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Yes, all 3,000-odd pages, or 4,000-odd if you count Cryptonomicon. And how amazing that it justifies that length - indeed, by the end even seems to be outgrowing it. Only one mention for Hawksmoor? This is scandalous scrimping, Stephenson! He pulls it all together ever more surely as he goes on, losing such small infelicities as slow down at least the opening of the earlier volumes, until in The System Of The World we have just that; a book about the birth of science and economics which itself expresses how they work, itself poetically stamps on the brain the idea of all life understood as information, of cities as circuits, of human ingenuity's ability to outwit humanity's myriad flaws. For the first time in a while, I even have some hope for the future of the species.
Now, of course, I'm fascinated by what he'll do next. Though really it's the sort of achievement after which anyone can justifiably put their feet up and spend the rest of their life down the pub.
Tigers raised in battery conditions and harvested, preparatory to calls for a lifting of the ban on tiger products, would be abhorrent on every level in and of itself. But when one learns that the same facility offers "a bear cycling across a highwire without a safety net", it becomes almost parodically evil. I pray that one day those tigers and bears get their own back on their tormentors.
Why there has never been a Pope John XX. I'd seen reference to this in Jurgen but had always assumed that it must have been Cabell being typically playful - and it still turns out that he glided over some of the absurdities of the situation.
Now, of course, I'm fascinated by what he'll do next. Though really it's the sort of achievement after which anyone can justifiably put their feet up and spend the rest of their life down the pub.
Tigers raised in battery conditions and harvested, preparatory to calls for a lifting of the ban on tiger products, would be abhorrent on every level in and of itself. But when one learns that the same facility offers "a bear cycling across a highwire without a safety net", it becomes almost parodically evil. I pray that one day those tigers and bears get their own back on their tormentors.
Why there has never been a Pope John XX. I'd seen reference to this in Jurgen but had always assumed that it must have been Cabell being typically playful - and it still turns out that he glided over some of the absurdities of the situation.
