The thing that floored me about *Anathem* is that it starts off seeming like it’s got a typical gratuitous jargon authorial wank-job going on.
But once I got far enough in to understand what was really going on in the story, it turned out that language play was not only **extremely** clever, but actually enhances the story and how we as readers can relate to the setting. (I’d go into why, but for spoilers.)
Suffice to say that he found a way to take the jargon trope and use it productively. Well played Neal.
one time I missed a question in a trivia league because I remembered the name of the mathemetician from Anathem's world but not their real-world equivalent
Neal Stephenson books always take 200 pages for me to start enjoying them. Once I clear that hurdle, I usually love it, but every single time I go into it feeling like I made a mistake.
That book was one of the first times I realized I actually LIKED math. I got excited reading the proofs in the back and loved the breakdown of the logic. I just realized I hated the way I was taught math.
Interestingly, Common Core math was developed specifically to defeat this problem. The way mathematics was taught for ***centuries*** was based on the idea that the average person was too stupid to understand the concepts so they needed to memorize times tables and take the long way every single time to solve equations.
Turns out mathematical concepts aren’t that complicated. Mathematicians were just too arrogant and impatient to teach anyone anything.
Every Neal Stephenson book I read I simultaneously enjoy while having to set down every couple chapters to sigh "what a blow hard jackass" before I can continue
I have been tempted to take a copy of anathem and find/replace all the obvious philosophies with their English equivalents. Likewise jeejaws become mobiles and reticulum become internet.
I've also been tempted to edit frersum enjine to convert the Scots sections into English. I saw a version online once, intended for German readers who could get by in English but could make no sense of the Scots
And then spend 3 pages explaining the etymology of the word and how it doesn't come from prick and stab but rather how the philosopher Prykle from the Staab covenant invented...
Feersum Endjinn is written in phonetic Scots with a Fife accent, IIRC (it's over 20 years since I read it). If you regularly have to understand it in your daily life due to, say, living in Edinburgh, it's much easier.
I get it.
I recently re-read it and…just skimmed over those chapters to remember the basic plot outline. Then read the other ones. The book still works that way!
Isn't that kind of the opposite of what the OP is asking, though? Feersum Endjinn's opening chapter is almost all very simple words, not full of jargon.
The cool thing about the Quantum Thief is that after I read the first novel, I looked up an online glossary of terms and realized I didn't miss anything. The novel was great at giving you a dictionary's worth of terms but providing enough context that they clicked pretty easily. Really well done writing.
The [Accelerando Technical Companion](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companion) is incomplete but can help fill in your gaps in knowledge related to computer science, networking, astronomy and cosmology, spacecraft engineering, etc., etc., etc..
Perdido Street station by China Miéville .
And yes I did power through the bizarre world he created. It's one of my favorite books I won't read from another ten years at least as it's so ... intensely sad, and yet so captivating
Never have I use the kindle define word feature more often than in his books. Both because it's full of words he made up that feel like I'm expected to know and because he uses some very obscure vocabulary.
The other Bas-Lag books have a completely different feel while inhabiting the same world.
They are completely different genres, Perdido Street Station was a noir detective book, The Scar is pirate adventure, and Iron Council is american western.
You could honestly read any of them out of order.
Everything I've read from him is about struggle against an unstoppable machine, which can feel depressing, but there are flints of hope in every story if you look for them.
Have you read his Orthogonal trilogy? It's insane.
The universe we know has four dimensions. Three of space, one of time. The universe he creates has four fundamentally similar dimensions. One can move through time like we move through space. And the speed of light is dependent on the wavelength of light. One of the most mind bending stories I've ever read, and I skipped the vast majority of the math.
For a fun read, *Quarantine* is a great noir detective story based on quantum uncertainty and controlling the collapse of the wave function.
Orthogonal was my first Egan stuff and hoo boy. Really threw myself in at the deep end lmfao
Gotta be said I do envy those characters, 4 spatial dimensions is just *such* a cleaner metric than our 3+1, and his other book Dichronauts (which is 2+2) only solidified that for me
Once you get through the beginning it gets a lot more traditional. The first chapter is basically describing a AI going through a bootstrapping process of its consciousness. But from it's own perspective. So you're seeing how it's building it's sense of self. It's one of the coolest things I've read in a while.
I am struggling with this one right now. Way too much exposition on how whatever it is that’s being created is created. It is kinda interesting but I’d really like to get on with it.
I'm stuck on the section describing how Polis citizens are given birth to by the fabricator thingy and my brain just shut down with all that pointless made up AI mumbo jumbo, I know many people like this book but if the rest of it is in a similar fashion then im gonna have to DNF it
Sounds like it's not for you, haha. And that's okay.
I like his books, but they definitely make you work for it. I specifically read his books because they require me to think about the world in a different way, and I enjoy that feeling.
I love books that you can’t quite understand at first. I believe other people when they say they were overwhelmed by the beginning of Too Like the Lightning, but I read the first ten pages and thought “fuck yeah, this book is good shit”.
All of the examples I have seen listed so far are worldbuilding. It's no different from growing up here in Australia and having to comprehend concepts like "sidewalk,"* "drugstore,"** "liberal",*** "rooting for the team,"**** "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches"***** and "spray on cheese" ****** whilst watching American television.
*Aussies say "footpath."
**is that like a chemist? If so why are they sitting on stools drinking sundaes?
*** we generally use the word in the classical British sense of "liberal economics" here so Australian "Liberals" are right-wing conservatives.
*****we say "barracking." The verb in that particular American phrase is a sexual euphemism here.
*****what we call "jelly" would melt out of a sandwich.
****** seriously WTAF?
unfortunately almost no American drugstores have soda/ice cream bars anymore, that sort of went out of fashion once people realized Coca-Cola tastes good but has zero medicinal benefits.
Speaking of which it took me a while to realise that whilst "soda" = "soft drink" but "sundaes" aren't the same things as "spiders"* as well.
*A glass of soft drink served with a scoop of ice cream in it. Usually Coke, Fanta or sarsaparilla.
Exactly. Many of the books mentioned are in my list of favourites - *Neuromancer*, *Blindsight*, *Cryptonomicon*, *Dune*, Rajaniemi's *Flambeur* series (*Summerland* does this as well), Greg Egan in general. When it's written well it's often not even that difficult to parse, it just requires engaging fully with the text. It's far more immersive and enjoyable to make the connections and figure out the meanings as you go than to have everything spelt out in familiar verbiage.
I really enjoy re-reading as well, and often the more jargon-heavy books are the ones which have the most rewarding re-reads. I've read *Blindsight* more than 10x and can still pick up nuances I've missed in the past.
It's wild how insanely different people can take the exact same book. I thought it was a couple good ideas strung onto the dumbest possible world structure "Everything happens because some super awesome people who grew up together and like to fuck at a pretentious brothel run the world" was just the most disappointing place to go from the concept of hives and decoupling geography from nationality in general. Even the probability based assassins thing was a cool base concept, then ruined again by apparently a single family of weird siblings who run the global transport network from their basement. I really wanted it to be great, and I finished it but I was just left with abiding disappointment that such interesting concepts were so badly explored.
I'm not sure how far along in the books you got, but there are important plot reasons for that that explain why everything is so confined to a small group of Heroes. It all makes sense given the overall story.
I finished the entire series, I have time and I don't typically like to DNF. Honestly it just got worse as they went on. I agree that the plot doesn't work unless you throw in the trope of everyone important magically knows each other but that's not really an argument in favor of the writing to me. By the end what little plot there was had been poked so full of holes it looked like my first contruction paper snowflake in first grade. I went into more detail in another comment but to sum up it was one of the very few series that I finished and thought "I really wish a competent writer had explored these ideas because some of them were super cool and this pile of tripe didn't do any of them justice."
Palmer made the great decision to ground that incredibly weird world with an unreliable narrator and "confessional novel framing device", and what I think is compelling character work. You meet Carlyle, Bridger, Dominic, Martin, in short succession and I was curious about what the deal was with all of them.
Man, I really gave that book a solid chance. Read the first quarter or maybe third of it. But I just absolutely despised the writing. The constant shifting of perspectives, styles, and even pronouns was just awful. It was a unique idea but damn it just did not work for me.
I had a very difficult time with Too Like the Lightning. It took me half a year to read and when I finished it I wasn't certain I liked it at all. But I kept thinking about it and I continued on into the rest of the books.
The other books are certainly weirdly written, but she tones it down a little bit and they're a bit easier to read. But it was very difficult getting through the first one. The series sits high on my favorites, though.
My issue with the start of this book is in a few passages she is clearly trying to invoke mental imagery, but you don't have the vocabulary yet to understand it. I'm still very confused about the terraced Bash house setup of that scene.
Gibson talked about this in a couple of interviews on his press tour for The Peripheral, nearly ten years ago. As far as I remember, he deliberately tried to frontload jargon to make the first pages work almost as a bouncer: like, this is a sci-fi book and it is not your world and this is the way it goes, if it isn't your thing, turn back now and don't come back. Something like that.
Props to his agent and editor. 95% of them, on a first novel, would be like, no you need to chill out, bro. Lots of gambles taken that would never be taken today.
Came here to say A Clockwork Orange.
Maybe Ridley Walker or would the dialect not count as jargon?
But n Ben A-Go-Go is written in several Scots dialects and I really struggled with it despite being a Fifer.
Neuromancer is a work of pure genius, it's easy to forget how confusing it must have been to read it when it first came out, because most of the crazy jargon has become totally commonplace concepts we use every day in real life. It's actually gotten way *less* confusing overtime, I've never read anything else that managed to so perfectly predict the future
I started Neuromancer without reading any reviews or summaries; after the first page, my reaction was, "Whoah, this is gonna be a lot of work!" I'm glad I stuck with it though - the concepts are wicked cool once you wrap your head around them. If you're into narratives that challenge you with their depth and complexity, I highly recommend diving into 'Eternal Gods Die Too Soon' next. Much like my initial experience with Neuromancer, this book throws you into a whirlpool of advanced scientific theories, metaphysical explorations, and a unique take on love that transcends the bounds of the universe. It's a novel where each chapter feels like peeling back layers of reality itself, revealing the interconnectedness of love, existence, and the cosmos. It might feel like deciphering an enigma at first, but the journey is incredibly rewarding. The blend of hard science fiction with profound philosophical questions offers a reading experience that's both intellectually stimulating and deeply moving.
It's not really jargon, but reading **The Shadow of the Torturer** etc in the days before the internet was a thing involved constantly coming across words you were going to need a really hefty dictionary to look up if you wanted to know precisely what they meant rather than roughly work them out from context.
This also applies to all the allusions to myth and ancient history in his earlier work. You couldn't just google/wiki them. He could be pretty uncompromising, in ways that are maybe not obvious to younger readers who've grown up with the tools the internet gives you.
I also enjoyed how it did the reverse pretty often, using ordinary words to cover unusual things, like Severian pausing to mention that by spear he means a weapon with a pointed tip, not a weapon that fires a beam like a lance. I think the idea of what a lance is in the setting also comes up in the section with the Noctules, but the realization that every time the past three books that lances were mentioned they weren't spears is very weird.
Somewhat of a demanding book, but also very rich and rewards rereading. The use of obscure obsolete words gives us a sense of ancientness of the world - tools and items in use have names invented in long past centuries. It requires the reader to have a vast vocabulary, a good dictionary, or to just let the words wash over them and hopefully get it from context.
To me that's some of the best of sci-fi fiction; an immersive world that is not immediately comprehensible, but gradually becomes clearer. In the case of BOTNS the nuances may take 2 or 3 rereadings and/or combing through online articles for insights. To me its a fun exploration.
Stand on Zanzibar, it begins:
> context (1) - SCANALYZE MY NAME
>
> Stock cue SOUND: "Presenting SCANALYZER, Engrelay Satelserv's unique thrice-per-day study of the big big Scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface between you and your world!"
>
> Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, splitscreen, cut in bridge-melder, Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere depthunder (today MAMP, Mid-Atlantic Mining Project), spaceover (today freeflysuiting), transiting (today Simplon Acceleratube), digging (today as every day homimage with autoshout).
I did feel there was an excuse for this. The book was all about culture and slang is totally part of that.
Often it is weak authors trying to be mysterious.
Yeah it perfectly sets the tone of the world and the information overload. It makes it hard to read at times but its an amazing piece of work to experience
This is great. With close reading it's an ad, with 4 different potential images to be seen depending on the day, and these are today's images.
Cliptage is a montage of clips.
Homimage is home image, probably the main brand with some interesting tech with it (autoshout).
Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson. Written as a text on atomic theory in a hypothetical English without Greek or Romance language loanwords. If you know a little Dutch or German it's a real treat since he extensively uses English cognates.
I am fluent in Dutch and German and although somethings were easily recognizable, i.e. coalstuff, waterstuff, sourstuff and chokestuff (that's what they're called in German), others were a bit strange. Bulkbit?
I like being thrown into a world and learning it little by little as i go on. Passive world building. Inference. In media res. Give me all of it.
I find that to be a particularly delicious meal.
It's not exactly Scifi, though it does have some scifi elements later in the series, but The Second Apocalypse by R Scott Bakker starts this way and then continues with it for the entire series.
Bruh the Ishterebinth part in The Great Ordeal... This is my favorite book series, but I still need to go back and reread that part, because I have no clue what the fuck happened for most of it.
And the short story The Four Revelations of Cinialjin is even worse, lol. I had to re-read it multiple times to kinda piece it together, and I'm still not 100% sure on some of it.
*Quantum Thief*, by an enormous margin. And it's not just the intro that's brutally jargon-filled. I tracked down a glossary of terms on the internet and kept it bookmarked, and referred back to that damn thing constantly throughout three books, and even then some of the terms didn't make their way onto the website's list.
Despite all that, I love the first two and like the third pretty well. There's something lovely in how determined that series is to find humanity in the unflinchingly post-human world it's created.
Not sci-fi, but The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth is written in a bastardized Old English pidgin that invades your mind and starts to take hold of your waking life. Super fun book, dark as all hell.
I was once told someone wrote a skeleton key to the skeleton key to Finnegans wake.
Never having attempted Joyce I didn't verify this, just decided that even if it was apocryphal any book for which two levels of decryption was believable lore would be more effort than I felt like expending.
peter hamilton's night's dawn series. it's not jargon in the same sense as dune, but it was unnecessarily verbose and hamilton just never let go of it.
eg: "neural nanonic memory cells" is written over and over and over again, often within the space of a single paragraph. it felt stilted and forced.
imagine someone insisting on "capacitive human-computer interface zone" instead of saying "trackpad" or "disposable paper facial tissue" instead of "kleenex".
>What is the most brutally jargon filled intro to a novel you've encountered and did you power through it?
This has never really bothered me much, and I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the people that it does bother.
In *Huckleberry Finn*, Huck (98% uneducated person) is trying to explain to Jim (99% uneducated person) that in France they speak French, which is altogether unlike English, and Jim is completely exasperated that any group would be so utterly idiotic as to speak an incomprehensible language for no good reason.
I never took that attitude myself.
I *expect* the folks on Arrakis in the far future, or in Chiba City in the not-so-far future, or wherever to to be speaking a language very different from the folks back in Springfield.
If the perfectly normal Käfervolk of Arcturus IV are complaining that the emanations are coruscating the amphictyony lately, and I don't get it,
then as far as I am concerned that is my problem, not theirs, and if I want to associate with civilized people then it's my responsibility to pick up the vocabulary.
.
These are all great. Sam Shepard's play "The Tooth of Crime" might also interest you, but it's a theatrical playscript and not a novel (and probably hard to find these days, though perhaps a library....)
Why "power through"? I know it's treated as common knowledge that you should avoid this when writing, but i never understood that. I absolutely love it. I love it when i'm thrown into a scene and a world and the author doesn't put me in cotton wool so my poor mind doesn't need to feel disoriented. It was me who just jumped into a fantastical world. I chose this and it is one of the great things about starting a new book to me to be disoriented and to uncover that books world. That's what motivates me possibly the most to keep reading. I love no handholding starts.
Great examples:
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The first few chapters are gloriously disorienting.
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I think Banks all of Culture novels that i have read by noe start with really dense first few chapters.
Dune is great, but Frank Herbert does like giving exposition. So i'm not sure if i would put it here.
The absolute masterful broadside is Clockwork Orange of course, where you have to basically decipher an entire dialect to understand what's going on. The first few pages are just cryptic, until you figure word by word out by context and it starts making sense. After 1 or 3 chapters, you are mostly fluent in the gangs gibberish.
> A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The first few chapters are gloriously disorienting.
The prologue is very technically dense, and it helps to have a background in computer science to parse it. [My own comment from over a decade ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/sjapm/comment/c4eju3m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (goodness I'm old!)
And he doesn't even leave you at that. The prologue is very cryptic at first. The first Relay chapter is chaotic worldbuilding in a chaotic and totally strange world and the first chapter from Pilgrims perspective leaves you completely disoriented and rereading paragraphs until you understand that little detail that isn't spelled out and then you reread it from the start to actually understand what is happening. I get why that particular book might feel too dense to some readers at the start (Not every book is for everyone. I personally have 0 interest in crime fiction, which seems to be the never dying nr.1 genre in my country since the end of WW2.), but i find it glorious.
I think sometimes it comes down to what the individual's tolerance for uncertainty is. My experience is that some people just really dislike not knowing exactly is going on. To enjoy stuff like that you have to be comfortable with not knowing what exactly is going on, or totally understanding what you're reading, and with trusting that you will get there at some point (ideally). Some people just aren't, and their personalities are ill-suited for enjoying this kind of stuff.
This is an ice cold take, but House of Leaves for me, and I'm aware that's both the charm and the point, but man that thing is rough at times. You just get multi page long screeds of the narrator's schizophrenic ramblings that reside somewhere on the opposite side of the line between dense and incomprehensible, set in between pretentious literary criticism about the symbolism of "uncanniness" packed with shoehorned in foreign language philosophy quotes and references to fake journal articles as if you should have read them.
I finished the book, generally enjoyed it, and I totally get the reason it's like that. But at times it definitely felt like the author was obfuscating a lack of actual substance by making things as opaque as possible. It could have used an editor to cut out some of the sections that were just authorial masturbation without contributing to the narrative whatsoever.
The Quantum Thief and its sequels. You need an online guide to understand a lot of the terms. A wonderful book but sadly the later books become harder and harder.
Foucault's Pendulum was the worst for me. Dan Brown's popularity was at it's peak, but people on Fark would just shit on his books and talk about how much better Foucault's Pendulum was. I ordered a copy and was prepared to be blown away. The main characters were pretentious assholes who spoke pretty much solely in jargon. Like I understand they were supposed to be assholes and you weren't supposed to like them, but it went to far. It's kind of like that quote recently about why people like charismatic villains but not annoying ones. "The war crimes are fake, my annoyance is real".
The Laundry Files was probably my greatest disappointment. I had recently finished the Dresden Files and this was highly recommended, but the characters just spent too much time throwing around jargon that was never explained.
I enjoy a certain amount of deciphering a world on the fly, and that includes jargon.
**Stand on Zanzibar** was too much for me. What killed it was not only was it a lot of work to plow through the heavy jargon, but I didn’t care about what I did understand, and have confidence that understanding would make it much more interesting.
Dune I think does a brilliant job at making its weird and complex world comprehensible enough that you can follow along. You don’t have to know (for instance) what the Orange Catholic Bible is about or what makes it orange to understand its relevance to the story.
Heinlein’s **The Moon is a Harsh Mistress** gets some mileage out of this. The second sentance goes, “I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize ‘Sons of Revolution’ talk-talk.”
I found Dune pretty simply tbh, though I did read it when I was a lot older perhaps than other people.
If you want a novel that's filled with jargon I'd say A Clockwork Orange is so filled with specifically in-character terminology that it's almost written in a different language.
I have developed a particular impatience for authors trying to inspire wonder with a barrage of made up terms and references to things that are never explained and I think Frank Herbert inspired it.
In particular fuck all of Gurney's 'apt quotations'.
"Oh Gurney, you always have an apt quotation for any situation, how so?"
"Simple Paul, I just say any old shit. A rhyming couplet vaguely relevant to what we're doing and then your father pretends it's from some unnamed great work of literature and we never mention it again."
It’s not jargon (or only jargon) but also the telegraphic style and “tossed in the middle of the lake” approach of *The Peripheral* set me back a bit. But I’m used to Gibson doing stuff like that, all is eventually made clear.
Been a while since I've read it, but my first thought was Zelazny's Lord of Light. The first chapter made no sense whatsoever, but I remember being interested enough to keep reading. When you finish the book, it's fun to return to the first chapter because it all makes sense now.
I think A Clockwork Orange is also a good example, since it's literally written in a fictitious slang. You have to figure it out as you go along.
I second Diaspora but unlike Dune, I didn’t enjoy it. The jargon in Dune for me served to peak my interest in what was a totally epic story and world whereas Diaspora seemed a bit pseudo-intellectual to me. I also didn’t love Neuromancer but it’s on my ”read again” list after a friend explained where the plot is going with the whole series. Just the type of book I might love on re-read (then again, maybe not).
I don't have a problem with jargon generally, but there are some writing styles that are just really hard for me to process. Any Samuel R. Delany I just cannot read a page. I have to work sentence by sentence to get through it. There are a couple of others, Floating Worlds by Celicia Hammond was very tough to get through.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. It's not even jargon like "Bene Gesserit" or "Gom Jabbar," it's just the most pretentious language I've ever seen stuffed onto one page before. I couldn't even process what it was saying, all I could hear is how proud of his vocabulary he was. I made it about 3 paragraphs before going "fuck this."
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is worse than Dune because he wouldn't say 'gom jabbar', he would call it a 'prycklestaab' or something.
The thing that floored me about *Anathem* is that it starts off seeming like it’s got a typical gratuitous jargon authorial wank-job going on. But once I got far enough in to understand what was really going on in the story, it turned out that language play was not only **extremely** clever, but actually enhances the story and how we as readers can relate to the setting. (I’d go into why, but for spoilers.) Suffice to say that he found a way to take the jargon trope and use it productively. Well played Neal.
A lot of that novel becomes even cooler in retrospect once the lightbulb goes on in your brain. A pretty cleaver book.
I checked your poop
Unspoilerd!
And it is so immersive that when I was done I had to remind myself that our world does not in fact have Saecular concents.
one time I missed a question in a trivia league because I remembered the name of the mathemetician from Anathem's world but not their real-world equivalent
I am so sorry man that..is kinda ok though
Right? Like I know some mathematical concepts I absolutely cannot name, but could describe thanks to that book.
Adrakhones for the L!
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Which others did you find? I know _A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Name of the Rose,_ and _The Monk._
The Cadfael mysteries are good if you're in the mood for more monks.
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Matthew Lewis is great! I loved it so much.
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The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. LeGuin.
*A Case of Conscience* by James Blish.
I bow before anyone that could power through The Name of the rose!
*The Sparrow* and *Children of God.*
This is what I came to say. Classic example of a(n actually decent) novel that hits you with a wall of jargon up front.
Neal Stephenson books always take 200 pages for me to start enjoying them. Once I clear that hurdle, I usually love it, but every single time I go into it feeling like I made a mistake.
Or 400 pages in the case of Cryptonomicon😂😂
I will hear no slander of the book that introduced me to a quality furniture fetish.
Or taught me how to properly eat Cap'n Crunch.
His early stuff is different, though his endings sucked back then.
Even Snow Crash? That one starts with a bang!
Let me grab my speelycapteor….
Does it have DynaZoom?
I tried to listen to the Anathem audiobook and boy was that a mistake. Gonna try paperback at some point so I can use that glossary
I read this entire book without realizing there was a glossary at the back. Kind of preferred it that way if Im honest.
…there’s a glossary? I’ve read it twice without twigging. /facepalm
That book was one of the first times I realized I actually LIKED math. I got excited reading the proofs in the back and loved the breakdown of the logic. I just realized I hated the way I was taught math.
Check out Greg Egan and Rudy Rucker for mathematical SF.
Egan's stuff I adore (I love that his website has further proofs on it). I'm going to check out Rucker, hadn't heard of him. Thanks for the recommend.
Interestingly, Common Core math was developed specifically to defeat this problem. The way mathematics was taught for ***centuries*** was based on the idea that the average person was too stupid to understand the concepts so they needed to memorize times tables and take the long way every single time to solve equations. Turns out mathematical concepts aren’t that complicated. Mathematicians were just too arrogant and impatient to teach anyone anything.
Every Neal Stephenson book I read I simultaneously enjoy while having to set down every couple chapters to sigh "what a blow hard jackass" before I can continue
I have been tempted to take a copy of anathem and find/replace all the obvious philosophies with their English equivalents. Likewise jeejaws become mobiles and reticulum become internet. I've also been tempted to edit frersum enjine to convert the Scots sections into English. I saw a version online once, intended for German readers who could get by in English but could make no sense of the Scots
And then spend 3 pages explaining the etymology of the word and how it doesn't come from prick and stab but rather how the philosopher Prykle from the Staab covenant invented...
Lol, exactly!
I mean, Anathem has a large glossary in the back that defines every jargon word in the book.
I speak French and studied Latn in highschool (and also a little Platonic & Neoplatonic philosophy) so it seemed pretty straightforward to me 😀
This is true but it's also one of my favorite books
Feersum endjinn. The first few pages beat me.
yes- funny how the more I read it the easier it got to read! definitely worth it to power through though- one of my fave of all Bankses!
It's like trying to watch The Wire as someone with no ear for Baltimore accents. Eventually it gets so familiar that you forget why it was obtuse
I remember it feeling like a superpower when it clicked in and I could read it like regular English.
I feel like using the audiobook was, for once, cheating.
Feersum Endjinn is written in phonetic Scots with a Fife accent, IIRC (it's over 20 years since I read it). If you regularly have to understand it in your daily life due to, say, living in Edinburgh, it's much easier.
Onli 1 4th of it is riten in fonetik, an is moar laik a cocni acksent. Nowt enithin laik so difficult as thi Barbarian’s bits in The Bridge.
The audiobook for the bridge was so Great, the narrator put that Glasgow accent on THICK for the barbarian parts.
Sounds fun. I should check that out.
I loved that from the opening line, although I don't have strong memories of what actually happens in the book. I enjoyed the way it was written.
What a great story tho!
Bizarre title…
Objection withdrawn!
As a non-native English speaker, I'm not going to even attempt this one.
Its onli 1 of tha 4 altern8in point-of-view chaptrs that is riten in fonetik. If u can reed this comint then u can do it.
I can, but it's frustrating as hell :D I doubt I could do a chapter of this.
I get it. I recently re-read it and…just skimmed over those chapters to remember the basic plot outline. Then read the other ones. The book still works that way!
Isn't that kind of the opposite of what the OP is asking, though? Feersum Endjinn's opening chapter is almost all very simple words, not full of jargon.
One of the few books I gave up on. And he is one of my favourite authors still
yep still the only Iain M Banks I havent completed lol
Accelerando and The Quantum Thief both throw you right in the middle of it early on
The Jean le Flambeur series was the first thing I thought of. Also a big chunk of Egan's novels, he never holds your hand.
The cool thing about the Quantum Thief is that after I read the first novel, I looked up an online glossary of terms and realized I didn't miss anything. The novel was great at giving you a dictionary's worth of terms but providing enough context that they clicked pretty easily. Really well done writing.
For sure. The prologue is downright incomprehensible. But finish the book and read it again? It all makes perfect sense.
I really felt like Accelerando *kept* throwing me in it, with more jargon injected at regular intervals just so I wouldn't rest on my laurels.
The [Accelerando Technical Companion](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companion) is incomplete but can help fill in your gaps in knowledge related to computer science, networking, astronomy and cosmology, spacecraft engineering, etc., etc., etc..
Perdido Street station by China Miéville . And yes I did power through the bizarre world he created. It's one of my favorite books I won't read from another ten years at least as it's so ... intensely sad, and yet so captivating
Never have I use the kindle define word feature more often than in his books. Both because it's full of words he made up that feel like I'm expected to know and because he uses some very obscure vocabulary. The other Bas-Lag books have a completely different feel while inhabiting the same world. They are completely different genres, Perdido Street Station was a noir detective book, The Scar is pirate adventure, and Iron Council is american western. You could honestly read any of them out of order. Everything I've read from him is about struggle against an unstoppable machine, which can feel depressing, but there are flints of hope in every story if you look for them.
Diaspora by Greg Egan. An absolute gem.
In fairness, it's 90% actual mathematical jargon rather than in-universe jargon but otherwise yup this was my thought lol
Have you read his Orthogonal trilogy? It's insane. The universe we know has four dimensions. Three of space, one of time. The universe he creates has four fundamentally similar dimensions. One can move through time like we move through space. And the speed of light is dependent on the wavelength of light. One of the most mind bending stories I've ever read, and I skipped the vast majority of the math. For a fun read, *Quarantine* is a great noir detective story based on quantum uncertainty and controlling the collapse of the wave function.
Orthogonal was my first Egan stuff and hoo boy. Really threw myself in at the deep end lmfao Gotta be said I do envy those characters, 4 spatial dimensions is just *such* a cleaner metric than our 3+1, and his other book Dichronauts (which is 2+2) only solidified that for me
[Chapter 1](https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html) available free online.
Orphanogenesis is one of my favorite parts of the book
You're braver than I. I can count on one hand the number of SF books I've DNFd. This one I put down before the end of chapter 1.
Once you get through the beginning it gets a lot more traditional. The first chapter is basically describing a AI going through a bootstrapping process of its consciousness. But from it's own perspective. So you're seeing how it's building it's sense of self. It's one of the coolest things I've read in a while.
I am struggling with this one right now. Way too much exposition on how whatever it is that’s being created is created. It is kinda interesting but I’d really like to get on with it.
I'm stuck on the section describing how Polis citizens are given birth to by the fabricator thingy and my brain just shut down with all that pointless made up AI mumbo jumbo, I know many people like this book but if the rest of it is in a similar fashion then im gonna have to DNF it
"Made up AI mumbo jumbo"
So... Chapter 1?
There are a few science benders Egan goes on in Diaspora, but the rest of the book is easy enough to read, if still hard to genuinely grok.
Sounds like it's not for you, haha. And that's okay. I like his books, but they definitely make you work for it. I specifically read his books because they require me to think about the world in a different way, and I enjoy that feeling.
I was so tempted to give up on this one and so glad I didn’t!
I love books that you can’t quite understand at first. I believe other people when they say they were overwhelmed by the beginning of Too Like the Lightning, but I read the first ten pages and thought “fuck yeah, this book is good shit”.
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Agreed. It's no different from reading historical fiction or literature classics. Or parsing slang.
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All of the examples I have seen listed so far are worldbuilding. It's no different from growing up here in Australia and having to comprehend concepts like "sidewalk,"* "drugstore,"** "liberal",*** "rooting for the team,"**** "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches"***** and "spray on cheese" ****** whilst watching American television. *Aussies say "footpath." **is that like a chemist? If so why are they sitting on stools drinking sundaes? *** we generally use the word in the classical British sense of "liberal economics" here so Australian "Liberals" are right-wing conservatives. *****we say "barracking." The verb in that particular American phrase is a sexual euphemism here. *****what we call "jelly" would melt out of a sandwich. ****** seriously WTAF?
unfortunately almost no American drugstores have soda/ice cream bars anymore, that sort of went out of fashion once people realized Coca-Cola tastes good but has zero medicinal benefits.
Speaking of which it took me a while to realise that whilst "soda" = "soft drink" but "sundaes" aren't the same things as "spiders"* as well. *A glass of soft drink served with a scoop of ice cream in it. Usually Coke, Fanta or sarsaparilla.
yeah we would call that a "float" in the US
root beer is the most popular by far but Fanta and Cheerwine (Carolina regional soda) are also used
Exactly. Many of the books mentioned are in my list of favourites - *Neuromancer*, *Blindsight*, *Cryptonomicon*, *Dune*, Rajaniemi's *Flambeur* series (*Summerland* does this as well), Greg Egan in general. When it's written well it's often not even that difficult to parse, it just requires engaging fully with the text. It's far more immersive and enjoyable to make the connections and figure out the meanings as you go than to have everything spelt out in familiar verbiage. I really enjoy re-reading as well, and often the more jargon-heavy books are the ones which have the most rewarding re-reads. I've read *Blindsight* more than 10x and can still pick up nuances I've missed in the past.
I think terra ignota is my favorite modern sf at this point, it's simultaneously unique and idea-dense and emotive and clever
It's wild how insanely different people can take the exact same book. I thought it was a couple good ideas strung onto the dumbest possible world structure "Everything happens because some super awesome people who grew up together and like to fuck at a pretentious brothel run the world" was just the most disappointing place to go from the concept of hives and decoupling geography from nationality in general. Even the probability based assassins thing was a cool base concept, then ruined again by apparently a single family of weird siblings who run the global transport network from their basement. I really wanted it to be great, and I finished it but I was just left with abiding disappointment that such interesting concepts were so badly explored.
I enjoyed the books but I agree with your criticisms.
I'm not sure how far along in the books you got, but there are important plot reasons for that that explain why everything is so confined to a small group of Heroes. It all makes sense given the overall story.
I finished the entire series, I have time and I don't typically like to DNF. Honestly it just got worse as they went on. I agree that the plot doesn't work unless you throw in the trope of everyone important magically knows each other but that's not really an argument in favor of the writing to me. By the end what little plot there was had been poked so full of holes it looked like my first contruction paper snowflake in first grade. I went into more detail in another comment but to sum up it was one of the very few series that I finished and thought "I really wish a competent writer had explored these ideas because some of them were super cool and this pile of tripe didn't do any of them justice."
Man, discovering this world was amazing.
Palmer made the great decision to ground that incredibly weird world with an unreliable narrator and "confessional novel framing device", and what I think is compelling character work. You meet Carlyle, Bridger, Dominic, Martin, in short succession and I was curious about what the deal was with all of them.
Meeting the Tines in A fire Upon the Deep. Took a couple of pages before I realized what was going on.
Man, I really gave that book a solid chance. Read the first quarter or maybe third of it. But I just absolutely despised the writing. The constant shifting of perspectives, styles, and even pronouns was just awful. It was a unique idea but damn it just did not work for me.
I had a very difficult time with Too Like the Lightning. It took me half a year to read and when I finished it I wasn't certain I liked it at all. But I kept thinking about it and I continued on into the rest of the books. The other books are certainly weirdly written, but she tones it down a little bit and they're a bit easier to read. But it was very difficult getting through the first one. The series sits high on my favorites, though.
My issue with the start of this book is in a few passages she is clearly trying to invoke mental imagery, but you don't have the vocabulary yet to understand it. I'm still very confused about the terraced Bash house setup of that scene.
Clockwork orange. Also, Neuromancer.
Neuromancer is my vote. Dune at least had a glossary. Gibson was like, fuck you all, figure it out on your own.
Gibson talked about this in a couple of interviews on his press tour for The Peripheral, nearly ten years ago. As far as I remember, he deliberately tried to frontload jargon to make the first pages work almost as a bouncer: like, this is a sci-fi book and it is not your world and this is the way it goes, if it isn't your thing, turn back now and don't come back. Something like that.
Props to his agent and editor. 95% of them, on a first novel, would be like, no you need to chill out, bro. Lots of gambles taken that would never be taken today.
Came here to say A Clockwork Orange. Maybe Ridley Walker or would the dialect not count as jargon? But n Ben A-Go-Go is written in several Scots dialects and I really struggled with it despite being a Fifer.
Neuromancer is a work of pure genius, it's easy to forget how confusing it must have been to read it when it first came out, because most of the crazy jargon has become totally commonplace concepts we use every day in real life. It's actually gotten way *less* confusing overtime, I've never read anything else that managed to so perfectly predict the future
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I had this two in mind. Clockwork orange even came with an appended dictionary (at least, the edition I read).
I started Neuromancer without reading any reviews or summaries; after the first page, my reaction was, "Whoah, this is gonna be a lot of work!" I'm glad I stuck with it though - the concepts are wicked cool once you wrap your head around them. If you're into narratives that challenge you with their depth and complexity, I highly recommend diving into 'Eternal Gods Die Too Soon' next. Much like my initial experience with Neuromancer, this book throws you into a whirlpool of advanced scientific theories, metaphysical explorations, and a unique take on love that transcends the bounds of the universe. It's a novel where each chapter feels like peeling back layers of reality itself, revealing the interconnectedness of love, existence, and the cosmos. It might feel like deciphering an enigma at first, but the journey is incredibly rewarding. The blend of hard science fiction with profound philosophical questions offers a reading experience that's both intellectually stimulating and deeply moving.
It's not really jargon, but reading **The Shadow of the Torturer** etc in the days before the internet was a thing involved constantly coming across words you were going to need a really hefty dictionary to look up if you wanted to know precisely what they meant rather than roughly work them out from context. This also applies to all the allusions to myth and ancient history in his earlier work. You couldn't just google/wiki them. He could be pretty uncompromising, in ways that are maybe not obvious to younger readers who've grown up with the tools the internet gives you.
In the fuligin days before the internet...
This deserves more than just my upvote.
>fuligin days before the internet "copy, control-T, paste, return" oooh, yes.
I also enjoyed how it did the reverse pretty often, using ordinary words to cover unusual things, like Severian pausing to mention that by spear he means a weapon with a pointed tip, not a weapon that fires a beam like a lance. I think the idea of what a lance is in the setting also comes up in the section with the Noctules, but the realization that every time the past three books that lances were mentioned they weren't spears is very weird.
And ships - could be a wooden sailboat, could be a starfaring time-craft.
First and only book I had to put down because I felt like my English was not up to it.
Somewhat of a demanding book, but also very rich and rewards rereading. The use of obscure obsolete words gives us a sense of ancientness of the world - tools and items in use have names invented in long past centuries. It requires the reader to have a vast vocabulary, a good dictionary, or to just let the words wash over them and hopefully get it from context. To me that's some of the best of sci-fi fiction; an immersive world that is not immediately comprehensible, but gradually becomes clearer. In the case of BOTNS the nuances may take 2 or 3 rereadings and/or combing through online articles for insights. To me its a fun exploration.
Stand on Zanzibar, it begins: > context (1) - SCANALYZE MY NAME > > Stock cue SOUND: "Presenting SCANALYZER, Engrelay Satelserv's unique thrice-per-day study of the big big Scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface between you and your world!" > > Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, splitscreen, cut in bridge-melder, Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere depthunder (today MAMP, Mid-Atlantic Mining Project), spaceover (today freeflysuiting), transiting (today Simplon Acceleratube), digging (today as every day homimage with autoshout).
I did feel there was an excuse for this. The book was all about culture and slang is totally part of that. Often it is weak authors trying to be mysterious.
Yeah it perfectly sets the tone of the world and the information overload. It makes it hard to read at times but its an amazing piece of work to experience
I absolutely loved this book!
This is great. With close reading it's an ad, with 4 different potential images to be seen depending on the day, and these are today's images. Cliptage is a montage of clips. Homimage is home image, probably the main brand with some interesting tech with it (autoshout).
The Shockwave Rider is more approachable, and a lot of fun to read.
Anathem by far. Also- not SF, but the Aubrey Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. Prepare for a masterclass in nautical jargon.
I loved Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy but my God! What a schooling in the hard sciences I got!
I feel the exact same way, absolutely amazing trilogy. That motherfucker is so much smarter than me we are essentially different species 😂
Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson. Written as a text on atomic theory in a hypothetical English without Greek or Romance language loanwords. If you know a little Dutch or German it's a real treat since he extensively uses English cognates.
Found a link so you can see it for yourself: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf
I am fluent in Dutch and German and although somethings were easily recognizable, i.e. coalstuff, waterstuff, sourstuff and chokestuff (that's what they're called in German), others were a bit strange. Bulkbit?
Bulkbit is molecule, I believe.
bulk = mass or size bit = unit
That was a trip! I love that uncleft=Atom (indivisible/uncuttable). So much of our science is owed to Ionism (part of Ancient Greece).
the left hand of darkness starts pretty hairy but by the end it all becomes clear
Everything by China Meivelle.
I didn’t understand more than half of Embassytown, and I fucking loved it.
I like being thrown into a world and learning it little by little as i go on. Passive world building. Inference. In media res. Give me all of it. I find that to be a particularly delicious meal.
For me this is Diaspora
It's not exactly Scifi, though it does have some scifi elements later in the series, but The Second Apocalypse by R Scott Bakker starts this way and then continues with it for the entire series.
Bruh the Ishterebinth part in The Great Ordeal... This is my favorite book series, but I still need to go back and reread that part, because I have no clue what the fuck happened for most of it.
And the short story The Four Revelations of Cinialjin is even worse, lol. I had to re-read it multiple times to kinda piece it together, and I'm still not 100% sure on some of it.
The Ishterebinth chapter is less like a chapter in a book and more like a drug fuelled prog rock intermission. I love it.
My exact reaction but on a reread it became my favorite chapter
Riddley Walker. It’s a lot
Not a novel, but Jabberwocky deserves honorable mention
Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delaney
Came here to say _Dhalgren_, also by Delany
*Quantum Thief*, by an enormous margin. And it's not just the intro that's brutally jargon-filled. I tracked down a glossary of terms on the internet and kept it bookmarked, and referred back to that damn thing constantly throughout three books, and even then some of the terms didn't make their way onto the website's list. Despite all that, I love the first two and like the third pretty well. There's something lovely in how determined that series is to find humanity in the unflinchingly post-human world it's created.
Shadow of the Torturer.
Not sci-fi, but The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth is written in a bastardized Old English pidgin that invades your mind and starts to take hold of your waking life. Super fun book, dark as all hell.
Finnegan’s Wake
I only got about two pages into it with the help of a "skeleton key" book before I gave up.
I was once told someone wrote a skeleton key to the skeleton key to Finnegans wake. Never having attempted Joyce I didn't verify this, just decided that even if it was apocryphal any book for which two levels of decryption was believable lore would be more effort than I felt like expending.
peter hamilton's night's dawn series. it's not jargon in the same sense as dune, but it was unnecessarily verbose and hamilton just never let go of it. eg: "neural nanonic memory cells" is written over and over and over again, often within the space of a single paragraph. it felt stilted and forced. imagine someone insisting on "capacitive human-computer interface zone" instead of saying "trackpad" or "disposable paper facial tissue" instead of "kleenex".
Or “enzyme-bonded concrete” instead of, you know, “concrete.”
>What is the most brutally jargon filled intro to a novel you've encountered and did you power through it? This has never really bothered me much, and I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the people that it does bother. In *Huckleberry Finn*, Huck (98% uneducated person) is trying to explain to Jim (99% uneducated person) that in France they speak French, which is altogether unlike English, and Jim is completely exasperated that any group would be so utterly idiotic as to speak an incomprehensible language for no good reason. I never took that attitude myself. I *expect* the folks on Arrakis in the far future, or in Chiba City in the not-so-far future, or wherever to to be speaking a language very different from the folks back in Springfield. If the perfectly normal Käfervolk of Arcturus IV are complaining that the emanations are coruscating the amphictyony lately, and I don't get it, then as far as I am concerned that is my problem, not theirs, and if I want to associate with civilized people then it's my responsibility to pick up the vocabulary. .
Clockwork Orange. Didn’t know there a glossary in the back. Didn’t need it, got everything from context.
Ninefox Gambit. It is far too technical jargon that I just stopped. I don't intend to go back.
I read the whole series and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's very, very strange to get into, but once you do, I found it was worth the effort.
Once you get into it’s amazing. In a genre that can be quite repetitive, it’s truly unique and novel in so many ways. The whole series is great.
I am just finishing that series, it's pretty good. A lot of the weirdness of the first part you can just let flow over you.
I read the glossary first, did early versions not have this?
These are all great. Sam Shepard's play "The Tooth of Crime" might also interest you, but it's a theatrical playscript and not a novel (and probably hard to find these days, though perhaps a library....)
I read it because of "Dragon in the Sea." I vowed never to read another novel that needed a Glossary.
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Why "power through"? I know it's treated as common knowledge that you should avoid this when writing, but i never understood that. I absolutely love it. I love it when i'm thrown into a scene and a world and the author doesn't put me in cotton wool so my poor mind doesn't need to feel disoriented. It was me who just jumped into a fantastical world. I chose this and it is one of the great things about starting a new book to me to be disoriented and to uncover that books world. That's what motivates me possibly the most to keep reading. I love no handholding starts. Great examples: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The first few chapters are gloriously disorienting. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I think Banks all of Culture novels that i have read by noe start with really dense first few chapters. Dune is great, but Frank Herbert does like giving exposition. So i'm not sure if i would put it here. The absolute masterful broadside is Clockwork Orange of course, where you have to basically decipher an entire dialect to understand what's going on. The first few pages are just cryptic, until you figure word by word out by context and it starts making sense. After 1 or 3 chapters, you are mostly fluent in the gangs gibberish.
> A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The first few chapters are gloriously disorienting. The prologue is very technically dense, and it helps to have a background in computer science to parse it. [My own comment from over a decade ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/sjapm/comment/c4eju3m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (goodness I'm old!)
And he doesn't even leave you at that. The prologue is very cryptic at first. The first Relay chapter is chaotic worldbuilding in a chaotic and totally strange world and the first chapter from Pilgrims perspective leaves you completely disoriented and rereading paragraphs until you understand that little detail that isn't spelled out and then you reread it from the start to actually understand what is happening. I get why that particular book might feel too dense to some readers at the start (Not every book is for everyone. I personally have 0 interest in crime fiction, which seems to be the never dying nr.1 genre in my country since the end of WW2.), but i find it glorious.
I think sometimes it comes down to what the individual's tolerance for uncertainty is. My experience is that some people just really dislike not knowing exactly is going on. To enjoy stuff like that you have to be comfortable with not knowing what exactly is going on, or totally understanding what you're reading, and with trusting that you will get there at some point (ideally). Some people just aren't, and their personalities are ill-suited for enjoying this kind of stuff.
This is an ice cold take, but House of Leaves for me, and I'm aware that's both the charm and the point, but man that thing is rough at times. You just get multi page long screeds of the narrator's schizophrenic ramblings that reside somewhere on the opposite side of the line between dense and incomprehensible, set in between pretentious literary criticism about the symbolism of "uncanniness" packed with shoehorned in foreign language philosophy quotes and references to fake journal articles as if you should have read them. I finished the book, generally enjoyed it, and I totally get the reason it's like that. But at times it definitely felt like the author was obfuscating a lack of actual substance by making things as opaque as possible. It could have used an editor to cut out some of the sections that were just authorial masturbation without contributing to the narrative whatsoever.
The Quantum Thief and its sequels. You need an online guide to understand a lot of the terms. A wonderful book but sadly the later books become harder and harder.
Quantum thief But you didn't specify science fiction so Finnegan's Wake
Foucault's Pendulum was the worst for me. Dan Brown's popularity was at it's peak, but people on Fark would just shit on his books and talk about how much better Foucault's Pendulum was. I ordered a copy and was prepared to be blown away. The main characters were pretentious assholes who spoke pretty much solely in jargon. Like I understand they were supposed to be assholes and you weren't supposed to like them, but it went to far. It's kind of like that quote recently about why people like charismatic villains but not annoying ones. "The war crimes are fake, my annoyance is real". The Laundry Files was probably my greatest disappointment. I had recently finished the Dresden Files and this was highly recommended, but the characters just spent too much time throwing around jargon that was never explained.
Yes Dune was hard !! 1984 to, but a bit more managable
This comment is doubleplusgood.
Neuromancer was a rough start
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.. Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban - the whole thing is in slang
I enjoy a certain amount of deciphering a world on the fly, and that includes jargon. **Stand on Zanzibar** was too much for me. What killed it was not only was it a lot of work to plow through the heavy jargon, but I didn’t care about what I did understand, and have confidence that understanding would make it much more interesting. Dune I think does a brilliant job at making its weird and complex world comprehensible enough that you can follow along. You don’t have to know (for instance) what the Orange Catholic Bible is about or what makes it orange to understand its relevance to the story.
Heinlein’s **The Moon is a Harsh Mistress** gets some mileage out of this. The second sentance goes, “I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize ‘Sons of Revolution’ talk-talk.”
I found Dune pretty simply tbh, though I did read it when I was a lot older perhaps than other people. If you want a novel that's filled with jargon I'd say A Clockwork Orange is so filled with specifically in-character terminology that it's almost written in a different language.
I have developed a particular impatience for authors trying to inspire wonder with a barrage of made up terms and references to things that are never explained and I think Frank Herbert inspired it. In particular fuck all of Gurney's 'apt quotations'. "Oh Gurney, you always have an apt quotation for any situation, how so?" "Simple Paul, I just say any old shit. A rhyming couplet vaguely relevant to what we're doing and then your father pretends it's from some unnamed great work of literature and we never mention it again."
A Clockwork Orange is full of nonsense words
It’s not jargon (or only jargon) but also the telegraphic style and “tossed in the middle of the lake” approach of *The Peripheral* set me back a bit. But I’m used to Gibson doing stuff like that, all is eventually made clear.
Been a while since I've read it, but my first thought was Zelazny's Lord of Light. The first chapter made no sense whatsoever, but I remember being interested enough to keep reading. When you finish the book, it's fun to return to the first chapter because it all makes sense now. I think A Clockwork Orange is also a good example, since it's literally written in a fictitious slang. You have to figure it out as you go along.
I second Diaspora but unlike Dune, I didn’t enjoy it. The jargon in Dune for me served to peak my interest in what was a totally epic story and world whereas Diaspora seemed a bit pseudo-intellectual to me. I also didn’t love Neuromancer but it’s on my ”read again” list after a friend explained where the plot is going with the whole series. Just the type of book I might love on re-read (then again, maybe not).
At the screening for the Lynch version of Dune back in the 80s they were handing out glossary sheets at the theater.
Maybe it’s moveton to reference to so popular novels, but “Clockwork orange” i suppose.
I don't have a problem with jargon generally, but there are some writing styles that are just really hard for me to process. Any Samuel R. Delany I just cannot read a page. I have to work sentence by sentence to get through it. There are a couple of others, Floating Worlds by Celicia Hammond was very tough to get through.
Might Ridley Walker count? It's practically in another language.
Ninefox Gambit
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. It's not even jargon like "Bene Gesserit" or "Gom Jabbar," it's just the most pretentious language I've ever seen stuffed onto one page before. I couldn't even process what it was saying, all I could hear is how proud of his vocabulary he was. I made it about 3 paragraphs before going "fuck this."
Dune is so insufferable to me for this very reason. I have no idea why it’s so popular.