Sunday, August 16, 2015

On the @AoSHQ morning book thread

Every week at Ace of Spades there is a Sunday Morning Book Thread,  This week they were discussing IO9's list of 10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them).  Being a loudmouth idiot with time on my hands I was going to comment, but once again the comments on the worlds shittiest blogging platform are broken.  Seriously someone plaese migrate Ace to a stable platform and then have Pixy Mesa gang raped to death by a pack of rabid zombie wolverines for having foisted this shitty shitty platform upon the world.

Anyway after all that here is the comment I was going to post:

Book List - I have read 5 of the 10.  2 of my favorite books are in that list, Cryptonomicon and 1984.  The thing about Stephenson is there is a lot of very pro-American sentiment buried in his books (especially Reamde) - there is an exchange in Cryptonomicon about the Children of Athena vs. Children of Ares that sums it up pretty well, but unfortunately does not work well out of the context of the book.  R.S. McCain says it better:
One of the things I like about his writing is that for somebody who grew up in academia (admittedly, the engineering and science side) Stephenson exchanged his disdain for middle-class working folks for serious respect, and you can see this very clearly if you compare the “meshbacks” in Snow Crash to the Forthrasts in Reamde. It’s not something you see a lot of in mainstream fiction these days, and it deserves kudos.
Kind of sums it up.
Also Stephenson wrote what I think is one of the funniest books ever - The Big U.  It has everything.  Giant Rats, D & D, Commie Spies, Hot Gun Toting Lesbians, A cult worshiping a flashing neon sign and a thinly veiled contempt for the forced conformity of higher education.
Anyway enough on Stephenson, one of the other commenters mentioned Ghost Fleet.  I agree it was a pretty good but not great book  - very early Clancyesque.  The author is a futurist so they took current technology combined it with stuff they knew people are working on, laid that over the top of the current political situation in the US and China and wrote a novel.

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