entirely safe and fun

giddy giddy.

What greeted me in my Amazon orbit today: New Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, dropping 9 Sept. The Ninth is a Tuesday, and the book is 2″ thick in hardcover, so there goes that Tuesday. If you see me in person or on the Internets, I do not want to know anything else about it, OK? I have seriously injured men for less.

For the uninitiated: Stephenson is a super-excellent science fiction writer who has written the best works in a handful of subgenres (techno-thriller: Cryptonomicon, cyberpunk: Snow Crash, retro-scifi/steampunk: The Diamond Age, alternate history: The Baroque Cycle). Whatever he’s doing, I enter into reading it with the very highest of expectations. It goes without saying that I recommend his earlier works (from Snow Crash onward and including the psuedonymous, collaborative techno-thrillers Cobweb and Interface) and that you could do a lot worse, come September, than having Anathem queued up.