Meh -- I usually like Neal Stephenson's work. The intro to this collection says it's a hodgepodge, and I have to agree. Some I liked, and some just bored me. I suppose I prefer Stephenson geeking out on his obsessions when it's in service of a plotline. ( )

These essays ramble, repeat, and did not hold my interest. I read only about half of the book. I am a big fan of his novels and will stick with them. ( )

A collection of essays, magazine interviews, the text (or transcripts) of a couple invited lectures, and the foreword to a book by David Foster Wallace. The two short fiction stories are funny and quite good, dealing with themes of virtual reality and cryptocurrency respectively. An essay, or lecture, discussing Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton is also very interesting. The writer argues that the real dispute between these two giants of mathematics and science isn't who was first in discovering calculus, but their personal metaphysics. He shows that Leibniz's is more relevant today, especially for modern physics. The topic was too advanced for me, but now I would like to learn something about cellular automata. The foreword to David Foster Wallace's, “Everything and More” describes an interesting parallel between Wallace and Stephenson in that they were both products of mid-western university town childhoods during the 1960's and 70s. It is a very uplifting tribute to the late Wallace. And it is good to have another positive account of his tragic life, to balance (or negate) material like the movie, “The End of the Tour”. I skipped around the book, and finished with the 118 pager: “Mother Earth, Mother Board” which is about the laying of transoceanic cables – both the first cables and the present day fiber-optics cables. As I was midway grinding through this highly detailed article, I was determined just to finish it. But when I did finish, I found that the author had managed to provide original insights into a strange and unique technology, and most surprisingly, relate the “digital” nature of early the telegram technology to modern digital technology. Digital of communication technology was only temporarily interrupted by Alexander Graham Bell's analog telephone technology. It is an article worth reading, only I wish that he could have spared some of the details of the process of researching the article. Overall, the book is well worth reading. ( )

I've been a big Neal Stephenson fan since high school; his particular blend of sci-fi, history, politics, and action - all classic nerd interests - is right up my alley, even if I haven't always agreed with him on every particular pronouncement or ideological point. I used to hunt down his non-novel writings, and this particular collection of 18 odds and ends - a mix of his short fiction, magazine articles, interviews, essays, and rants all together - should just about do it for the hardcore Stephensoniac. There's some minor omissions, as well as some retroactive editing, but I doubt most will miss stuff like the questionable short story "Jipi and the Paranoid Chip", or the more dated parts of "In the Kingdom of Mao Bell" that got excised.

One irritating feature of Short Remarks (a deliberately ironic title as several of these pieces are fairly lengthy) is that the pieces have no discernible organizing principle, either chronologically, stylistically, or typologically. Thus a 2004 interview with Salon runs right before a 1993 meditation on the relationship between believers and secular folk, a 2012 Time magazine bit about attention span and Anathem, his 2003 Foreword to David Foster Wallace's math book Everything and More, a 1995 short story, and so on. This being a collection of miscellany, it's not like there's a narrative to miss, but it would have been helpful to organize this a little; even in scrapbooks one picture usually comes before another.

The pieces that are here fall into a few categories for me: thought-provoking history (like "Metaphysics in the Royal Society", a great outline of some of the modern implications of the still-fascinating Newton-Leibniz debate about the nature of space and time), questionable rants (I agree with "It's All Geek to Me" that there were a lot of dumb articles about the movie "300", but I also didn't think it was that interesting of a movie), and forgettable short stories (the cryptography/micro-advertising "Spew", for instance). Stephenson is unapologetically nerdy in his tastes, and uncommonly eloquent in his defense of the merits of sci-fi literature, as in his Gresham College Lecture, which has a lot of good insights on the nature of genres, and how some lend themselves to some mediums and some don't (as in the gravitation of the crime genre to TV, whereas romance is more of a movie genre). He's at his best when discussing the appeal of ideas, whether delivered through books, childhood experimentation, or self-discovery, and if you had to try and come up with a "theme" for most of the works here, it would be "respect and encourage new ideas".

The only places where he loses me are the times where his minor reactionary streak gets the better of him, like when he goes off on postmodernism. He certainly has more experience with that sort of thing than I do, and I would probably agree with him that overall literary deconstructionism and things like that are not helpful or useful; I just don't think articles on what postmodernism does or doesn't do to literature are very interesting in general. Also, it's sometimes hard to tell if his interest in religion is sincere admiration, simple contrarianism, honest experimentation, or what - pieces like "Blind Secularism" have weird Straussian overtones that don't mesh well with his better moments.

In any case, while only a few of these pieces are truly outstanding ("Metaphysics in the Royal Society", "Mother Earth, Mother Board", "Gresham College Lecture", "Innovation Starvation"), there's enough good stuff to make this a worthwhile stop for the Stephenson fan. ( )

If you haven't already figured out from my favorites shelf, I lurve Neal Stephenson. I think there's nobody like him except maybe Terry Pratchett. (Someone once told me I had it in me to become "the new Neal Stephenson" and I still think it's the highest praise I've ever received. Granted, I am pretty sure they were mad drunk at the time but I like to think that it still counts.)

Given this, I was a bit worried when Reamde dropped, as it seemed his sure hand was starting to slip. I bought Anathem, but it's been sitting under a bunch of other books. When I blew through B&N while waiting for the family to finish shopping (as always), I saw this and paused for a moment. Yeah, I thought, it's new Neal Stephenson, but what about that collection of William Gibson essays that you bought? What about that Malcolm Gladwell collection?

It took me a few seconds to say "screw it, it's Neal Stephenson," and I am glad that I did. Stephenson seems to have a better focus in this compared to Gibson and Gladwell - granted, he does have his preferred dead horses for beating (where Gibson has Japan/otaku and the Internet, Stephenson has literary vs genre fiction and space travel), but that doesn't detract from the overall quality here. "Mother Earth Mother Board" is the crown jewel, a fascinating, long piece about transocean cabling. "Arsebestos" is a fresh take on the sitting-is-bad-for-you situation, something I thought I had long since grown tired of. I felt pretty guilty that I couldn't keep up with the piece on metaphyiscs, Newton, and Leibniz; however, this was assuaged by the short fiction studded throughout. "Spew" is sort of forgettable and feels like it's missing a real ending; however, this is more than made up for by "The Great Simoleon Caper" which seems to nicely bridge the gap between Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash (which you better go read right now, since this review's over). ( )