In the Beginning was the Command Line is an idiosyncratic essay about interface and operating systems by Neil Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. It is almost a memoire and almost a plug for Linux.
I am now reading the second of the The Baroque Cycle series, The Confusion. It con-fuses two story lines that split in Quicksilver, that of Eliza and that of Jack. The prose is sinking into academic prose as Stephenson can’t avoid lecturing his reader about details of the history of culture that he has learned or invented. Eliza remains an unbelievable character who gives hand jobs to cryptographers and, of course, is beautiful. You wonder if Stephenson has met a woman who has interests other than his? I am annoyed by the tendency of science fiction writers to create women characters who are not women, but are admirable men in babe’s bodies. The prose equivalent of Lara Croft – action hero with boobs.
That said, Stephenson plays well with history in this retro scifi book, especially the history of economics and science. It remains to be seen if he can pull all the threads together in the third novel. Is he going to pull off “the ideal history of computing, the internet and commerce”?