There’s a post on BoingBoing today called Neal Stephenson: Why Star Wars Doesn’t Suck, about how the “geeky” plot elements of the prequels have been excised and moved into geek-friendly formats like cartoons (”Clone Wars”) and video games and so on. Interesting theory, and the New York Times article by Stephenson is indeed a quite compelling read (if not one of his most elegantly written).
But I wanted to make a post about the article here, because it seems to me that BoingBoing has missed the point of Stephenson’s argument entirely, and the dissonance between their “Doesn’t Suck” headline, and Stephenson’s actual article left me hell of confused the first time I read through it. So don’t do what I did, and go looking for an apology in Stephenson’s article. Just let the man talk for himself, and if at the end of it all, you think he’s pleased with the way things have worked out, re: leaving the geekery out of the prequels, then perhaps I’m just over-analyzing. But riddle me this, why would a man whose last book weighed in at over 2,000 pages extol the virtues of leaving *anything* out? =)