Beyond Reality discussion

If you've finished reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson, this is the place to share your thoughts with the group.

Caution: There will likely be **SPOILERS** in this thread.

Long-time BR lurker, so before I stomp around opinionating about the book, I want to make sure I play by the rules...

Is it ok to comment about the book if we read it before this month? I read it last Jan, and Have Opinions, but said opinions mostly preclude my wanting to read it again...

Dev wrote: "Long-time BR lurker, so before I stomp around opinionating about the book, I want to make sure I play by the rules...

Is it ok to comment about the book if we read it before this month? I read it ..."

Hi Dev, thanks for checking in. You certainly may comment about the book whether you read it before or are reading it specifically for this month’s discussion. So please feel free to share your opinions!

Right-o. So for context, I tend to think of this book in terms of my history with Neal Stephenson, but of course he does have a co-author here in Nicole Galland. And I consider myself a bit of a fan of Mr. Stephenson. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Diamond Age are among the finest books I know, Interface, Zodiak and Reamde are all excellent, as is the Baroque cycle on average, though I felt it went a bit flat in the middle. I'm not a mindless fanboy - I found Seveneves and the Mongoliad trilogy (on which Galland is one of several co-authors) to be mostly enjoyable, but deeply flawed.

So when I say that I think DODO is Stephenson's worst book that I have read to date, you know where I'm coming from.

To crib from my own review: When Neal is on fire, he tells 13 different side stories about 47 different characters, and then ties them all together into a single coherent story. When he isn't, he does the former without the latter. This is that.

In short, this book has a myriad of different plotlines that feel like short stories with next to nothing to do with each other, they aren't told nearly as entertainingly as is his usual standard, and they don't really come to a conclusion so much as crash to a series of mostly-unrelated halts and then explode for no apparent reason. There are, as usual, some brilliantly interesting ideas and amusing characters in here, but they were buried under a LOT of unnecessary bulk, and an entertaining overall story was nowhere to be found.

Even the best of us - among whom I would still insist Mr Stephenson belongs - strike out sometimes. To my mind, this book is one of his. I don't feel I know enough of Ms Galland's style - not having read any of her solo work - to comment on where this would fall for her, but I also wouldn't blame the failure on her alone; this crashes for too many of the same reasons some of Neal's other works struggle.

I found this one to be generally enjoyable. I find myself liking most time-travel stories, so this read was perhaps meant for me. I enjoyed the silly acronyms and the relationship between Mel and Tristan. The idea of magic tied to quantum mechanics was an interesting bit of world building. I liked the different formats, from a journal to letters to office memos, used to tell the story. I felt for the witches, trying to regain their magical ability but reduced to performing parlor tricks in a box. OF COURSE something is bound to go wrong!

My complaint is that the book is just too long. For a somewhat silly, lighthearted time travel story, this book is heavy indeed.