Reading A Lot Lately

• A while back, a co-worker of mine was talking about how much better of a movie The Constant Gardener would have been if it had actually been about a guy who constantly gardens. So. I drew a little comic about it. (Original Flickr page here.)

• More (read: "Legit") comic news: I finally got my hot little hands on "Love and Rockets: New Stories #1," and it, to say the least, did not disappoint. I don't know what to say about it other than that.

I mean. There's more to say. Like. About the tightening of Jaime's drawing style versus the loosening of his writing. And how the opposite appears to be happening with his brother Beto. But, you know. If you're a fan of Love and Rockets, then you're going to read New Stories #1 regardless of anything I'm going to tell you. And if you're not a fan, then you're going to have to pick through like 25 years of back issues before that kind of observation makes any difference to you whatsoever.

• Yesterday I received the new Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, in the mail. Because OD rules.

I'm not one of those guys who has read everything that Neal Stephenson has ever written. I have, though, read The Baroque Cycle and it's precursor Cryptonomicon. All these books are long as hell. So. Even though I haven't read everything that he ever wrote, Neal Stephenson is probably the writer that I've read the most pages of in my life. Which is weird.

Following The Baroque Cycle, which dealt primarily with Stephenson's large scale re-imagining of the history of technology and commerce on Earth, Anathem is kind of a curveball, as it, so far, deals with monastic civilizations on a planet separate from our own. By which I mean to say: Neal's on some sci-fi shit.

That's fine with me. I'm not the biggest sci-fi guy in the world, but I respect mastery as much as I do not respect genre fiction / literary fiction distinctions, and Neal Stephenson is that dude. So. I'm willing to not resist, as a reader, some science fiction.

That said, early and often in Anathem, a reader is inundated with all kinds of new vocabulary concocted and cataloged in a glossary by Stephenson in order to describe, among other things, historical events and architectural elements on the planet Arbe. As willing as I am to follow Stephenson's stories, the verbiage of the early pages of the book coupled with a series of complicated descriptions of structures - using heavily, of course, many of those words created by Stephenson in order to describe them - interspersed with nonchalant allusions to the history of his fictional planet, had me worried.

Shit, I was thinking, I hope Mr. Stephenson hasn't gone and written his Silmarillion.

Because, see, I view The Silmarillion as kind of an unintentional warning for science fiction and fantasy writers to not take the imagining of alternate worlds to the limit. (I am not a fan of Tolkien, but I have certainly known plenty of Tolkien fans in my life and not a single one of them has ever been able to plow through the totality of that thing.)

Now, having gotten a little futher along in Anathem, it occurs to me that I shouldn't have been so apprehensive. My favorite thing that Stephenson does with his writing is the showcasing of his uncanny insight into complex systems. He has the ability to describe them in terms that make them simple to understand without reducing them. In Cryptonomicon - my pick for the best book with the nerdiest title maybe ever - he does this both with the way codebreakers do their work as well as with the military chain of command. (And, you know, a dozen more times.)

There is a paragraph in Anathem, on page 41, in which Stephenson discusses an in-book historical figure, Proc, who is a kind of metaphysician:

"... Proc was the leading figure in a like-minded group called the Circle, which claimed that symbols have no meaning at all, and that all discourse that pretends to mean anything is nothing more than a game played with syntax, or the rules for putting symbols together. ..."

With this sentence, Stephenson has sold me my ticket. He has not only distilled, pretty much, the essence of what all those weirdoes are talking about when they discuss postmodern literary theory into a relatively simple statement, but he has also demonstrated, to me, that he may well be using the world that he has created within Anathem not as a self-contained thing, but as a commentary on the world in which he, the author, lives.