— by Wombat-socho

I am speaking, of course, about Neal Stephenson, who after two unsuccessful novels broke out with the wildly successful Snow Crash, a wild tale about hackers, feudal corporatism, an Aleutian with a nuke, and a girl and her dog. He followed that up with the even more complex and fascinating The Diamond Age…and then there was Cryptonomicon. Cryptonomicon was an outstanding book that jumped back and forth between World War II and the present, with cryptography tying it all together, but whatever it was, it sure wasn’t science fiction, and it didn’t really fit in the technothriller genre box either. It was still popular with science fiction fans, and a lot of other folks bought it too. The Baroque Cycle departed even further from SF, being a three-part historical novel set in the 17th and 18th centuries. Stephenson insists that it’s SF due to some mysterious events that take place and the novels’ concentration on technology, cryptology and numismatics, but he may be the only person that believes this. With the exception of the monumentally boring Anathem -the first piece of writing by Stephenson I had to push myself to finish, hoping he’d pull a rabbit out of the hat and make the dull, boring book exciting at last- he’s avoided the genre lately in favor of historical novels co-written with a squad of other folks (The Mongoliad) or mainstream novels that, like Cryptonomicon, have a lot to do with the Internet and the people that use it, whether they’re MMORPG magnates, fantasy novelists, or deranged Russian mafiosi. I am speaking, of course, of Reamde, which resembles its predecessor Cryptonomicon quite a bit but doesn’t have nearly as much annoying and obtrusive mathematical equations interrupting the narrative.

I like Stephenson’s writing quite a bit; his non-fiction pieces are every bit as interesting as his fiction, and I think I’d pay to pick up a collection of them. One of the things I like about his writing is that for somebody who grew up in academia (admittedly, the engineering and science side) Stephenson exchanged his disdain for middle-class working folks for serious respect, and you can see this very clearly if you compare the “meshbacks” in Snow Crash to the Forthrasts in Reamde. It’s not something you see a lot of in mainstream fiction these days, and it deserves kudos. As for The Mongoliad, I have finished the first three volumes and am probably going to pick up the rest as they become available at the county library. It’s historical fiction that diverges from actual history somewhat in its explanation of the death of Ogedai Khan and the abrupt cessation of the Mongol invasion of Europe; its depiction of the brief reign of Pope Celestine IV also plays fast and loose with history. Still, they are entertaining books, and despite the contributions of the other authors (including Greg Bear) the Mongoliad comes off as a Neal Stephenson novel, with attention paid to the fine details of combat and characters alike.

On the non-fiction side of the house, I finished Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, which covers World War II in Western Europe from 1944-45, and in its own way is every bit as bloody and gore-spattered as Stephenson’s tales of the Mongol invasion. Being a sometime student of military history and a wargamer, I was conscious in an academic way of the staggering casualties and materiel losses involved in the reconquest of Europe and the fall of the Third Reich, but Atkinson’s book brought it all home in a way that no previous history had before. Atkinson quotes dozens, possibly hundreds of soldiers, sailors and airmen who did not survive the war, and spares nothing in his account of the grisly battles from Normandy Beach through the Hurtgen Forest and into the concentration camps. I don’t know if I’ll ever re-read it, but it was definitely worth reading once.

At the moment, I’m splitting my attention between two books: Bill James’ Popular Crime, which is a fascinating book about infamous crimes, the criminals who commit them (or were convicted of them; not always the same thing) and the times in which they occurred. James first rose to public notice as a student of baseball, the coiner of the word “sabermetrics” to describe that study, and the author of several books on the subject, including the fascinating Historical Baseball Abstract, but lately he’s been branching out into other matters that interest him, and he’s very much worth your time. The other book is an old favorite, Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War, a condensation of his epic fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, which is without question the best-written and most enjoyable of the four official military histories published by the U.S. Armed Forces. Neither are available in Kindle format, unfortunately, but at $3.96 for a used hardback copy, The Two-Ocean War is an absolute steal.

Inadvertently omitted from last week’s book post, was David Drake and S.M. Stirling’s Hope Rearmed, the second volume in the third reissue by Baen of the Raj Whitehall novels. This time the series has been republished in three two-book collections, with The Chosen (best described as Raj Whitehall and Center vs. the Draka) added to round out the original five novels. Same books, of course, but it looks like someone at Baen went through and removed the more numerous annoying typos that infested the first two editions. Worth picking up if you don’t have either of the first two editions on hand.

Joe’s Garage Acts I II & III