It’s a very different book after the break, but one which you have to know the first book to understand. As I have characterized it, it felt more pulpy or RPG-ish after that. But it was a fun adventure story in the middle of the massive info dump that still somehow managed to withhold information that we had clearly been provoked to wonder about.
Oh, as for the ending:
Seems like we ended on the start of a war. The Reds have sided with the Morlocks in their claims to all the land because they have built their holdings in the sea. Well, if Blue makes the same deal for the Atlanteans, and they kind of have to if they’re going to beat down Red’s moral posturing, both sides are occupying space already claimed by the side the others are allied with. So… war, long and vicious is inevitable, is it not?
Also, the Morlocks felt they had a right to all the land when they had by no means the capacity to do the work it would take to make it possible to live there? I think the story underplays how that sheer effrontery would overcome any publicity advantage the Reds could possibly generate actually supporting that claim. I’ll buy that they generated a narrative of resentful entitlement that kept their population in check. I don’t believe it will do anything but anger the vast majority of the Blues when they hear about it.
Yeah, a sequel is a real fear. I hope Stevenson spends his time on something more interesting than continuing this story line.
Objectively, the claim, “You abandoned the surface of the planet by going into orbit, so it’s ours” doesn’t hold much water when the claimant also abandoned the surface of the planet by going underground. Doubly so since the surface would still be uninhabitable had the space crew not re-watered it. But the fact that the Morlocks would make the claim is pretty consistent with human rationalizing.
But, yeah, in a hypothetical war between Blue and Red, the Morlocks play no non-PR role.
I believe he’s said that he’d like to write more using the same background although I’m not sure if it would be a direct sequel.
And his current project was said a few months ago to be a sequel to Reamde - although I also see that there’s an audiobook out recently based on a comic called Cimarronin, about a disgraced Samurai living in Manila… He’s listed as a writer.
The Reds and Blues came to a mutual understanding that they had to make their war, at least the terrestrial one, as cold as possible for the sake of the terraforming process. Since the Morloks are essentially mythological creatures straight from the heart of their race’s shared cultural memory, an alliance with them has enormous power, because it’s still a cold war.
It would be like if Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon and discovered the actual verifiable descendants of Adam and Eve, and if they’d said, “oh by the way, we never gave up our claim on Eden, which you now call Earth. But we’re willing to work with you guys on this.”
I liked the first part of Seveneves, and the second part was intriguing in concept, but it seemed like Stephenson got tired of writing and decided to wrap things up toot sweet.
I liked Reamde, the way it mixed MMORPG exploiters with 70s Vietnam-era rebels, spies, international criminal cartels, insular paramilitarists and Facebook-bred terrorists. Stephenson seems to have a thing for corn belt geniuses.
I reread the Baroque Series, my favorite of the Stephenson books. I got about halfway through *Anathem *and stopped reading. I may try it again someday.
I’m currently reading Interface by Stephenson and George Jewsbury. It was written 20 years ago but has some pretty intense behind-the-scenes skullduggery involved with election politics and exploitation of voter thinking and mood. I don’t know how much the labels of voter categories is actually authentic, but it so totally applies to the today’s social media method of making decisions based on trends. It’s a little disturbing to read about the cynical ways social analysts regard the voting body as livestock to be directed towards the slaughterhouse, but we all know how power corrupts and how good it feels to be in power.
*Cobweb *, another collaboration with uncle George, takes place during the Persian Gulf War. It’s also a fun read for nostalgic purposes.
If he does, I hope he employs an editor with a heavier hand. I think he had an interesting premise, and good storytelling but it was unnecessarily long in places where it didn’t need to be, and then all of a sudden it was breakneck speed to finish it up.
For the Cold War analogy to work by way of explaining why the propaganda is believed to have power, you’d have to have all those other nations. But here it’s down to Red vs. Blue, unless I’ve missed something. You may have some copperheads in your own nation, but for the most part your international stage is pretty well divided into two factions already.
The ring is full of nationstates whose political natures are determined by their mixes of races, and further informed by the purity of those races.
Like I said way upthread, I would have loved to have heard more about all that. It could have been really interesting stuff, but Stephenson just barreled towards the end as soon as he jumped forward in time.
Just recently, I was looking at all this Whispersync business on Amazon and saw that for $3.99 (plus an unmentioned $0.33 tax) I could add the audio to the copy of Snow Crash I already had for Kindle. So, I did. Well, it’s still an unresolved mess because it doesn’t really let me switch between the text and audio the way it goddamned says it is supposed to on the page where I clicked the button to send them the money, but that’s another issue. I can load the audio on the Audible app, and it’s a great recording. The performer really gets the feel of the story. And I am reminded how much I love that book still.
The audible add on for SeveNeves worked just fine in my Kindle app, and it was a good performance, with change in narrators after the 5000-year break. But it’s hard to beat Snow Crash’s whip-cracking cadences in that gravely voice. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for an audiobook, even if I’m really frustrated at how the damned thing doesn’t work with the Kindle app.
Finally got around to reading this! I really enjoyed it – I actually finished it in a single day (started in the morning, finished in bed). It probably helped that I glossed over much of the over-long (IMO) descriptions of orbital mechanics and ‘chains in space’. I think I enjoyed the survival stuff of the first third more than the rest – the rapid devolution and conflict in orbit didn’t quite work for me, but I guess it was necessary to set up the “seven Eves” circumstance (though this could have been done with asteroid strikes rather than savagery). The Reds and Blues stuff (especially the Reds) were somewhat caricatured sci-fi villain race material, I thought.
Oh, oh yeah. That tracks. At least 30% of any Neal Stephenson book seems to be completely unnecessary sidetracking into math and/or science. I did this on audiobook so I was a bit of a captive audience for that stuff.
I think it was Anathem that just had footnotes directing one to an appendix for the rare reader who wanted to check out 30 pages of narration about a geometrical proof.