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Comment by phaedrus | Hacker News Reader

Your last paragraph is actually an idea fleshed out / minor plot point in a Neal Stephenson novel.

Interesting, I’ve never read any of his works, but I will have to now.

The novel is called, "Fall, or Dodge in Hell." It's probably even better if you know some of the characters from previous novels, but I haven't read his other stuff yet and still enjoyed this one. It's a sprawling story that seems almost like he duct-taped several manuscripts together to stuff them all into one novel. However that's not a reason to not like the book so much as just an observation that many of the side-tangents could have held their own as stand-alone stories.

Hmm. Well said. I've not been able to put my finger on what bothers me about a few of his novels and that's a good description of it. REAMDE was long also but didn't really suffer from that. I think it made Seveneves unreadable (for me).

The Diamond Age was another Cyberpunk thriller. It and Snowcrash were fairly tight novels without endless tangents and I think I like them best of his novels I've read.

Most of his books are fantastic.

Fall Or Dodge In Hell is the book referenced and it's a loose sequel to REAMDE. (Which is a really fun techno-thriller novel that explores what happens when ransomeware locks up some very bad people's computers.)

Cryptonomicon is a fantastic fictionalization of Alan Turing and breaking the enigma code combined with a cool story about what encryption can do in the future.

Snowcrash is probably his most famous and is very cyberpunk and awesome. (Not my favorite of his though.)

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