[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.