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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
informative
The author sure loves details ( about weapons dealing, physics, and other things) and it’s sometime overwritten. For a while I enjoyed it though, and was looking forward to book two. But the main character Aurora/Dawn goes through so much abuse I couldn’t wait to get it over with.
Slow, meandering and not captivating
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
It's honestly heartbreaking for me to have to rate a Neal Stephenson book so low. There were parts of it that were great and interesting and fun but... Man I just really prefer it when he writes scifi. I see how this might be a good setup for the next book and maybe that'll be more interesting but I just can't wait til he writes more great scifi again.
I'm of the opinion that Neal Stephenson lost the plot sometime around when he started hanging out with billionaires. "Seveneves" is the first one to show the rot creeping in, but two-thirds of it still manages to be a fairly gripping hard science fiction novel. The work Stephenson did on the Hieroglyph Project shows him to be fully enamored with the billionaire tech bro zeitgeist, and "Fall" is nothing short of a love letter to rich assholes where every named character has a net worth of at least ten million bucks and everyone else is a servant.
Neal managed to stop humping Jeff Bezos leg long enough to grind out this, a half-written story of a maybe-communist-maybe-cowgirl Forest Gump who seems destined to get involved with major events of dawning of the atomic age. I say "seems" because this book ends before any actual plot happens, so it's not clear what the story will eventually be. Neal confirms this for the reader in his afterword where he states that any acknowledgments will have to wait until he's figured out what his book is about. Humble suggestion from a reader: maybe figure that out before you publish next time.
Neal managed to stop humping Jeff Bezos leg long enough to grind out this, a half-written story of a maybe-communist-maybe-cowgirl Forest Gump who seems destined to get involved with major events of dawning of the atomic age. I say "seems" because this book ends before any actual plot happens, so it's not clear what the story will eventually be. Neal confirms this for the reader in his afterword where he states that any acknowledgments will have to wait until he's figured out what his book is about. Humble suggestion from a reader: maybe figure that out before you publish next time.
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I have read many other Neal Stephenson books. I got 28% of the way into this and still had no idea what the point of the story was, no attachment to the characters, and no interest in finding out where it was going.
adventurous
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Historical fiction with a scientific angle, in other words classic Stephenson
He’s back with another ambitious series, apparently unconnected to his earlier novels but set between his Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, during the Great Depression.
What’s a bit unprecedented for him is that this first volume is relatively short for the author, and almost entirely devoted to the back story of his protagonist, a young woman with most unusual life that brings her from Leningrad to a pony ranch in Wyoming to Magnitogorsk in Stalin’s USSR. There are a few secondary characters, but she’s really the focus of the novel.
The series seems set to be to the early Atomic age physics what the Baroque Cycle was to calculus and finance, but there’s mysteriously relatively little of it in this opening volume - it enters the scene almost surreptitiously - and it remains to be seen what future entries will be made of.
Dawn, also known as Aurora is a fascinating and intriguing character who isn’t without recalling some traits of the main female character of the Baroque Cycle. Stephenson displays both his usual qualities and quirks. It’s a rich but dense read, and it’s not a bad idea to brush up on you history of 1933-34 America and Russia, as the author puts Dawn in the middle of events without giving much context (she doesn't have much either, especially not outside the communist interpretation).
It’s a good read, a new Stephenson is always cause for rejoicing, but it's one that feels mostly like a prologue and it might be well to wait for the context of later books in the series to pass final judgement on it, and what it was trying to accomplish as for now the shape of things to come remains a bit nebulous at one closes down this first novel.
He’s back with another ambitious series, apparently unconnected to his earlier novels but set between his Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, during the Great Depression.
What’s a bit unprecedented for him is that this first volume is relatively short for the author, and almost entirely devoted to the back story of his protagonist, a young woman with most unusual life that brings her from Leningrad to a pony ranch in Wyoming to Magnitogorsk in Stalin’s USSR. There are a few secondary characters, but she’s really the focus of the novel.
The series seems set to be to the early Atomic age physics what the Baroque Cycle was to calculus and finance, but there’s mysteriously relatively little of it in this opening volume - it enters the scene almost surreptitiously - and it remains to be seen what future entries will be made of.
Dawn, also known as Aurora is a fascinating and intriguing character who isn’t without recalling some traits of the main female character of the Baroque Cycle. Stephenson displays both his usual qualities and quirks. It’s a rich but dense read, and it’s not a bad idea to brush up on you history of 1933-34 America and Russia, as the author puts Dawn in the middle of events without giving much context (she doesn't have much either, especially not outside the communist interpretation).
It’s a good read, a new Stephenson is always cause for rejoicing, but it's one that feels mostly like a prologue and it might be well to wait for the context of later books in the series to pass final judgement on it, and what it was trying to accomplish as for now the shape of things to come remains a bit nebulous at one closes down this first novel.
adventurous
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes