From what I can gather, his other works are either cyberpunk, sci-fi (e.g. Snow Crash) or something like steampunk (The Baroque Cycle)?
I enjoyed the pace and settings of Reamde, but don’t know what to choose next. Willing to try a different genre to ‘standard’ sci-fi or historical thriller.
He has a few enough books that people will just start listing them.
My recommendation is Seveneves. I guess it is sci-fi, but 90% of it is all stuff we have today, it just happens to be space stuff. It’s been awhile since I read it, but I think it has a similar thriller type pacing as Reamde. (Except for the long breaks to teach you orbital mechanics.)
An obvious followup would be Fall; or, Dodge in Hell which is sort of a sequel to Reamde, because it shares some of the same characters. I didn’t like it as much, though.
For me, he has more misses than hits. I hated Seveneves. I hated Fall so much I quit maybe a quarter way through. I hated Quicksilver so much I never touched the two sequels. I liked Reamde okay, and Ananthem was pretty interesting (but heavy). Diamond Age is a pretty okay lighter reading book. Snow Crash is okay, has some fun bits, but is pretty dated.
(Here is a SDMB thread on Fall.)
Perhaps Zodiac? It’s a now-past near future, with a lot of the fun, lighter dialog of his earlier works, and of course, much shorter. It’s something of an environmental thriller. And since it isn’t a huge tome, it’s a fast, light read.
Of course, if you like the big, fat meandering style of his later works, perhaps the Cryptonomicon. It’s a huge work, but it’s a single story (the Baroque cycle features ancestors of the characters started here IIRC) - a mix of techno-thriller, treasure hunt, and dive into the historical code-breakers of WW2 and “modern” (for 1999) codebreaking/encryption. It’s not exactly fair or fully truthful, being fiction after all, and IMHO (again, I’m a fan of the earlier works) it gets bogged down and sidetracked option, but it’s still got genuine moments of greatness (the prologue and dental description sequence always make me grin).
It is explicitly dated in that enough precise years are given that you can pretty much pin down the exact year in which the story is taking place [let’s say ~2002, give or take]. An interesting approach instead of “twenty minutes into the future” (or the past, by now). But I always have always liked it, with its cute “fun bits”.
I was thinking more of the bicameral mind crap, for instance.
I might give Cryptonomicon a go, as the codebreaking sounds interesting.
Mind you, I’m looking at my current ‘to read’ pile which has grown considerably since Christmas and thinking I have enough to keep going until Easter.
Preach it! My que of un-played video games and un-read books grows every year around this time.
Not that I’m complaining mind you…
Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books. Don’t get bogged down in the math. Fall has some GREAT ideas but is a tough read. It was once said that inside every Stephenson 900 page book is a 400 page book screaming to get out.
I was recommended Stephenson by a guy I met in a bookstore. Without knowing what else to pick, I randomly grabbed a copy of Seveneves. There were parts that I liked (reasonable science, scenario), and some parts that I didn’t (seemingly gratuitous sex…like thrown in to help sell movie rights ?). But I was particularly disappointed with the ending, which seemed “tacked on”, and kind of Spielberg-like.
Fast forward a couple years and a friend of mine goes to a book signing by Stephenson for his latest book Polostan. Someone in the audience asked him about Seveneves. Stephenson explained that he had intended the story to be a trilogy. But his editors convinced him that he shouldn’t…so he just tacked on the ending to wrap it up as a single novel. So this helps explained the kind of abrupt time-jump ending.
I can only speak to the one book, but I would not recommend Seveneves.
Here’s what be said about it before it was published:
The basic elements of the world were fixed a long time ago, and for at least eight years I have been roving around pitching it to various people in various media: television, movies, games, and various “transmedia” combinations. In the autumn of 2013, however I decided to just sit down and write it as a novel: the one thing I know I can get done. Because it was a mature concept already, this went quickly and I was able to deliver it to Jen Brehl at HarperCollins about a year later. The only part that gave me any trouble was calibrating an ending that would leave the reader satisfied that the story had concluded while leaving the impression of an open-ended world.
Sounds like he has a memory like George Lucas.
(I see the SDMB’s thread on Seveneves happened a year before I got here, so I didn’t get to share my fresh hate like with Dodge.)
I just assumed it was typical Stephenson ending difficulty, and kind of didn’t worry that it completely did feel like two more novels were compressed into the last two chapters, or whatever.
I for one would have liked the story about the survival of the moon base, mine, and walrus people and then the next book about bombarding the earth with comets and teraforming it.