Words&Dirt

Deeper into the wordy quagmire that is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.  As with Quicksilver, this volume contains a considerable dose of magical moments dissolved in a nearly impenetrable sea of overdone gibberish.  It’s brilliant gibberish, but not brilliant enough to make this book shine the way I typically expect from Stephenson.  While enhancing the Baroque [...]

“Today, in the sunset of the fossil fuel era, the oil industry remains the most concentrated industry in the world, followed closely by the telecommunications and the electrical power generation and distribution industry.  Virtually all the other industries that depend on the fossil fuel/telecommunications matrix require, by necessity, huge capital expenditures to establish sufficient vertical [...]