[Barrin92]

it's funny because for me the prose of a lot of science fiction writers was always what turned me away from the genre. I could barely make it through Dune and gave the Foundation up. A lot of science fiction authors which I came to love a lot like Gibson or Le Guin I think I mostly got into because of their sense of style.

Stephenson for me is probably the worst offender for this. I've met so many people both online and offline, particularly other programmers who always told me to read his stuff but he's straight up pasting pages of Wikipedia into his books, I felt like I was being trolled.

[Slow_Hand]

I can relate. I'm massive Dune fan, but I see why people would have difficulty with Frank's prose. It's dry and not particularly sensual. However it is incredibly functional and lucid once you acclimate to the world he's building. He has a strong way of making you very aware of how everything relates to one another, both in space and conceptually.

Stanislaw Lem, on the other hand. The substance is usually fantastic, but the reality of the characters tends to get obscured by long, intricate sentences that lack the precise objective descriptions of Frank's writing and lose a sense of where everything is in relation to one another. Lem tends to be extremely light on description in many instances. Perhaps that can be partly attributed to translation difficulties, as I've never read the Polish source.

On the other hand I'd disagree about Neal Stephenson, I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time (halfway through it right now) and I loved the opening chapters. There's a real kineticism with Hiro and YT speeding through traffic that I find very evocative and leaves me pining for my days of doing irresponsible shit in traffic. He really has a way of writing action that feels exciting and focused.

Neal has some hilarious descriptions that really paint a picture. There's a great description of the "rat thing" robotic sentry disarming a lawn full of aggressors with blinding speed and he describes one of the aggressors as having "had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left."

That said, if do have one gripe so far it's the five uninterrupted chapters with Hiro expositing hard with the Librarian daemon about Sumerian mythology. The concepts being discussed are really interesting but it becomes tiring after a while, even when broken up by a few interstitial chapters following YT.

[x86x87]

Stephenson is a bit more polished than PKD but your point still stands.

[pmoriarty]

I had high expectations from a bunch of friends recommending Snowcrash, but when I read it I found it to be so awful I couldn't even finish it. It was just so childish and stupid. I don't get why people like it.

[Jtsummers]

Snow Crash is either an accidental or deliberate parody of cyberpunk. The main character is Hiro Protagonist. When he goes into a VR world and is "fighting" with a sword he's swinging a sword around wildly in the real world too, while around other people. And then in Diamond Age Stephenson [rot13]xvyyf gur zbfg plorechax punenpgre va gur svefg be frpbaq puncgre[/rot13].

When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say

[flybrand]

Thank you for commenting on Stephenson’s plot resolutions. I love his writing and his stories, but the end of his books are just so unfulfilling. Especially Anathem!

[FPGAhacker]

> And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say

that made me laugh out loud

[pmoriarty]

Yeah, I got that it was a parody. It just wasn't funny.

[cableshaft]

Of his books that I read, it is definitely the one that comes across as the most childish and stupid (with a few good ideas). His other books aren't like that.

I had trouble getting through them as well, but for other reasons. For Cryptonomicon it was his "let me prove how smart I am" diversions off the main story for dozens of pages at a time, and for Anathem it was an interesting idea told in a boring yet difficult-to-parse way, at least as far as I got.

The quality of the prose in those other two books seemed better, at least.

Big fan of PKD books, btw, although I think his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own (but they are quick to read as a result, I could knock one out in about 4-6 hours, usually). The ideas, dialogue, and often the endings make them all worth reading, though.

[pmoriarty]

"his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own"

Dick is a champion of the underdog everyman. His protagonists tend to be humble repairmen and other "losers" in the lower stratum of society... I find those characters very human and relatable.

The other type of Dick protagonists are those who think they're on top of the world, until their world turns upside-down and so they get to experience being dragged through the mud.... usually finding out that what they thought was a perfect world was broken, hostile, and sometimes even evil.

His writing style is direct and economical. I really don't have a problem with it.