Two books I'd been meaning to read for a long time that I read in the past week: Snow Crash and The Fermata.

The Fermata is a very clever dirty book by Nicholson Baker. It is funny and qualm-inducing and about many things beyond magical powers and masturbation.

Snow Crash held my interest, especially the whole Sumerian glossolalia thing, but I was somewhat disappointed because Neuromancer did a lot of the things it did several years earlier, and because Stephenson's later book, Cryptonomicon, is one of my all-time favorites and he wasn't there yet with this one.

Comments

[SNG]

The biggest problem w/Snow Crash was that the ending was too tidy (also a Crytonomicon problem).

Have you read Stephenson's Diamond Age? It is brilliant!

[Ed Cone]

Have not read Diamond Age yet.

Agree on ending of Snow Crash, less so on Ctnmcn.

[Ian McDowell]

I'm struggling the remember the title of the sophomoric but very funny novel I read some years ago that was something of a parody of Snow Crash. The hero's VR immersion was facilitated by a device called the ProctoProd (TM), which was inserted into a very uncomfortable place.

Is The Fermata the one where the protagonist can stop time, a la H. G. Wells's "The New Accelerator" and John D. McDonald's The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything? And where he uses this ability to have some fun with Anne Rice at a book signing?

[Ed Cone]

Fermata: yes, that's the one. It's also a meditation on creativity, or something. He sure can write.

Snow Crash suffers a bit when read today because virtual reality is no longer futuristic, so what once must have read as gee whiz now comes across as, hey, Second Life, that was cool for a while. And, as I said above, it suffers from the fact that Gibson did many of the same things a few years earlier.

[Spag]

A friend recently recommended "The Singularity Is Near" to me, but I haven't checked it out yet.