f13.net

I recommend reading Snowcrash first - it's a lighter and easier read (and thoroughly enjoyable).  Cryptonomicon is denser, and harder work.

I recommend reading Snowcrash first - it's a lighter and easier read (and thoroughly enjoyable).  Cryptonomicon is denser, and harder work.

I am reading Dan Brown (Da vinci Code) Digital Fortress, its not bad, but its kind of wierd how the afarage chapter is 1 and a half pages long. Im about 100 pages in, and on like chapter 35.

very quasi, his research doesn't quite go as deep as say Crichton

Not that Crichton's research is particularly deep or accurate. (The dinosaurs must escape, because of Chaos!)

I skimmed through the 1st chapter of Digital Fortress in the supermarket, and already hit a few distinctly implausible bits. Didn't make me want to buy the thing, though I'll probably get The DaVinci Code eventually, to see what the fuss was about.

My big problem with Digital Fortress & the Davinci Code were that they were written for children. I can breeze through Brown's writing before I even know  what happened. I think that's why the bulk of America was able to comprehend it and kick up a fuss. Rednecks got it.

If you like "Into Thin Air" have you tried "A Perfect Storm" by Sebastian Junger yet?

yada yada yada... Diane Lane ... yada yada yada

Oh noes!

I have The Da Vince Code here next to me in the bag it was just purchased in.  I was about to start in on it.  Unfortunate to read such reviews before I get to page one.  (Looks like only a day or two of reading in any case) Well...my wife is the one who picked it up for me, so I can blame her if I must.  Last book she got me was Neil Gaiman's "American Gods", which I considered "easy" reading, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Cryptonomicon was indeed a great book.  I haven't read Snow Crash, and it seems I've stalled on Quicksilver.

Stephensons novels are by far a must for mind expansion.  Snowcrash is a very good book but you could just read the first 18 pages and stop there.  They are like a novellete in their own right, which I term the funniest 18 pages ever written by man.

Can't comment on the end though, because I've still got about 60 pages to go.  However, he did pull a "bad guy slips away near the end while no one was looking" schtick which loses him a couple brownie points.

I'm interested to hear what you think of it after those last 60 pages. IMO, he cranked the Cheese knob up to 11 at the end. Very, very disappointing.

I've heard the release of the 4th book (of A Song of Ice and Fire series) has been pushed back into August, or so it was reported on Amazon when I last looked. Does anybody have more information about this, or am I getting a bad estimate?

II also just finished his latest book Ilium, great setting for a story.  He brought back the greek gods in a far future setting.

Anyone else a Dan Simmons Fan?

Stephensons novels are by far a must for mind expansion.  Snowcrash is a very good book but you could just read the first 18 pages and stop there.

I see a lot of people mentioning Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, which are both excellent, but I have yet to see a single person make mention of The Diamond Age. It's not quite as "fun" of a read as Snow Crash, but worth the time nonetheless.

Snowcrash is a very good book but you could just read the first 18 pages and stop there. They are like a novellete in their own right, which I term the funniest 18 pages ever written by man. I've lost 2 girlfriends in the past because they couldn't understand how I could laugh so hard I cried over just reading a book.

The Curse of Chalion by Bujold (fantasy novel picked up because of massive recommendation on rec.arts.sf.written).

Did anyone here finish Quicksilver?  I got about 200 pages in before it came down to gouging my eyes out or stopping reading it.  

Does anything actually happen in this book at some point to justify pushing past the pain and finishing the book?

That Moneyball strategy is really working out great isn't it?

Another good one is Please Kill Me- the Uncensored Oral History of Punk

OK, you're cool.








About that "husboyfriend" of yours......Does he like this book too? Because I do  :-P

That Moneyball strategy is really working out great isn't it?

Took Snow Crash on my last business trip on the advice of this thread. Big thanks to all of you, a great book.

For whomever mentioned Illium up there (yes I'm that lazy to not go dig it up), the sequal Olympos is coming out on July 1. I've been looking forward to it so have been keeping an eye out. Seems like it has been a while in publishing sequal terms.

No, I haven't finished writing everything I wanted to include in A FEAST FOR CROWS. I have wrapped up a whole bunch of characters and storylines since the last update in January, but "a whole bunch" does not equate to "all."

And I was facing another problem as well: the sheer size of the book.

All of the books in this series have been big, mind you. A GAME OF THRONES weighed in at 1088 pages in manuscript, not counting the appendices. A CLASH OF KINGS was even longer at 1184 pages, not counting the appendices. And A STORM OF SWORDS measured a gargantuan 1521 pages in manuscript, not counting the (etc).

Any publisher will tell you that a book as big as A STORM OF SWORDS is a production nightmare, and STORM did indeed cause problems for many of my publishers around the world. In some languages it was divided into two, three, or even four volumes. Bantam published STORM in a single volume in the United States, but not without difficulty. Pretty much everyone agreed that it would be a really good thing if the fourth volume in the series came in somewhat shorter than STORM, so I set out with the idea of delivering a FEAST closer in length to A CLASH OF KINGS.

Alas for good intentions. In hindsight, I should have known better. The story makes its own demands, as Tolkien once said, and my story kept demanding to get bigger and more complicated.

I passed A CLASH OF KINGS last year, and still had plenty more to write. By January, I had more than 1300 pages, and still had storylines unfinished. About three weeks ago I hit 1527 pages of final draft, surpassing A STORM OF SWORDS... but I also had another hundred or so pages of roughs and incomplete chapters, as well as other chapters sketched out but entirely unwritten. That was when I realized that the light I'd seen at the end of the tunnel was actually the headlight of an onrushing locomotive.

And that's why my publishers and I, after much discussion and weighing of alternatives, have decided to split the narrative into two books (printing in microtype on onion skin paper and giving each reader a magnifying glass was not considered feasible, and I was reluctant to make the sort of deep cuts that would have been necessary to get the book down to a more publishable length, which I felt would have compromised the story).

The first plan was simply to lop the text in half. In that scenario, I would finish the last few chapters in as short a length (and time) as possible. That would have produced a story of maybe 1650 to 1700 pages in manuscript, which we would simply have broken into two chunks of roughly equal length and published as A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part One and A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part Two.

We decided not to do that. It was my feeling -- and I pushed hard for this, so if you don't like the solution, blame me, not my publishers -- that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. Cutting the novel in half would have produced two half-novels; our approach will produce two novels taking place simultaneously, but set hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and involving different casts of characters (with some overlap).

The division has been done, and it think it works quite well. The upshot is, A FEAST FOR CROWS is now moving into production. It is still a long book, but not too long; about the same size as A GAME OF THRONES. The focus in FEAST will be on Westeros, King's Landing, the riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. More than that I won't say.

Meanwhile, all the characters and stories removed from FEAST are moving right into A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, which will focus on events in the east and north. All the chapters I have not yet finished and/or begun are moving into DANCE. I think this is very good, if truth be told, since it will give me the room to complete those arcs as I had originally intended, rather than trying to tie them up quickly in a chapter or two so I could deliver the massively late Big FEAST.

So there it is. I know some of you may be disappointed, especially when you buy A FEAST FOR CROWS and discover that your favorite character does not appear, but given the realities I think this was the best solution... and the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that these two parallel novels, when taken together, will actually tell the story better than one big book.

And if there are those who don't agree, and still want their Big FEAST with all the trimmings set out on one huge table... well, there's an easy fix. Get both books, razor the pages out with an Exacto knife, interleave the chapters as you think best, and bring the towering stack of text that results to your favorite bookbinder... and presto, chango the Big FEAST will live again.

As for me, I am getting back to work. There's good news on that front too -- A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is half-done!!!

(And before anyone asks, yes indeed, this development means that Parris was right all along. It will now probably require seven books to complete the story).

That makes a lot more sense than QT and Miramax deciding to cut half of a story into two movies.

After finishing up book 3 in "A Song of Ice and Fire" and loving the series, I find myself looking for something epic in space, with ship battles. Lots of combat but most of it ship to ship. Any suggestions?