Being a Stephenson fan, I am going to agree, but go further. His books don’t have endings, but they also don’t have beginnings either. His style tends to make it seem like there is so much going on in the universes and with the characters he creates that there is only so much he can pack into the book, so they read like snapshots of whatever actions happen to be going on at the time. Be prepared to be thrown into the story right away and hold on the whole way, and be willing to accept that he doesn’t care about a slow-buildup or a proper dénouement.
Question - How about the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde? The first book is “The Eyre Affair” http://www.amazon.com/Eyre-Affair-Thursday-Next-Novel/dp/0142001805/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256134822&sr=8-1 well worth reading, just don’t know if you guys find this alternate universe more fantasy than sci-fi.
from the summary:“Imagine this. Great Britain in 1985 is close to being a police state. The Crimean War has dragged on for more than 130 years and Wales is self-governing. The only recognizable thing about this England is her citizens’ enduring love of literature. And the Third Most Wanted criminal, Acheron Hades, is stealing characters from England’s cherished literary heritage and holding them for ransom. …
stealing a character from a book only changes that one book, but Hades has escalated his thievery. He has begun attacking the original manuscripts, thus changing all copies in print and enraging the reading public. That’s why Special Operations Network has a Literary Division, and it is why one of its operatives, Thursday Next, is on the case”.
Oh and people travel by zeppelin.
It’s both of those, and other things too. Fforde deliberately throws in and/or alludes to as many genres as possible. They’re not the kind of thing that science fiction purists would be looking for, but they’re great fun and highly recommended.
Three authors: Lois McMaster Bujold, Vernor Vinge, and John Barnes. I quite literally have read nothing by any of them that I didn’t like. Barnes eslecially is an unappreciated genius – he can write in almost any style, from cyberpunk (Kaleidoscope Century) to satirical disaster-flick novel (Mother of Storms) to high tragedy (Earth Made of Glass) and make you enjoy each.
It threw me for a loop the first time I read Snow Crash, too (and kind of pissed me off)–but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Stephenson does end his books, and he does wrap up a lot, but what he **also **does is makes you feel that there must be more: that the world will continue past the end of the book. Because that’s how **life **works: you’ll never have everything wrapped up, because nothing ever really ends.
I popped in to recommend this one also. Depending on what you mean by the “the central premise” , if you mean the decimation of Europe, I disagree that it’s ridiculous; the mortality of the Black Plague was pretty high and I could see it hitting even higher, anywhere where there was sufficient population density and travel between towns. Also I didn’t find the story to be particularly fable-like in the beginning unless you’re referring to the bits between the main stories?
If by central premise, you mean reincarnation, I’ll grant you that’s sort of a silly gimmick that doesn’t add much to the story. Robinson has picked a handful of personality types and essentially re-uses them in each tale by reincarnating them; you can tell who’s who by the personality, and the character’s first initial. It’s “cute”, and sort of ties the sections together, but can largely be ignored.
Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It’s Young Adult, but very gripping - my 12 year old brought it home from the school library and she and I both tore through it.
The premise: an asteroid smacks into the moon - knocking it into a closer orbit around earth and causing all sorts of havoc: weather, tidal effects including tsunamis and massive volcanic eruptions, breakdown in supply chains (no electricity / food), etc. OK, the initial premise is a bit absurd from a scientific standpoint, but otherwise the story is very, very believable. I don’t mind saying that at the end, my, er, allergies were acting up.
There’s a sequel, The Dead And The Gone which I’ve read parts of, and the author is working on a third book in the trilogy.
Oh, and anyone know how to force Wikipedia to revert an edit? Someone vandalized the page for the second book I just recommended. Morons.
Never mind, just figured that out and fixed it.
I’m quite willing to forgo a beginning, and get thrown right into story without having any idea of what’s going on. In Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, for instance, I had absolutely no clue just what sort of beings Tines are (they aren’t called Tines in that book, IIRC, but in a short story) at first, and a lot of the story rather confused me. Once I figured out just what sort of beings they are, though, I had to re-read the beginning, and piece together their nature. Tines are not intelligent as singletons, but are telepathic hive creatures, needing several members to form a sapient individual. A single Tine is sort of a personality fragment.
I don’t think that Stephenson doesn’t write endings because it’s an artistic choice. I think that he doesn’t because he’s actually incapable of writing a decent ending. Sure, life doesn’t really have endings, so in a way, his writing is very lifelike. However, life is full of stuff that doesn’t need to be in a story. For instance, it’s very rarely relevant to a story for a writer to note that a character urinates, defecates, or otherwise eliminates bodily waste. It MIGHT be relevant to show it, in order to show the culture of the people that are written about. Telling a story, whether it’s written or filmed or whatever, consists in part of showing the relevant acts and ideas, and not showing others. It’s possible to choose a stopping point, and wrap things up for that point, and leave the reader or viewer with the impression that life will go on for the characters.
I think that a story is incomplete without an ending. Since I am not satisfied with the way that Stephenson doesn’t end his stories, I won’t start reading another work by him, and I feel it’s fair to warn other people before they start reading him. I think that I wouldn’t be so frustrated and annoyed if I hadn’t gotten so caught up in his stories, which were very good right up until the time they stopped. It’s sort of like having sex without climaxing. It might feel good just having the sex now and then, but I want a climax most of the time!
I’d say that’s a fair assessment. The Space Bubble series does have some hard science around its maguffins, though.
3rding, 4thing whatever… great book.
Opening line: “I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army”.
I’ve become a big Asher fan – I also read The Skinner first, and then his human polity series. There is also a direct sequel to The Skinner: Voyage of the Sable Keech.
More post-singularity surrealism than trad. space opera I would have said – from the opening rain of telephones to smart clothes running away. But definitely fun.
Cryptonomicon (just squeaking inside 10 years) may be the exception – IIRC everything is pretty well wrapped up at the end… mostly. 
I really enjoyed McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series (Talent for War, Polaris, and Seeker) rather more than the Academy series – but they’re all a decent read if you like the little SF sub-genre of xeno-archaeology. (Which I do)
The Atrocity Archives? Very funny.
Oh, and chorpler mentioned Morgan’s Altered Carbon, etc… all rather good, and if you like near-future dystopian stories add his Market Forces and Black Man (sold I think in the US as 13 or Thirteen).
I don’t think that’s a reasonable analysis at all. I have no problem with you saying “I don’t like it,” but when you start to edge over into “it’s stupid and wrong because I don’t like it,” that’s when I go :dubious:. I mean, how would you feel if my reaction to your opinion was, “You don’t like it just because you don’t get it”? You’re clearly intelligent, so I’m sure that’s not the case, but it’s just as fair a characterization as yours of Stephenson.
Stephenson wraps up all of his major plot points. He just doesn’t answer every single question, and he leaves a few wriggling threads. **You **may need to have every single nagging detailed explained and neatly tied up, with nothing else introduced at any point of the story that won’t at some point be dealt with or given a resolution, but when a book doesn’t do that, it doesn’t make it a bad book or make the author a poor writer–it just means it’s a style you, personally, don’t enjoy.
Some quick notes -
re the OP - Did you know that Spin has a sequel? Called Axis, It’s pretty good too “we are taken to the mysterious planet Equatoria, a world apparently engineered for humanity by the inscrutable machine intelligences known as the Hypotheticals. …”
also re the original recommendations I made I was in a hurry & forgot to add any information, as requested by the OP, so here goes
The Carpet Makers - “Set on a low-tech world where the main industry is the manufacture of carpets of human hair, German SF author Eschbach’s first novel forms a grim mosaic of stories of myriad people and cultures trapped in stagnation …Intended for the emperor on a distant planet, the carpets are so finely made that each carpet maker can only finish one in his lifetime…”
Blind Lake - “At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They can’t contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch. Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site…”
I thought Spin was wonderful, but I can’t figure out if I would want to read a sequel. There are some books that cry out for sequels and some that seem complete on their own.
jsgoddess - I agree with you with regard to sequels. too many are money driven, rather than driven by anything else, and show it in their poor quality (true for movies too). However, in this particular case I think the second book worked because it was not a direct sequel and introduced interesting new characters and situations, i.e. it was not just a reiteration of the first.
Don’t agree: the Baroque Cycle (not strictly science fiction) and most recently Anathem have perfectly adequate endings. The major Stephenson offender in this regard was The Diamond Age.
There is actually a third book in the works to complete the “Spin Cycle”, as he refers to it tongue-in-cheek. Wilson is unusual, in that despite having written many, many novels, he’s never had a sequel or series until now. I think that gives this series more credibility.
Good to know. Thanks for the additional info.
You want recent? You want really, really good?
Check out Ken Scholes’ Lamentation
Here’s my review of it.
But don’t take my word. Mr. Card has some nice things to say:
This is the golden age of fantasy, with a dozen masters doing their best work. Then along comes Ken Scholes, with his amazing clarity, power, and invention, and shows us all how it’s done. No more ponderous plotting - Scholes barely gives us time to breathe. Yet he gives us vivid characters, a world thick with detail, and wonders we’ve never seen before. I wish my first novel had been this good. I wish all five volumes of this series were already published so I could read them now."
– Orson Scott Card
Even better, his second book in the series, “Canticle,” is just out, and it ramps up the story to a higher level.
If you like a blend of SF and magic, and wheels-within-wheels intrigue, go buy it. You’ll be very pleased.