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In which Mr. Stephenson perfects his particular take on the technothriller. Pity the notional traveller who picks up this book at the airport for a globe-trotting, politics-adjacent James Rollins-y kind of ride and cops a twenty-page disquisition on the biology and habits of the feral hog right between the eyes instead. But, if said traveller survives Stephenson letting his inner Melville out (which, pleasingly, Stephenson intertextually puts his hands up to), said traveller will receive the genuine pleasure of seeing Stephenson start his multiple plot threads and tie them all together in the final chapters, no matter how unlikely any such confluence seemed at the beginning. It’s a wonderful trick of engineering skill, and I certainly chuckled to myself as I watched him pull the stunt off.

(Digression – I decided to spend this winter reading some of the books I’d always meant to, and that’s included MOBY DICK. An appalling gap in my reading. I watch or read the adaptations – Bill Sienkiewicz did a beautiful graphic novella palimpsest of the book – and I assume I know what the book is. I didn’t. At all. Nor did I realise the breadth and depth of its influence on the American novel. But I’m not here to talk about mad old Melville today.)

TERMINATION SHOCK is a giant confection, sure (though, at some 700 print pages, shorter than his usual tomes), and perhaps there will never again be a vast 24-course banquet like THE BAROQUE CYCLE from his keyboard, but when a confection is made with this much expertise and obvious joy — and Stephenson is clearly enjoying himself immensely — you can’t help but admire it and consume it with equal joy. A Stephenson book hasn’t had the sense of smiling to itself on the page since, perhaps, ANATHEM, and on the levels of craft and pace it’s a head above REAMDE, SEVENEVES and FALL. I mean, it’s 700 pages long and I read it in something like eight days, in huge gulps. I found later that I didn’t make any Kindle highlights at all. I was just carried through the book without pause.

(Also, there is no criticism of Mr. Stephenson’s post-BAROQUE CYCLE output here. He did, after all, do the damn thing. He doesn’t have to do it again.)

But, being a technothriller, its foot in the near future will become a footprint in the past soon enough. The inciting incident is a super-rich American who decides to do something for the future, and that’s the era we live in — the zillionaire act of privileged hubris framed in terms of “the future.” Although, I must also note my delight at the tool of the act being a Gerald Bull supergun, something of a retro grace note. On a base level, then, it’s a parable of tech disruption, which is certainly not new territory for Stephenson, but he may never have framed it in such universally accessible terms before.

So, then: an action thriller about a hunter of feral hogs, the Queen of the Netherlands, a Punjabi-Canadian martial artist and a truckstop billionaire who’s discovered a way to pause the climate emergency, in which Moby-Dicks abound and I get to learn a lot about the history of sulphur and, well, the history of anything else Neal Stephenson was interested in over the last couple of years. It feels like it’s probably the state of the art in modern genre writing. I think this serves as an excellent entry point into his work.

TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson (US) (UK)

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

A while ago, I started the project of reading the entire oeuvre of author Steve Erickson. I finally finished RUBICON BEACH this week. Not as flawless as THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT — there is a sequence in the back half set in LA that personally did not capture me, and it seemed to me to go on forever until boom Erickson drops the hammer. But your mileage may vary, and, frankly, the glorious strangeness of the rest of the book more than makes up for that period of drag. Where THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT was a magnificent piece of networked and perfectly dovetailed structure, RUBICON BEACH is a flowing tangle of dream logic. Imagine it as three long dreams experienced on consecutive nights, the remains of each surfacing in the next as your mind tries to make sense of the story it’s telling itself as you sleep.

When he laughed it was the sound of destruction’s motor.

The book breaks into three sections:

In a near-future America, an ex-political prisoner goes through a somewhat Kafkaesque period of community surface in a drowned Los Angeles that sings to itself at night. There is a murder mystery that emerges like a recurring dream.

Some time previously, a strange woman is kidnapped from her riverine jungle South American home and finds herself in LA, roughly contemporary to the time of the authorship, 1986. Things are dreamlike in her presence.

In the mid-20th Century, an American mathematician who’s run away from maths after a terrible discovery that no-one else can comprehend finds himself far from home, dreaming his life away. But the thing he really ran away from was the land that sings to itself.

The sun was white in the west; and as he sat watching it, he saw a geyser erupt from its middle, first a small spittle of black, then a trickle in slow runnels up over its face.

All of these things connect together in the third part, but not in a way that makes complete sense. As if we cannot fully comprehend the machinery of the structure because we deny the existence of the hidden number and cannot hear the music.

It remains a hugely ambitious novel, with vast sustained swathes of absolutely beautiful, compelling writing.

RUBICON BEACH, Steve Erickson (UK) (US)

Next up is TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, as I fill in the gaps in my Erickson reading. RUBICON BEACH gave me, in places, a similar feeling to that I had while reading MOBY DICK, that this book explained much about movements in American fiction.