Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad

Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by sbierwagen on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @09:16AM (#1652671)

    It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants 
    (that’s “bewraying its kecks” for you medieval time-travelers).

Euyagh, he's doing another Baroque Cycle? I just re-read that, and while it's not awful, he really is at his best when he's writing about tech.

Snow Crash was good. Interface was good. Diamond Age was okay. The Baroque Cycle was a slog, and Anathem was a blight, a cinderblock of a book full of made-up words and pointless obfuscation.

I am not optimistic about this latest venture, especially considering the buzzword-density on the front page of their site.

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Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by maw on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @09:24AM (#1652696)

Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

I'm due for a reread of the Baroque Cycle before too long, so I won't pass judgement on it here, but I'd happily welcome another Anathem.

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Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by gwern on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @11:02AM (#1652953)

> Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

It still felt cheap. Give me another book like Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_ where all the made-up words were English words! (And obviously often Latin-derived.)

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Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by aaronbrethorst on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @12:38PM (#1653281)

It had a purpose in the context of the novel. Why did it strike you as being cheap?

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Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by gwern on Thursday September 02, 2010 @08:36AM (#1655965)

Most of them struck me as being poor riddles; 'here's this strange quasi-English quasi-Latin word which is usually a portmanteau; try to figure out from context what it means and how I derived it!' They wound up irritating me like the meaningless religious allusions and terms in _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ (and many other anime) irritate me.

Maybe there was a purpose in the novel's context beyond being a strange bit of parallel-worlds gimcrackery. I must've missed it.

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Re:Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mong... by oihuyjfrgtdfghj on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @10:59AM (#1652946)

So not even original made-up words!

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