Linky linky

In case you can't get enough Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell blogging, I forgot to mention Kip Manley's post from a few days ago.

Fella name of Jonathan left comments. He's some kinda academic lit guy. Has a blog that looks like it could get interesting, so let's encourage him. He has a post up about Gene Wolfe. Please go leave comments, if so inclined. (We'll have to get back into the Wolfe thing ourselves sooner or later.)

And I never link to the little professor. She's wondering whether to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Everyone else liked Snowcrash and I loved The Diamond Age. That's all I know. Anyway, I fell off the cycle halfway through Confusion, though not because I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. It's interesting to watch a supreme geek mind colonizing history in this imaginative way. The diminutive prof worries about the style. As Henry says, Stephenson is a Whig. And, as Ray wrote a while back, "outside a historical context, terms like "craft", "good story", and "experimental" are little more than Whiggish fertilizer." Of course, that doesn't help us here. It's quite interesting to watch such a rational machine-loving mind at work, conjuring ambitious historical visions for the sake of understanding humanity. I think Stephenson towers up there with H.G.Wells. His Slashdot interview is interesting and entertaining (Henry sent me the link.) His typology of writers; his fight with William Gibson.

Don't miss Teresa Nielsen Hayden's squick and squee. Postcards from the id, as the guy in Forbidden Planet might have said. This all relates to Matthew Yglesias' post on art and whatever.

Tonight I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. What did you think of it?

Comments

[theophylact]

Well, I liked it. But then, I like every one of Gibson's novels. The one I liked best, though, was his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine.