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Summary: Wonderful reading...
Review: This was the first work by Neal Stephenson that I read. It is excellent--he's a technological visionary, a sci-fi storyteller, and a social critic that can put together a great novel. I have since read Zodiac and Snow Crash and loved them both. I bought Cryptonomicon here on Amazon a month before it was released. I just got it in the mail and can't wait to start reading it tonight.
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Summary: How to raise your daughter right.
Review: I've read and enjoyed most of Neal Stephenson's books, including The Big U. This is my favorite. As the father of a daughter, this book really struck home. My wife and I have often thought about what would allow her to grow up to be the best person possible. Neal Stephenson has a daughter and has done some soul searching in this direction as well. Diamond Age is a book that will stay with you far after you read it; I read it over a year ago and I continue to reflect upon some of the ideas it introduced. I recommend that you read it.
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Summary: Great book, but that ending.....
Review: Typical Neal Stephenson fare - awesome book and an ending that is beyond crap. He's done it before with Snow Crash, except this book is even better, which makes the ending even more frustrating. That doesn't change the fact that this is THE best sci-fi book I've read and one of my favorite books.Mr. Stephenson, if you are reading this - please do something about your epilogues. Having one would be a start.
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Summary: It doesn't get much better than this.
Review: If you enjoy sci-fi at its best, and your not averse to thinking and reading at the same time, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Among all of its strong points, it has what I believe to be one of the best female characters ever to appear on the written page. Put simply, it's a damn good book.
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Summary: Technology that's too advanced seems like magic.
Review: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Arthur C. Clarke said something to that effect: the technology of one culture that's advanced enough seems like magic to some seperate culture that's not as far advanced (it's a paraphrase, not a quote). I'm sorry to say, that's what all that nano-technology seemed like. It was far enough away from my real world so that the characters might as well have been using magic wands. But I got to know the people and that's the saving grace. Fascinating folks, Mr. Stephenson's personel roster of characters. And regardless of the machinations of how they got into and out of their several and shared messes, the problems that they faced are time honored (questions of the greater good versus personal volition, and so on). And it's pleasantly unsettling to realize that the Maltese-Falcon-Holy-Grail-gadget-contraption of all the characters' convergent paths in Mr. Stephensons' technotopia, ...was a book. To harken back to his wonderful previous novel _Snow Crash_, he proposes therein that an adept practitioner could compose a series of phonemes that would 'fuss' (imagine a different choice of words, ...but 'fuss' will do, for this discussion) with someone's mind. Imagine, for the sake of this novel, a way to codify such phonemes, store the data in archival volumes that could be passed on to others over distance and time, so that generation after generation of peoples could have their minds 'fussed' with, ...and you have (all of the nano-computerized window dressing aside) a book. Everything from _Winnie The Pooh_ through _Das Kapital_ takes on even more ominous proportions than they started with, since they and their like have been 'fussing' with our minds (at our own request) for ages and ages now.
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Summary: It's the characters, not the story
Review: What I enjoyed most about reading this book is that I actually cared about the people in the book, from the heroine (Nell) down to periphial characters (Harv). The characters were well rounded and fleshed out, without being stereotypical and predictable. But I have to agree, the ending left me wanting. It reminds me of Stephen King's drawback: building and building to a suspenseful conclusion, only to fall flat.
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Summary: Can't wait for his new book
Review: I read this book 2 years ago and I still think about it. It is a book of ideas and isn't like Snow Crash (I also enjoyed it). Wish I had as much imagination as Stepheson.
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Summary: NEAL!!! PLEASE LISTEN TO US!!!
Review: They're all right. The ending stinks. The only reason I'm commenting is that I hope it will sink in when so many of us say it. The worst ending of any quality book I know. The incredible thing is that we all hate the ending but love the book. That really says something. Transcendant! A brand new sci-fi sub-genre. And hey...Neal! Drop us a line, we'd love to know...was it the deadline, the editor, or did you just get bored?
Rating:
Summary: Thought-Provoking
Review: This is a story about botched attempts to use molecular manufacturing to rescue humanity. The botches are inevitable since people are so fallible. Stephenson anticipates problems, brilliantly shows several Western, technical solutions that continue the economy of scarcity, and then shows a conflicting philosophy (Confucian) literally at war with the assumptions of the Western solution. I would have called it "The War between Seed and Feed" The book's pacing is marred by a long, dull, improbable, poorly-explained section about people living in caves under the ocean.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining Page-Turner, but a little flat...
Review: Stephenson's prose is a blast to read, and his stories are always entertaining. His ideas about nanotechnology are great, but one wishes he could flesh out his worlds a little more. On the surface the ideas are exciting, but the plotline seems to stop short at the end, as if he was up against a deadline and needed to wrap the whole thing up. He could have made the characters so much deeper, the plot so much more complete. I give it four stars because Stephenson's ideas are so interesting, but you wish he had made the book a hundred pages longer just to finish what he starts.
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