Skip to main content

Book Review - The Mongoliad Book 1

Neal Stephenson speaking at Google,
Neal Stephenson speaking at Google, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve been wondering if Neal Stephenson has decided to write a best seller of every genre’.  Diamond Age is cyberpunk. The Baroque Cycle is picaresque. Reamde and Crytonomicon are action/adventure.  Anathem is science fiction/fantasy.  If we see a romance and a murder mystery come from his inventive pen, we’ll know that my conjecture is indeed correct.

In a way, Mr. Anderson is crowdsourcing his latest work, with the first book of The Mongoliad Trilogy recently published with co-authors Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, E.D. deBirmingham, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey and Cooper Moo.  Or perhaps he has seen the commercial success of Game of Thrones, and is creating the script writing team for the series.  (His books would be rather complicated to turn into a movie.  A Lord of the Rings series would be more appropriate.  The Baroque Cycle would have to be a series.)
I continue to view him as the most creative and inventive author writing today.  This first volume is set in the medieval era and focuses on conflict between Mongols and Western Europeans.  As with many of his prior books, a big list of characters is introduced, with multiple plot lines that experienced Anderson readers know will eventually converge.  Based on volume one I would characterize this as action fiction.  A thinly veiled Knights of the Round Table plans to take on one of the sons of Ghenghis Khan (Ogedei– Khagan-or Khan of Khans) with the goal of causing a retreat of the Mongols from what otherwise seems likely to become the complete occupation and sacking of all of Europe.

Protaganists from Volume I. are Cnan, a member of a clan named The Binders, a kind of stealthy gypsy band, and Gensukh, a Mongol warrior, sent from his officer position in the field by his father, to the court of Ogedei Khan, overlord of the Mongols.  Cnan ends up entangled with the knights, using her tracking and hiding skills as a scout and occasionally as a one-woman diversion. 

While there is action, the first segment of the series clearly is stage setting.  Keep the book handy; you will need to refresh your memory as to the legion of characters and chapter endings before opening Book 2.

I haven’t read anything by Stephenson that I wouldn’t recommend.  The Mongoliad is no exception.

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Reasons We Think America is On the Wrong Course

I was listening to the Michael Medved show yesterday. He does a nice job at talk radio. But he was worked up because the CBS News Poll showed that 72% of Americans surveyed think the U.S. is on the wrong track. (When I went to CBS' site, it looks to me like the number is 69%, but that's an insignicant difference). Medved's view is that income for the poorest citizens are rising (recent government data), unemployment is low, stock market is high, no cold war, so why so pessimistic? Here are my answers: Several of our young men and women are being killed every day in a war that we are getting sick of. The deficit is some unimaginable, staggering number that my generation is imposing on my children. Social Security is bankrupt and both Congress and the Administration (both previous and current, and both Republican and Democratic) are unwilling to face the issue. There are virulent infectious agents in hospitals that are resistent to essentially all antibiotics, and the drug co...
2 comments
Read more

Stimulus Plan

Mr. President: The House stimulus bill is awful. Dangerous. Counter-productive. It has a very high probability of making things worse!. Your man Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be a tough guy: turn him loose on the House Dems - they are selling you down the river. Some simple tests: the spending will improve long-term productivity; the spending will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and the spending will happen fast; very, very fast. There may need to be some legislation to enable spending without years of environmental review. For example, spending on wind farms would improve long-run productivity and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But let's say the wind farm is a couple of miles offshore. You can't have environmental groups stopping the development to see if some fish will be harmed. This spending has to happen now. And, no tax cuts with the possible exception of AMT. People aren't going to spend any tax savings; they are going to pay their credit card bills or r...
10 comments
Read more

Romney/Thompson dream ticket?

The role of Fred Thompson in yesterday's SC primary is as murky as his next step. Did he divide the religious vote and thereby hand Huckabee a loss? Or would those votes, had he not been there, have gone elsewhere? My instinct is that more of those votes would have gone to Romney or McCain than to Huckabee. Fred comes across to me as the thinking person's conservative: thoughtful on positions, a sense of history, a Federalist, serious about the war on terror and prepared to take the long view on it. His addresses have content, not sound bites - which may, unfortunately, be a drawback in 2008. Mitt is quickly seizing the stage as the most knowledgeable in the field on economics, growth and job creation. With a war still consuming dozens of billions, it isn't clear that the race will be won on voters' views of candidates job creation prowess. However, he gives off as much energy as Fred seems to absorb - Mitt's electron shell could power Fred. So, Mitt may be drawi...
5 comments
Read more