A review by bschlotz
The Mongoliad: Book One by Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear

2.0

I am a huge neal stephenson fan, and I've noticed that his work is usually composed of swashbuckling and ideas, in some combination (his favorite ideas to explore seem to be language, currency, globalisation, and homosexual mathematicians). Basically all of his books are like action action action lengthy exposition action action END. His best work has an even mixture and pacing of these two elements. I was a little miffed that reamde was like 90% swashbuckling, but mongoliad was much worse. Not only is it totally lacking in that weird play of ideas he does so well, the ACTION isn't even that compelling. It reads like a D&D campaign adapted to novel form. There's a huge amount of detail given to the nuts and bolts of the combat, which I found a little incomprehensibly technical (like Hard scifi, but with swords instead of ray guns).

The best thing I can say about it was that the setting was interesting. I usually read historical fiction with 1 eye on the relevant wikipedia entries, which in this case made for some interesting broadening of my historical horizons.

I dunno. Props for trying something new, and I don't doubt that the larger foreworld project will be a huge amount of fun for its participants and a mild source of entertainment for the readers. I'm sure I will end up reading all of it, out of some misplaced loyalty to one of my favorite authors, who is going through a bit of a self-indulgent phase.