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Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with Snow Crash was at the end of the book. The author has done this in other books too, where you have a very detailed story but then it feels like the end gets rushed. Kind of like another 200 pages of novel get squeezed down to 12 pages.

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This is absolutely par for the course for Stephenson. He's written at least 4 books like this, as far as I can tell.

Seveneves in particular is 700 pages of incredible, next-level worldbuilding, then the potential for 3 more 300+ page volumes compressed into 180 pages. It's like at the 700 page mark the "wrap it up" light comes on, and he hastily bookends it.

Stephenson is great at starting stories. Arguably he does this several times in each book.

He can't write endings for shit, though. (Every book of his that I've read - Anathem, Seveneves, Reamde, Cryptonomicon/Snow Crash/The Diamond Age, and more - all fail to come to a satisfactory ending. But I keep reading, because the rest of the books are good...)

Cryptonomicon and Anathem get endings of a sort... later :)

Would you mind expanding on this?

I've read both books and am curious what you mean.

I haven’t read anthem, but his latest is in the cryptonomicon universe....ties up a couple loose ends...or at least shows some repercussions.

Right. It does a similar (albeit smaller scale) thing for Anathem.

I thought his most recent (Fall, or Dodge in Hell) was a followup to Reamde, not Anathem or Snow Crash?

And I was pretty sure Cryptonomicon led into Snow Crash and then The Diamond Age...

The Baroque Cycle seems to end well IMHO.

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