The Baroque Cycle
Tastes differ. I thought it was a fun story and a quick easy read. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. My wife, mother, and sister, all of whom are big readers but none of whom are really in the target nerd demographic, all liked it. Anathem and Diamond Age were harder for me because of the depth of ideas. I had to slow down and think to get through them. Baroque Cycle was harder because of the sheer number of characters with multiple and/or similar names, which is realistic but annoying. There's a list of characters in the back of the first book, which helps, but it's annoying to…
All are fantastic. I was put off by the beginning of Snow Crash initially, as there are some tongue-in-cheek bits that struck me as too campy. But I might not say that now, having read it a few times. The Baroque Cycle is a massive piece of work spanning 3 volumes, comprised of 8 nominally independent books. If it seems intimidating, just try the first one and see if you're not hooked. I'd love it if there was twice as much material. Anathem is by far my favorite. Its hooks take longer to set, but for me they set much deeper. There is a lot going on in this book, and it will truly…
> The series I really want is a Baroque Cycle series. With Virtual Backgrounds, I think it could be really really immersive. I recently finished the Baroque Cycle after having bounced off of it a few years ago - this time around I appreciated it so much more. It's his masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned. I'd love to see it as a series, but good lord... how long would it have to be to actually do it justice? How many scenes of Isaac and Daniel talking about geometry or philosophy? It's so difficult for me to imagine somebody actually making such a sprawling thing because I feel like the…
As much as this might be an impossible sell, I’m inclined to agree. Strongly suspect Baroque Cycle would actually be more watchable than it was readable. I got through the series and it was well worth the slog, but that was at a time in my life when ploughing through 50 books in a year came naturally and I had time to burn. If I started now (30s, have kids) I’d burn out early in The Confusion—but being able to compress things a bit into a more easily consumed medium would help.
In literature, I recall physically squirming during the sequence in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle when our protagonist had some bladder stones removed sans anaesthesia. And more recently, reading a thoughtful review of the BBC comedy series 'Quacks' from 2017 - where they described breathtaking advances in medicine around 1840. Things went from "Let's cut this off quickly enough that you don't die from shock" with a 20+% chance of dying from the truly agonising operation meant to save you -- to a few decades later when they'd mostly worked out how to safely knock you out, carefully…
I thought it was great, a wild journey through the 17th century. But maybe not to everyone’s taste - massive sprawling scope and there is indeed a huge cast of characters; it’s packed with various (mostly super interesting!) digressions into things like coinage, banking, alchemy, court politics. It will take you a while to get through. If you’re not sure, you could read his Cryptonomicon first, and if you like that, and are good with even more so, and in the 17th century, then Baroque Cycle is probably your thing.
> ...if you've read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, you probably have some idea. I looked up The Baroque Cycle on GoodReads and the reviews weren’t very positive. One reviewer compared it to the London phone directory in terms of number of characters vs plot complexity. Is this series worth reading? I have found HN gives better book reviews than goodreads in general - want to hear what you all have to say.
From your review, I see that you have only read one book out of the BC trilogy. In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it. After finishing BC, do a careful re-read of Cryptonomicon. You will find a lot of things that seemed inconsequential on the first read, have a huge backstory behind them and they mesh as smoothly as a planetary gearbox. This is Neal Stephenson at his best. You can really tell that he had the whole story in his head, he just chose to tell the modern-day one first. I really hope he picks up this storyline again. I liked Anathem but…
The Baroque cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion and System of the World is awesome as well. Who doesn't want to read fiction about The Royal Society, Isaac Newton and Liebniz mixed in with phrases in the line with "In memory of Englands greatest swordsman, beaten to death with a club by an Irishman". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle
I have loved Stephenson's work in the past, up until about Cryptonomicon. Everything I've read since has been a great short read, bundled up in a thousand pages. Seveneves started off strong, but then turned into a real slog. It could have been a great 200 page book, but at 600 pages I was just glad to be done with it and expect it to be the last thing of his I read. The Baroque Cycle felt similar, even though it contained many of the characters I loved from Cryptonomicon, but I just couldn't make it through it. I see there are people here who like or love it, which is great. I am not…