Tag: Neal Stephenson

The Read Report — July 2023

This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.

Sandman: Season of Mists (Volume 4)

By Neil Gaiman

My re-read of the Sandman series continues.

I was surprised how quickly this volume rushed into the plot that would drive this entire arc. For the first time, we see Dream meet with all of the other Endless, except for the still-unrevealed “prodigal.” His elder brother, Destiny, calls them together for a meeting, because his book (which describes everything that will ever happen) tells him that’s what’s he’s going to do.

In previous volumes, it was revealed that Dream was once in love with a mortal, and when she rebuffed his advances, he got very grumpy about it, and threw her in hell, where she’s been for a few thousand years. For some reason, Dream’s siblings bring this up, and amazingly, for the first time, he realizes that this was a pretty shitty thing to do.

He embarks off to Hell, and Gaiman cleverly sets us up to think that Lucifer is going to fight Morpheus, but when Dream arrives, he finds the Lightbringer shutting everything down. He gets his revenge on Dream by giving him the keys to an emptied Hell.

The rest of the book follows Dream as various old gods come to his kingdom to ask for the keys to Hell, a piece of prime psychic real estate. We see him for the first time as a royal figure, with these mythological figures seeking his favor. He turns out to be adept at navigating the politics of the situation, and he manages to get rid of the key and free his former girlfriend in the process.

I think this might be the first volume that is completely free of any superhero references, which is no big deal in modern comics, but was probably a rarity when it first released.

Sandman: A Game of You (Volume 5)

By Neil Gaiman

Volume 5 revisits Barbie (no, not that one), who was first introduced in Volume 2, The Doll’s House. She’s split with Ken (no, that that one either) and now lives in New York, in an apartment building with a whole new set of interesting neighbors. In Volume 2, we saw bits and pieces of Barbies dreams, which were an ongoing fantasy tale where she was the protagonist. Here, we find out that she hasn’t been dreaming for months, and when her dreams return, they bring some very real nightmares with them.

I’m hardly an arbiter of wokeness, but I will say that this story was written in 1991, involves a lesbian couple, a trans woman, and a homeless person with implied mental illness, and feels surprisingly modern and respectful in the way it treats all of these characters. The world around them doesn’t always treat them kindly, but the narrative explores them honestly as people with good aspects and interesting flaws, rather than caricatures.

This volume also barely involves Morpheus. The apartment building crew venture into Barbie’s strange dreams and confront an invading creature. Only at the very end does Dream show up, giving us a few tidbits of info about his past.

I have to say at this point that I had forgotten how meandering the series is. There are certainly bits and pieces of connective tissue: characters that keep coming up, and the ongoing theme of Dream learning how to be more “human” and a bit less of a stodgy, immortal curmudgeon. And hints of a feud with Desire. I’m now halfway through the original run, and there’s no clear overarching conflict apparent. Yet. Luckily, the world, the characters, and the writing are so good that I don’t much mind.

Borne: A Novel

By Jeff Vandermeer

The city of Ambergris left a strong impression on me, and I decided about a year ago that I needed to explore more of Jeff Vandermeer’s work. So I picked up Dead Astronauts, only to find it almost inscrutable. Then I discovered it was actually the second book in a series. I finally got back around to picking up the first book, and that is Borne.

Vandermeer has once again created an amazing setting in the confines of a city. We learn that the Earth has been ravaged by environmental catastrophe and bioengineering run amok, but apart from this, very little is revealed beyond the City. The City has no name, and it is a ruin surrounded by harsh desert. It is inhabited by scavengers, and by Mord, the kaiju-esque 3-story-tall bear. Mord and many other creatures were engineered by the also-unnamed Company, which exists as a huge, white building at the edge of the city, abutted by the holding ponds where the bio-waste and failed experiments are dumped, to eat each other and be eaten, and sometimes to escape into the City.

Borne is about a scavenger, Rachel, and her partner and lover, Wick, a sort of freelance bioengineer who once worked for the Company. They protect and defend their base of operations, a half-ruined apartment building, from scavengers, from another Company alumn called The Magician, and from Mord and his monstrous bear minions. Rachel discovers a piece of biotech, which she calls Borne, who turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter and becomes a sort of surrogate child to her.

I find Vandermeer fascinating because he is frequently riding the very edge of the Principle of Least Necessary Information. This book and the Ambergris stories are all a kind of puzzle that manages to propel you forward through the story while scrounging for hints and clues about what exactly is going on. I devoured this book in a day, because I couldn’t stop reading.

The Strange Bird

By Jeff Vandermeer

The Strange Bird is a hundred-page story set in the same world as Borne. It starts with some tantalizing bits outside the City, as the titular Strange Bird escapes from a bio-engineering lab and sets off in search of…something…it’s not sure what, but it knows it’s got to find it.

After a series of adventures that leave it considerably worse for wear, the bird arrives in the City and is captured by The Magician. This middle part of the story covers some of the same events from Borne from a different viewpoint, providing  more context around the events toward the end of that book.

Eventually, the bird escapes once more, in an entirely new form, and continues its journey. When it finally arrives at its destination, it discovers that the thing it was looking for is long gone, but the ending is bittersweet and it still manages to find some peace at the end of the road.

Dead Astronauts

By Jeff Vandermeer

I was excited to return to Dead Astronauts, now that I had the first two stories in the series fresh in my mind. If Borne rides the edge of Least Necessary Information, Dead Astronauts jumps head-first off the edge. It is experimental in the extreme, living somewhere between poetry and novel. In my original reading, I was lost. With the added context of Borne and The Strange Bird, I was able to follow the story, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything.

Dead Astronauts has four parts. In the first part, we follow the three “astronauts.” They are Moss, an ever-changing plant creature in the form of a human, Grayson, an actual astronaut with a robotic eye, and Chen, a former Company bio-engineer who sees the world in equations. These three have made it their mission to destroy the Company, and to this end, Moss shunts them between parallel universes to try to find a version of the City and the Company where they can gain an advantage. The Company, however, also coordinates between parallel universes, and in the end, the Company seems to overcome them.

The second part shifts perspective (and uses the rare second-person!) We follow a character who remains unnamed for almost the entire section, living homeless in a city that may be a past version of the City, or may be another place entirely. Creatures from the Company begin to appear , followed by the Company’s agents, biological and robotic. There are pale men who may have some relation to Wick from Borne, and a duck with a broken wing, an innocuous creature that turns out to be a horrible monstrosity.

In the third part, we learn more about what goes on inside the Company. We learn about Charlie X, a character who has appeared in the first two stories in smaller roles, and how intertwined he is with everything that has happened. While we get more information, the origin and the nature of the Company are never entirely explained. Is it responsible for the ruination of earth? Or did it merely take advantage of it? And just how many of its tentacles did it send out across parallel universes? Vandermeer gives plenty of tantalizing clues, but no clear answers.

The final part of the story follows the blue fox, another bio-engineered creature that has appeared here and there in the other stories. The fox shares a connection with Moss, and it can also cross between parallel worlds. In this final part, the different storylines become intertwined across time and the different versions of the city. Causes and effects are all mixed up in twists and loops.

Reading these three books in order, I enjoyed them immensely. If you can accept that not everything will have a clear answer, and you’re interested in puzzling through some of the mysteries, I would highly recommend the series. This is pretty much the pinnacle of literary science-fiction.

Reamde

By Neal Stephenson

I already wrote another post about this book, so I won’t say any more here.

What I’m Reading in August

I’ll continue The Sandman series, and pick The Witcher series back up as well (in fact, I’m already halfway through the next book). I’m also eyeing some unread books on my bookshelf by Terry Pratchett and Andy Weir. See you in a month.

Five Things I Learned From Reamde

As far as I can remember, this is only the second Neal Stephenson book I’ve read. The first was Snow Crash. As you’d expect from books written twenty years apart, they’re quite different. From this admittedly tiny sample size, I get the impression that Stephenson has undergone the same transformation as William Gibson, from cyberpunk science-fiction to stories that interpret current technology through a futurist lens: stories that say, ”it’s hard to believe it, but these things could happen today.”

Reamde is a book about ransomware, money laundering through MMORPGs, the Russian mob, and Islamic terrorists in China.

1. Style is an Engine of Story

Sentence-to-sentence, Reamde is a fantastically well-written book. Stephenson’s prose reminds me of literary fiction, because it was just as critical to my enjoyment of the book as the characters or plot. However, the style is very different. It’s not lyrical, it’s clean and precise, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating.

The best way I could describe it is that it feels like walking through the story with Terminator vision—everything overlaid with little details, and targets zooming in to focus your attention on important things.

There are many engines that can power a story, and a strong style like this is a great one, if you can manage it. Since it’s all about how you say it, not what you’re saying, it layers nicely with other engines.

2. Eschew Unnecessary Detail

The level of detail used to describe something—a place, a character—can be an important cue to the reader. Describing something in detail indicates its importance, and explicitly limiting that detail shows a lack of importance.

At one point in the book, some characters meet the pilots of the private jet they will be riding on. The pilots’ introduction is sparse: “He greeted the pilot by name.”

The pilots are necessary to the plot, so they have to be mentioned. Stephenson could have come up with a throw-away name, but this gets across the message just as well. It’s a clue that the pilot will only be relevant for a short while. The reader doesn’t have to worry about remembering the name of yet another side character.

When characters are going to be important (or at least stick around for a while), Stephenson makes sure to introduce them in a way that reveals one or two interesting physical characteristics and something that reveals a bit of their personality. This makes them instantly memorable.

The other great use of this technique is to add detail to accentuate things that will be important to the plot. It’s like a miniature “gun on the mantle.” If you spend time describing a key and a padlock, that lock ought to be important. If you leave garbage out in the forest to attract dangerous animals, some dangerous animals had better show up at some point.

3. Coincidences Strain Believability

Incredible coincidences or lucky breaks aren’t unusual in action/suspense stories like this, but they have to be used carefully.

Reamde’s plot really kicks off with one such coincidence, and it results in several characters getting mixed up with the Russian mob. To me, a crazy coincidence works great as an inciting incident.

Where coincidences start to chafe is when they’re used to repeatedly ratchet up the tension, or even worse, to resolve a problem.

There’s an egregious example of this at the end of Act I of Reamde, where everything that happens in the latter 2/3 of the book hinges on a group of hackers who just happen to live in the same run-down tenements as a terrorist cell. In a city of millions.

There are other examples as well, including several chance meetings among the large cast of characters that end up being vital to the plot later on, and many of the characters being players of the in-story MMO, T’Rain, so that there’s always someone available to log on when it becomes relevant to the plot again.

When I got to the part where bad guys were killed by a cougar, I had to stop reading and look up the stats on cougar attacks. Then I just threw up my hands and accepted that this is what I signed up for. That’s not the kind of reaction you generally want from a reader.

4. Beware Pet Characters

Stephenson is deeply in love with Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He’s the cool, smart guy who gets along in any social strata and knows all the things. He’s a former pot smuggler turned Silicon Valley CEO. He’s bored of being a billionaire, because he’d rather be out solving some new earth-shattering problems. He is the Golden Boy caricature that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos try to project.

Even in a life-threatening situation, he’s having fun, practically on vacation. It’s really only at the very end of the book where he shows any amount of fallibility. Of course, he makes up for it by being the guy who saves the day.

The strangest thing of all is that this is really not his story. Although the perspective jumps around, the bulk of it is from the perspective of Zula, his niece, and she’s the one with a character arc and the most to lose. Yet the story starts and ends with Dodge.

Because Stephenson is a great writer, Dodge is still a fun character, but I’d like him more if he was a little more human and fallible.

5. Structure is a Double-Edged Sword

Like most suspense stories, Reamde has constantly escalating stakes. Every section is essentially “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Things could always get worse (or worse in a new way).

The danger of this constant escalation is that it can quickly ramp to extremes (and well beyond). It’s easy to jump the shark.

In Act II, Reamde splits many of the characters up into separate groups in their own bad situations. I realized pretty quickly that the rest of the book was going to be about how everyone long journey to end up back together in one place, for the final showdown.

However, wrangling everyone back to the same place, at the same time, requires introducing another round of characters and another handful of helpful coincidences.

This made the second half of the book feel considerably more meandering. When everyone finally arrived at the final showdown, there were so many characters involved and so much to resolve that there were literally 100 pages of running gunfights.

By that time, the story had escalated to such extremes that my reaction to the bad guy’s final defeat was a combination of exhaustion and relief that it was done.

Bookends

It’s been a while since I read a book that was such a mix of joys and irritations. I love Stephenson’s prose, but this book did not need to be a thousand pages or finish with a novella-length series of shootouts.

Reamde was released in 2011, so I’m thinking I’ll pick up Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, sometime soon, just to get the full “bookend” experience of his career so far.