Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon

[mmcirvin]

Anyway, I was thinking about those stupid "what is science fiction/fantasy" definitional issues lately because I just finished being the last person on the continent to read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which incidentally is probably his best novel since Zodiac (though it definitely suffers from First Part of a Gigantic Trilogy syndrome).

If you compare Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver to the books they obviously most resemble, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixon respectively, the Pynchon books have more fantastic content than Stephenson's by a considerable margin, but it's also the Pynchon books that are more likely to end up on the "fiction/literature" shelves rather than "science fiction/fantasy". It's not worth getting outraged over, though, since these are primarily marketing categories (and the Pynchon does sometimes get shelved under science fiction!)

Actually I shouldn't be so certain about Cryptonomicon, since after two attempts I've never been able to get more than halfway through it. The World War II parts are great, but the parts set in the quasi-present day bore me to tears for some reason; I was reading in the wake of the tech-bubble crash and I think those parts already seemed painfully dated as a result. Maybe I should try rereading them as historical fiction.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It probably does have to do with how much you like reading about that period of history. I'd just been following the serialization of Samuel Pepys diary (http://www.pepysdiary.com/), and learning a lot about life and politics in Restoration London from that; I'd had a slight handle on the Glorious Revolution from going to a college named after William and Mary; I absorbed a bunch of stuff about Louis XIV in high school; I live in the land of fled Phanatiques today, and of course as a physics guy I'd always been interested in the intellectual life of the era and all those people who collectively invented modern science. Where I did find the story hard to follow was near the end, in Eliza's flight across the politically scrambled region inland of Belgium, but I think that the confusing nature of that episode was part of the point.

Stephenson's use of language was interesting-- he was basically writing in early 21st century English, with lots of goofy deliberate anachronisms, but with 17th century usages thrown in haphazardly for flavor. Pynchon went more the whole hog in Mason & Dixon, even capitalizing like an early-18th-century writer, but made his anachronisms all the wilder to compensate, throwing in references to things like Mr. Spock and Popeye the Sailor Man.