor female characters serve as pure sex toys; when we hear about (but barely see) one of them losing her sex appeal and becoming an important part of a resistance movement, it's played as tragic rather than heroic. And the one major female character, who from the start is obviously destined to be our modern-day protagonist's love interest, is that perfect combination of athletically sexy body, intelligence, and assertive independence that every geekboy loves. Yes, even me, but it still annoyed me that the author was so obvious in his ploy; the character is unrealistic, with no apparent flaws or even quirks.
Ultimately, I don't think I'll be tackling Stephenson's huge followup trilogy anytime soon.
Gibson's Pattern Recognition is a much smaller and simpler novel, and for me a more satisfying one. By contrast with Cryptonomicon, here we get only one person's perspective, and it's a woman. (We also have a female villain but a range of male friends, adversaries, and unknowns, so it's not entirely balanced but it's much better.) It's still a bit of a geek book (in particular, the relationship between the internet world and real life is explored), but not as much of one, and it's no more a geekboy book than a geekgirl book.
Two things about Pattern Recognition stuck out for me. The first is minor and somewhat provincial: in a book full of travels to locales such as London, New York, Tokyo, and Moscow, it startled me when one character took off from London to visit a company in Columbus (yes, my hometown in Ohio). Talk about unexpected familiarity. (Some might be interested in knowing that he was researching a company called Sigil. I doubt it's real.)
The larger thing that stuck out for me in the book is that this was Gibson's reaction to 9/11. It seems like, in the year or so afterward, every American artist had to find a way to react to that tragedy in their work. (See also: Springsteen, The Rising) Now that the chorus of 9/11 responses has dissipated (and is now starting to be replaced with responses to a much larger tragedy), encountering it again seems almost anachronistic, or at least jarring. (Though it's probably less jarring and anachronistic for New Yorkers than for Ohioans.) The 9/11 aspect isn't a dominant part, but it's a larger part than I think it really needs to be.
By the way, my friends with literary aspirations should take a look at this recent post from Neil Gaiman about the publishing industry.
no subject
no subject
no subject
What?! What does it have? (Inquiring minds want to know.)
It has
Or not... that error appears in the first version of my rewrite. (After the crash I wrote to a text file before copying to LJ.)
I may have moved what I was thinking up a bit higher in the paragraph, or I just forgot it altogether.
I'll fix it.... leaving people reading this later to wonder what you're talking about. (Sorry about that. :-)
Fixed
Re: It has
So what else is new? ;-)
Re: It has