Double Geek Out!
May 24th, 2010 - 9:16 am
For some all-new uses, the future of the printed page is LCD:
Here’s an intriguing idea: author Neal Stephenson and a few friends (including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland) are going to be releasing a set of serialized stories as apps for the iPad and the iPhone. The project is called “The Mongoliad,” and is based on a world designed by Stephenson (author of the great novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age).
The apps will present “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff,” and even ask readers to interact and create their own stories in the universe with some “pretty cool tech.” Interesting.
My iPad cannot get here soon enough.
Bastards. I was going to wait until I burned through my current (very deep) dead-tree book reading queue before buying one. This changes things.
Wow, imagine having a writing career so visionary that Cryptonomicon doesn’t make the list of your great works.
@Tim – Well, he does lose a point or two for Anathem. He’s one of my favorite authors, but he seems to be hitting that magic point writers sometimes get to where they’re so popular/successful that they no longer feel they need to listen to editorial advice. Their work becomes absurdly bloated and less well-developed. Think Tom Clancy, after “The Sum of all Fears” or Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle – still somewhat enjoyable, but a bit of a slog to get through. You could cut half of it out and not miss much. It’s usually just downhill from there (“Red Rabbit”, anyone?). Sad.
I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than the “I’ve run out of ideas and I’ll just whore my name out to anyone with a typewriter and a checkbook” road that authors like Clive Cussler took. Come to think of it, Clancy did that too. Double-fail (albeit all the way to the bank).
Para-narrative? What’s that? A combat story?
Um, Snow Crash was a joke – a parody of the cyberpunk genre.
Good one, too.
Red, it takes at least two to make a debate. Stephenson’s earlier works are entertainments, diversions while he developed a voice and a depth of knowledge that could take us into European intellectual history with a vivid portrayal of the Enlightenment, the 30 years war, the Spanish conquista, and the origins of the capitalist system. The Baroque Cycle ought to be required reading for both English and Engineering majors. Anathem requires that the reader bring a good understanding of basic math, logic and philosophy or it will fall flat. If you bring that you’ll get a great Sci-Fi novel of an alternate earth in an alternate dimension in an alternate future.
If you’re comparing Stephenson with Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, you should either just bow out or be ready to prepare yourself for a proper encounter with his fiction. Give the man some respect. You don’t read Joyce’s Ulysses without at least a brush up with the Odyssey. Stephenson is in that league.