[darthjim]

Jingo is brilliant (especially in these days of "omg his skin is brown he must be packed with explosives" nonsense).

Reaper Man is hilarious, more so than any other book. Ever. This is an Unarguable Fact.

Moving Pictures is a crushing piece of satire.

I find it impossible to choose between them.

Sorry.
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www.the-scoremagazine.com

[Renfrew]

With the ones you mentioned, I'm a bit surprised you didn't bring up Small Gods.
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[rf]

I was never able to get into Discworld, though I did enjoy Good Omens (largely due to Gaiman, probably, since I love Gaiman).

Since I also liked Hitchhiker's Guide, I suspect my Discworld issues are related to the differences darthjim mentioned. I experienced the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show at about the same time I was watching Star Trek: TNG (that is, a very long time ago), and they both seemed to have this great balance of, err, "absoluteness" with "contingentness." Of course, TNG was much less comic, but they both played with basic aspects of reality while still having an entertaining cast and detailed world--they had the subject matter of more surrealist stuff intended for stoners, but left enough things unmeddled with to make a good story. Discworld and some other comic fantasies strive just to create a thoroughly zany world, and don't dip into that Twilight Zone/TNG-style questioning as much. (I think?)

Since I mentioned Gaiman before, I should say that he can achieve the tone I'm describing, too. American Gods (which is very, very good "lower fiction") has plenty of trippy bits, but maintains the sense that something coherent (if ontologically wacky) is going on, and does so without seeming annoyingly secretive.
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[darthjim]

[Renfrew]

[Dracko]

Terry Pratchett's best stuff isn't Discworld, at least I've found. I'm far more fond of his Johnny Maxwell books. Good Omens is good too, but I take issue with Gaiman on a number of occasions. He just over-does things. He realises he's cleverer than most, and I get the distinct impression he lets it go to his head to the detriment of a story.

Still, a far worthier writer than Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan or all those other fantasy-churning wankers, and he's a cool guy in person. I am tired of being told I look like him, however. Anansi Boys is a good read, perhaps a better one than American Gods
, and his recent collection of shorts, Fragile Things, is particularly interesting. Good Omens is definitely of note as well.

Lucifer is still a far superior series to The Sandman, that said. If you're up for comics, give Violent Cases and Signal to Noise a look.
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[darthjim]

[Renfrew]

http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/fortunes/discworld
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[darthjim]

[Renfrew]

I wonder if he is ever going to bring some kind of conclusion to any Discworld storyline.
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[internisus]

Up to chapter 5 in Snow Crash. It's probably the coolest book I've ever read. Cool or hip. One of those. And the satire is great. Half the funny is just bringing out the little things about America that you can't stand and making them their own ginormous enterprises.

So it seems this was published in '92. It's funny; a lot of the tech in here, especially the virtual internet reality (so far anyway), is like almost here. I mean, you can see a lot of this shit being at least on the fringe of your reality by 2010. A good deal of it is here right now. Just turn the whole internet into an MMO with no goals (except to make money and hang out with peeps) and you've got it. Up to chapter 5, anyway. That's pretty early. I'm just working on the initial descriptions; no action yet for the internet.

And the lasers painting the goggles is cool. And the Kouriers pooning cars and wearing night vision is sweet as hell. And the Deliverator's ride with its auto-loading pizza hatch and HUD monitoring the age status of each individual pie is beautiful. And his activated charcoal suit sounds righteous, too. And I wonder what country I have to move to to be able to carry a katana and wakizashi all the time.

So yeah, it's really hip. Or cool. It's something.

[rf]

Stephenson said in an interview somewhere that he thinks the predictions in Snow Crash were a little off, not about technology but about interest level. He thinks we could be much closer to things like the metaverse, but so far making online worlds more immersive hasn't made them sell better, or something like that. The laser goggles, for example, can be bought today for industrial purposes, but no one is brave enough to take the risk and market a "home VR" system that would require consumers to buy a bunch of expensive devices like that just to do anything. People would be reluctant unless the so-called "actual content" was really good, and if that content is largely user-created, you could have a vicious cycle of "low sales" --> "online world is worse, so less desirable" --> "lower sales"
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[BotageL]