h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hyp, I think that you should expond on your list ala skippy (http://www.skippyslist.com)

29. The Irish MPs are not after “Me frosted lucky charms”.

I once stopped a couple from having sex on one of the tables in the German Literature section. As he pulled his jeans up, one of them said 'well there's no one else here, so it is private, isn't it?'

Oh so I'm no one, am I?

And anyway, if they're going to do that sort of thing, they should have the decency to do it under the gaze of Nietzsche (who'd probably approve) rather than near Goethe, who was probably having the vapours.

Heidegger would probably have decided that they didn't exist. Leibniz would have objected to monads running loose in the room.

I had no idea German literature was so arousing.

I just finished Cryptonomicon. I can't wait to read it again. So good. One quick question. Did any of Bischoff's descendants show up in the present day narrative?

I don't remember any, but I haven't read Crypto all the way through in a couple of years. I can tell you now that I actually cried over Bobby Shaftoe.

Now go read Quicksilver. Or if you feel in the mood for something lighter, go read Snowcrash.

I do not recall any of Bischoff's descendants making it to the present day scenario.

Cryptonomicon is far and away my favourite book. Everything from the networking (mostly accurate) to the crypto (pretty accurate from my limited understanding) to the descriptions of imaginary lands (Qwelgm and Kintukara (going by memory on those)) paint a world that is immediate and facinating. I even liked (in a voyueristic sort of way) the Van Eck Phreaking thing that they do to one of the partners where they read his letter to the porn mag.

I have to buy another copy of it, as mine is ruined (the spine broke on it). This time I think that I will go for softcover, as it is easier to handle that way.

Marv, try and find another hardcover edition. I gave my hardcover away before I moved to New Mexico and really regret it because the softcover is thick and stubby and you'll crack the spine in the first reading trying to read into the inside margin. I wish they had made the softcover taller and wider in order to provide comfortable reading. What are publishers thinking when they do that?

Lil, publishers are alas thinking 'lets get as much moolah as we can out of this book, and frankly, making a bigger edition with a better quality spine is going to cost more, so let's not do that'. Isn't it depressing? It's not like we want hand-bound heirlooms, just a book that survives being read more than once.

Am now reading V.S. Ramachandra's 'Phantoms in the Brain', all about neurology. I am utterly fascinated and keep following S around the house saying 'did you know...' I must be driving him nuts.

actually, my softcover of cryptonomicon has a very flexible spine, and wide inner margins. I could routinely leave it open in the middle and have it stay open with out any problem.

I am a happy, happy girl. Sporky got me Wodehouse's "Life at Blandings" omnibus for my birthday. I immediately put down all other books and magazines currently occupying my nightstand to dive into it.

If I want to discuss "spoiler" incidents from Cryptonomicon, is this the appropriate place? And what is the appropriate method? Should I just put "SPOILER" at the top of the post, and then scroll down a good ways before beginning to type? Should I start a new thread at my personal space?

Nah, most everyone has read it so feel free to discuss what you want; it's such a pleasure to have a new Stephenson convert in the room!

I have to confess to having the enourmously bad habit of sneaking a peak at the end of most evry book I read. Since I read a lot of detective stories, this is a very bad habit indeed. Still.

I'm still not sure I agree with throwing books out. This is what charity shops are for.

I'm afraid I'm not a great respecter of books in the sense that I will crack the spines on any book that's mine, and turn pages down in lieu of bookmarks. Reading should be comfortable. This is why ebooks will never catch on for me...

Let me start with a criticism. OK, I have to say that I was reading the end very fast, but it kind of bothered me that Andrew Loeb showed up in the jungle, and was better at sneaking through the jungle than DMS, John Wayne or the other guy. Why was he even there? Was he working with Wing? I never saw that connection.

How did he know about Golgotha? I could see him showing up at the submarine.

I easily could have missed something, in which case I'm very happy to learn my mistake.

Loeb's character is flat as cardboard -- he represents that element of the fantastic that you always find in an NS novel (as you're about to find when you dig into the Baroque Cycle). I thought it was a stretch, although it could be accounted for by Loeb's established qualities of relentless obsession, and the postulate that people will go to any lengths for gold. We're to believe that Loeb has gone mad in the jungle and blames Randy.

There is also a jarring anachronism much earlier in the book, when Shaftoe and his men are standing around the frozen corpse of the cook who is embracing the pig carcass. NS describes the late cook as "bitchin'" with a knife, a faddy word that simply does not go with a WWII plot strand.

But overall I'm inclined to be generous to NS; he sucked me in with that whole incongruity of a China Marine composing haiku as his jeep is hairing through a Chinese riot full of bankers.

Well put Lil. I was sucked in by the haiku under stress as well. I didn't notice the bitchin anachronism, but I'm not good at picking those out to begin with.

I was rationalizing to myself that if NS wanted to have a happy ending to Cryptonomicon, it would have to be cheesy. Also, it's easy for me to sit here and criticize. But to put together 900 pages of amazing fiction, with an unbeleivable use of technical knowledge, and only get the most minor of complaints...that's what I associate with NS.

I'm re-reading it, and I'm keeping track of the words/subjects I don't know, and looking them up. Here's what I've got so far

"Barrens, 1st page, 2nd paragraph"
"As nightmarishly lethal, *memetically* programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet."

memetically - tricky. definition of meme (from OED): A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.

I think NS is somewhat referencing Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene", and is saying that genes/bodies are our hardware, and social conditioning is our OS/software. Any takers?

Should I keep posting these here? In ~21 pages I've got 5 so far.

Oh yeah, keep posting!

Would it help to know that NS's wife is a doctor? And yes, a lot of his genetic research goes back to Snowcrash.

He gets me with his vocabularly, too. In one of his books he refers to a university campus as full of "hederated gothics." Hedera is ivy (I had to look it up). So that's ivy-covered buildings of a gothic style of architecture, converted to several words with a poetic meter!

And this phrase in the first couple of pages of Crypto -- "...a shack of knot-pocked cargo pallet planks ..." would make the composer of Beowulf envious.

I think that the depth of how NS loves his characters is shown in his work. He does not just write about DMS, Bobby, Goto et al, he lives through them on the page.

Showing LPW as someone living in a plane of understand beyond the regular crowd was a pleaser as well. When LPW fails the math portion of his entrance exam for the navy because he spends the whole time working on a proof, thereby masking his actual abilities, you see how uneffected he is by it. Prior to joining the Navy, LPW is exposed to homosexuality by Turing and Rudy, but he does not mind because he respects their minds. That was an uncommon trait in pre-WWII social life.

If Randy is who I identify with the most (being the overwheit nerdish person that I am), LPW is who I admire the most in the series. His finely honed mind for pattern recognition is something that I could only hope to gain.

I agree with Lil, by the way, in saying that Bobby is often overlooked in the story. The audacity he shows when he confronts MacArthur for instance. Someone with the stones to drive right on up to the general deserves more pages than we were shown. If I ever meet NS I will ask him about that oversight.

NS is also something of a prophet when it comes to online life. The internet did not exsist in it's current form when he wrote Snowcrash, yet he presaged some of the most interesting things that are being worked on right now.. Full immersion into an online community, for one.

I can only hope that his vision is fullfilled in some respect. I would love to see much of his technology in action. In Snowcrash and Diamond Age NS wrote about a world filled with political and economic turmoil in a manner that we have a hard time comprehending. Yet in the midst of that crisis technology blooms. The Matrix is an awesome use of the internet. Smartwheels, rod memory, self contained nuclear masses powering robots, nanotech are all great things for our current industries to try to invent. I think that it is fully possible that we can see some of his ideas make it to fruition as engineers and scientists work toward making fiction reality.

Sorry to ramble on, but I get very excited about NS's work. He is far and away the most exciting author I have read int eh last few years.