We are all nerds: The literary works of Neal Stephenson | Hacker News Reader

We are all nerds: The literary works of Neal Stephenson

bastian.rieck.me

307 pointsPseudomanifold220 comments

My favorite Stephenson's novel is Anathem with superb world building (as usual) but also a pretty good story and ending.

But it's also a book whose world (specifically the avout society) attracts me. I've grown up in a Catholic setting, but "converted" to atheism/agnosticism pretty early. But even with its many failings, there are certain aspects of religions which seem worth preserving - the focus on community, the rituals, a particular rule framework, meditation (prayers) and introspection.

The book presents a (on a certain level) pretty attractive model of society which combines the practical religious patterns with a full rationalism.

I kind of understand why such "atheist religion" is unlikely to get off in the real world, but it's still something I would wish for.

Interesting how different Judaism and Catholicism are in this way. My family lost forty people in the concentration camps, and there was simply no way we could reconcile a belief in god with that. But I also grew up with a strong Jewish identity, and still practice many of the rituals.

I was probably in college before I really understood that other religious practices truly BELIEVED the stuff they were talking about, in a way that most Jews I knew didn't. It was like being really into Harry Potter, and one day finding out that everyone who was really into LOTR truly believed that Frodo was a real person who had gone on a journey with a magical ring. And that THEY were confused how you could talk so much about these fan theories and what is/isn't Harry Potter canon if you didn't deeply believe that there was a magical wizarding school hidden somewhere around Manchester.

When my Catholic friends would lose their faith, they pretty much stopped calling themselves Catholic. At most they might call themselves "lapsed," but they always made it very clear that they no longer considered it part of their identity and they didn't go to church. My friends with more fundamentalist upbringings became aggressively anti-religious, like the militant vegans of the religious world.

I think some of the reason Judaism sticks is that an individual relationship with God isn't a central tenet. The individual's primary relationship is with the community, it's the community that has a relationship/covenant with God. A lot of the practice and ethics are about how a person best contributes to a harmonious group. It also certainly helps that we keep changing languages - first Hebrew which I don't speak, then Aramaic which I also don't speak, then Yiddish which I also don't speak - so it's easy to go through the rituals without being smacked in the face with direct appeals to an almighty power. And Judaism is a "religion" somewhat more in the way that belief in Greek gods was a "religion," a part of life and culture that blends with more secular life and culture.

I think you’re underestimating the number of cultural Catholics and other Christians.

I’m quite sure I am. I also find that most people I’ve talked to about this underestimate how many Jews are atheists.

It wasn’t until the late Roman Empire that what you believed in your mind really became important in religion. Before that, performing the rituals correctly was far more important.

Do you have any good resources in mind on this topic? I've been reading Boyarin's Border Lines, which hypothesizes that the concept of religion was created around that time to describe what kind of thing Christianity was, and to explicitly separate it from Judaism (which was cast as another thing of the same type by both sets of leaders). Really interesting perspective.

A lot of the conversation these days is dominated by fundamentalists, so it always seems like people from other cultures are far more likely to have faith. I can tell you growing up, I was the wierd one for insisting that because I lacked faith, is not call myself a Christian.

> ... My family lost forty people in the concentration camps, and there was simply no way we could reconcile a belief in god with that. ... I was probably in college before I really understood that other religious practices truly BELIEVED the stuff they were talking about

Interesting to contrast this attitude with that of the Biblical authors who so clearly foretold even those horrifying events: "... If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god; Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart. Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth. Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake."

Interesting to contrast the contents of the Bible with rational thought summed up perfectly by Epicurious:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

God creates ALL things including free will and evil, then punishes us for making certain choices he already knows we will make, lets bad things happen to good people because of some "plan". Sounds like a juvenile sadist with poor planning skills.

We don't need to look outside the Bible for this, we can find the gist of these very arguments in the text. They nicely illustrate the inherent limits of ordinary rational understanding compared with divine inspiration, even though the latter is only granted as a very rare gift to the truly worthy.

This spreads waaaay too much in otherwise rational circles. Check your "if" statements, and ask for help from someone if you don't see where these Epicurian suppositions are poor rhetoric, patently misaligned with well-known scripture, and thus only serve as mental fodder for your own choir. Else, consider with an open mind that "God is love" and consider how loving it is for, e.g., a nanny state to care for all your needs and control you in pure utopian safety. Given our gift of free will, what an act of love it is to be hands-off so the subjects can learn (love - of self, other, environment, etcetera) how to impose balance of one's self within all of creation. God being able, but not willing, therefore, is clearly more nuanced than the "malevolent" conjurings of such a narrowed mind. That said, such God would be able, but unwilling, as the will is distinctly ours. Following along, still? Evil exists because we may choose it, giving good people the opportunity to do something other than nothing with it. Does God really punish, or is that something we do to ourselves? I, for one, am neither deceived by Epicurious nor you nor a pastor - were I to treat all above as true, there would indeed be suffering - but who would be punished, though, and for what exactly, by whom? The plan is apparently to give us free will and let us learn love in all its forms and functions - sounds like juvenile sadists can imagine all they want and tell us "this is true" and "this is illogical" and be believed for millenia, though they're just wrong and gaslighting a culture. As a reminder, an early creation, The Lightbringer angel, is known to be deceptive. Those who accept The Word for what it honestly is do not thusly suffer. A more loving, honest act would be to seek how such scripture is right and see how the falsified interpretations from some hateful few oughtn't give such trouble - but it's still your choice what you seek, and ye shall find it.

> Evil exists because we may choose it

The existence of kids with cancer (one example of the million miseries of this world) easily refutes your claim that "evil" is begotten by "free will".

Oh brother... if vague prophetic visions of doom to come is enough to impress you then maybe you consider the people who write the horoscope columns in magazines to be divinely inspired?

The ones who were slaughtered believed. We're rational enough to understand when direct evidence contradicts a hypothesis, thanks.

In the UK there are probably very few 'true believers' left in the Church of England, including within the priesthood. The church has been dying for decades, which personally I feel is a shame. There are many beautiful buildings, rituals and music that will die with it.

What I enjoyed about this book is it helped me "get" Platonism. Somehow, Neal Stephenson made Platonism seem cool and interesting.

People focusing on the mathematical monks are missing the point that Arbre is intended to exemplify a more Platonically idealized of our world. Not all in good ways, but also in bad ways.

When technology goes bad in Arbre, it goes worse than in our world. When there are divisions in Arbre society, those divisions are sharper than in our world. Mathematics is more powerful, but it is also more separated from Praxis. The maths aren't just monasteries for mathematicians; they instead represent the Platonic form of "The Institution", and as such incorporate elements of monasteries, prisons, universities, asylums, and barracks. Arbre's version of Platonism is itself divided into two camps that in our world are dimly reflected as "religion" and "abstraction"; in Arbre the division between these is larger-than-life. The Monad ever devolving into a Dyad.

Anathem is also my favorite, fairly easily.

I’m not surprised there are Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, or Baroque Cycle favorite-rs but I am when I come across someone that thought Seveneves or Dodge was his best.

I absolutely loved Seveneves; easily my second favorite. The first part was too long and the second too short, however, and it's obviously not as good as Anathem ;)

>The first part was too long and the second too short

....and no one ever mentions the third part because it was so long and poor that the book would be better without it.

Seveneves wasn't bad, but part 3 dropped it well down my list of favorites, maybe below Zodiac.

For context, an informal off-the-cuff ranking of his books for me:

Anathem (epic world building, I love the philosophy and the theory)

Cryptonomicon (I've always been interested in WWII, Cryptography, and Computers)

Baroque Cycle (taught me a lot of history I didn't know and somehow made finance interesting)

Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)

Zodiac (also a nicely paced thriller)

Fall (I don't hate this like some people do, but would love to see the real world from the beginning developed further)

Seveneves (I love the science and hate the pacing and all of the third act)

Rise and Fall of DODO (this felt like a slog to me and by the end I was forcing myself to read just to get through it).

The Big U (I don't think this is as bad as Stephenson himself does but it's nothing amazing)

Mongoliad (not my thing)

I pre-ordered a signed copy of Termination Shock, read the first few chapters, got distracted, and have never cared enough to go back. I suppose I should finish it but it didn't grab me fast like some of them have.

I’m always amazed at how polarizing part 3 of Seveneves is for people. I loved the whole book, but part 3 was among my favorite of any NS book. My only complaint is that it wasn’t longer.

Trying to avoid spoilers, I was disappointed given Stephenson's usually rigorous research that at least one entity appearing in the third act could not have possibly survived to that point for multiple glaringly obvious reasons. The image of Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator, except over the Act 2/3 scale, is a surprisingly good reference, and we all know how well that's held up.

And that was far from my only complaint in that section.

Yes, I completely agree. I’d love a sequel that’s just the third part. Or a sequel that’s just the second part.

> ....and no one ever mentions the third part because it was so long and poor that the book would be better without it.

The consistent thing about Neal Stephenson books seems to be that nobody likes the endings. In a way, I guess we want them to go on forever?

Stephenson ends a book like a crash ends a car trip. It's not that I wanted the trip to go on forever, it's that I wanted it to end with the car neatly parked in a driveway, rather than unrecognizeable pieces scattered in a ravine.

I don't agree in this example. Seveneves did end, then it came back it ruined itself. A bit anyway, you can ignore the final act pretty easily.

Seveneves did not have a third part. I have no idea what you are referring to :-)

> Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)

Best paced? It could've easily been twice as short if Neal got rid of all the MMORPG stuff.

I know, I know, that's the part Neal wanted to write about and used the transcontinental thriller plot as a framing story, but that just didn't work out.

> Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)

Funny, as someone who loves Anathem, I couldn't stand the pacing in Reamde. I found the whole thing quite souring, coming off the tail of his other works. Whoever edited that book did a miserable job, as far as I'm concerned.

I've only read Seveneves to the end and was blown away (and simultaneously a bit disappointed if that makes sense?). I've started Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash but they didn't interest me as much.

I thought Fall Or Dodge In Hell was pretty good, probably just because I don't know anybody else who has tried to answer the question... what would it be like to be reincarnated in that way?

Same! I love Diamond Age and to a lesser extent Cryptonomicon, but for my money Seveneves found him leaning into his worst instincts.

At his best, Stephenson’s love of oddball, hyper-focused engineers leads him into in-depth explorations of niche fields & communities. In Seveneves though it manifested as boring Heinlein-esque heroic Mary Sue libertarian engineers who are never wrong, while every other character is somewhere on a spectrum of stupid to nefarious.

For anyone who enjoys future world-building that dives deep into religious and political systems, I recommend Ada Palmer's Terra Ignotta series. She's an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College at Chicago University, and creates a future (set in 2425-ish) using rich historical cultural references that is also not terribly improbable.

A secular buddhism/meditation revolution is currently happening in the west, with many neuroscientists and other academics involved in the mix. It kind of matches what you are describing. I'd recommend starting with Michael Taft's "Deconstructing Yourself" podcast, in which he interviews many of the most prominent western representatives of meditative traditions and human potential movements, most secular. He also is the chair of a meditation center in San Francisco called The Alembic that opened recently.

Agreed. I think there is definitely a certain kind of person who attaches to the idea of academic monks (myself included). Especially the slower pace of life and limited pop culture influences. I remember a few years ago someone on the Anathem subreddit tried to live "cloistered" for a year- not totally isolated, but intentionally avoiding media throughout the year, then they listened to a few albums and watched the best regarded movies.

I definitely liked Anathem, but the structure of it seemed odd. Like half the book was world building then the plot happened really fast and it was over. The idea that scholars are extremely concerned about being intellectually corrupted by the outside world and having an intricate methodology to prevent it is definitely a novel concept though.

That’s all if his books! They have such setup and then a transition to mediocre d&d campaign

I think you missed the part about how the avout were put into maths because they were blamed for scary tech and generally considered weird. To saeculars, maths are as much prisons and mental asylums as they are universities and monasteries. That's why avout have all those rules about not being permitted any technology except the robe, the cord and the sphere, and they are subject to auditing.

i had no idea what i was going to read, but deeply enjoyed snowcrash and just picked another stephenson book to read. what a bizarre and interesting world, but at the same time.. not that bizarre given actual monastic life across various religions in our world.

I agree! There is something very beautiful about people having the time to just think and learn, without access to distracting technology or practical concerns. I wonder what would happen if this was a real pathway in society. I also wonder what were to happen if driven individuals would take sabbaticals in places like this - what kind of ideas would they come up with?

Superb book in any case, may pick it up again.

If anything the Avout are the scientists.

They don’t have labs and don’t do any experiments. Theoretical scientists, at best.

I agree, I don't think diamond age gets enough interest. It's one of my favorite books and the ending is unsatisfying but at least upbeat. Seveneves is also tons of fun. And if you know anyone who likes history, his older Baroque Cycle is pretty great

I haven't heard this in an interview or anything but I think now Stephenson is older and successful enough, he just writes the books exactly how he likes. Diamond age feels like he was agonizing over every word to keep everything so short. But Fall, and his newest book Termination Shock (which I also didn't like most of) ,just feels like an author who likes writing. Both have these amazing moments, which reminds me like a jazz musician, where it's almost effortlessly insightful and funny. But with no editing or second thoughts

The thing about the Diamond Age is the first half is a brilliant book full of great ideas that seems to be set for a complex and enthralling finale, and the second half is an absolute mess that ruins the first half. Only book I can think of comparable in that respect is Stranger in a Strange Land (note to sci-fi authors: don't think you can tie the plot of your killer high-concept idea together with the first thing that comes to mind, especially not if the first thing that comes to mind is the need to come up with creative reasons for your characters to have orgies)

I accidentally purchased the "uncut" version of Stranger in a Strange Land, which included 85,000 more words that were edited out of the original release.

If ever there was a book that didn't need an extra 85,000 words...

I read Stranger in a Strange Land in my youth and it was mind-blowing. The unnecessary Lewdness was nice in puberty but looking back today it's more like a thing of its time thing...

I, too, read it when younger and thought there was a lot of sex in Stranger in a Strange Land until I read Dahlgren where there is a lot less thinking and talking about it and more just step by step descriptions of every act, and that book came about fifteen years later.

I sorta agree, but I also think one of the reasons that the first part is stronger has something to do with the protagonist’s age. When she’s just an innocent little girl, you feel incredible tension every time she is threatened. As she gets older and more capable, the danger doesn’t connect as viscerally to the reader (in my case anyway).

But, warts and all, still one of my favorite novels ever.

Agree it's inevitable that it loses some tension and sweetness (and the role of the all-important Primer), but it's more that Stephenson just takes her in terrible directions (she decides to work in a brothel dictating BDSM fantasies, then she gets violated by rebels, then she unironically becomes the Victorian colonialist ideal of the great White Leader the Chinese girls need) and the others in even worse directions (disappear from the narrative, die a pathos-free death, wake up after 12 years of drug induced orgies and have no emotional reaction whatsoever but a compelling need to wander into a pace-killing subplot about a theatre). The plotting is clunky, I'm not sure the writing is as good despite a few nice moments and the whole Drummers orgy-computer concept is best reserved for another book, preferably unpublished.

Hmmm. Tequila (Nell's mother) vanishes which is weird (it's plot necessary, but in reading and re-reading I don't think she's even firmly written out, she just vanishes)

But the other recipients of the Primer both do something it's just that this novel isn't about them, indeed maybe the point is that their paths diverge so enormously. Princess Nell is exactly what Nell intended from the get go. We don't see Elizabeth and Fiona's first interactions with the Primer, it seems safe to assume they do not begin by escaping from a terrible castle since their lives are comfortable and there's nothing to escape from.

To the reader perhaps it seems like Fiona doesn't amount to anything, but we're not shown very much about it, and it may well be that to her this is every bit as much what she wanted out of life as Princess Nell's outcome. All we know about Elizabeth is that she joins CryptNet. The novel never even tells us (beyond hints) what CryptNet is about. It tells us what CryptNet claims to be doing, and it tells us that nobody believes that.

You could read it as the other two girls fail, but I'd argue that from what Elizabeth's grandfather says at the start, and what the Constable tells Nell later, we can see that the grown-ups have a sense that actually conforming to somebody else's expectations is exactly what they don't see as a path to success. All the parents want what parents so often want - younger copies of themselves, but that's stupid. Nell isn't what Tequila (or Bud) wanted, Fiona isn't what Hackworth wanted, and Elizabeth plainly isn't what her mother and father seem determined to make of her, which suits her grandfather down to the ground.

I get the point that they're not conforming to expectations, which is fine, but having set them up to be observed failing to conform to expectations, we get an "It's ten years later now. Elizabeth's disappeared to join mysterious hackers. Fiona's had no father for a decade but we won't dwell on that, here's a novella about a night out at Dramatic Personae instead. Oh, and Nell's brother who was super important at the beginning died too, poor him. And Nell's ignored the the messages about empowerment and science education messages but been inspired by all the racting to checks notes make up kinks for middle aged men, and we're not even going to riff on the clash with the values of the 'Victorian' middle class upbringing she was donated that implies"

More to this point, you could imagine 2 alternative versions of the Diamond Age, exploring the same world, but from the eyes of each of Fiona and Elizabeth. Nell's story isn't necessarily more interesting, and her outcome wasn't necessarily more successful: She's the one of the 3 the book focused on.

Cryptnet and Dramatis Personae were both intriguing, mysterious organizations that were written to imply there's much beneath their surfaces the plot only touched.

Yeah, I think the dissonance I fundamentally had with the ending of The Diamond Age is that it seems to not have any sense of irony (or any concept that, maybe, the Seed might not be the awful idea that his protagonists are trying to sell us that it is, for example).

I can totally relate. Despite the shortcomings I love the book; there are parts better to be forgotten though...

I secretly dream of a distributed republic.

I secretly dream of discovering a second half of the book I enjoyed as much as the first...

We should feed the first half into an AI and ask for the second half

I think you can write a book to have a good beginning, and you can write a book to have a good ending, but it is very hard to do both.

William Gibson books are all about the ending I find. The beginnings are positively disorienting most of the time. The book with the best ending I've ever read was Musashi. The entire book is building up to the finale which is almost unbearably dramatic. But it starts pretty slowly.

The Magus is a book with a well connected beginning and end, almost seamless if you like. Although it employs a trick to make this happen, where the first person narrator is possessed of preternatural insight into what is going on, which streamlines the story. But Fowles is a pretty exceptional writer.

This. Absolutely the feeling I had after reading both of them

Also for anyone who likes weird scifi, read Cory Doctorow's Rapture of the nerds, it has an amazing audiobook and is just fun and clever

Spoiler Alert

The idea that rich people have access to more compute power in the cloud, and can experience more compute cycles per minute (and thus have more experiences in a metaverse!), is exactly how I see a dystopian universe based on cloud computing developing. When I read that part in the book, it blew my mind.

You might like Greg Egan’s Permutation City too.

This looks so good! Will definitely read it. Thank you!

Diamond Age is the one I keep going back to and getting more out of over the years.

Same here. What I'm drawn to is Nell and Harv's relationship. As short as it is, it has an earnest, bittersweet authenticity. I appreciate Stephenson circling back to it. Starting off the reader with it and closing the loop is one of my favorite, sentimental moments.

Probably my favorite, edging the others out slightly... as you might guess.

Seveneves is all women protagonists, cannot get behind that though I tried.

It felt like Stephenson had a committee of editors, and they told him certain things would make the book sell better, and they promised to fund his VR sword game.

One of the men sacrificing his life is described in a way to tick off a diversity checkbox, for example.

I stuck around because the cosmological ramblings reminded me of Anathem, and while the ending became Animorphs, I couldn't follow him into REAMDE.

I just keep Anathem and Diamond Age in mind when folks discuss Stephenson. Those have my favorite moments. Someday, I may venture into his past works.

Much as I love Neal Stephenson's novels, I really wish he'd stayed around at the writer's class he surely took until they had learned how to wrap up books and write endings; more often than not, I turn the page on a Stephenson novel only to find it was the last...

(While I exaggerate a little, his stories do not end as much as END - I would be thrilled if he could spend a few pages wrapping it up in the end before leaving us waiting for the next title...)

The yarns he constructs are definitely entertaining enough for me to cope with this very minor annoyance, though.

Way, way back I ran into a comment on Slashdot saying essentially:

Neal Stephenson doesn't really do endings. At some point, he just declares victory and stops writing. (not an exact quote, though the second sentence is probably very close to the original)

I thought this was a hilarious observation, and shared it with my coworkers. This then became our standard phrase when we decided that a task wasn't really worth more development hours. So, should we spend another day polishing this, or do we just declare victory?

So thanks, random Slashdot poster 20 years ago, for contributing to our company culture for a few years :)

I read (probably) the same comment, thought it was funny but also quite true and fitted what I had been thinking but wasn't able to really express.

Crytptonomicon is one of my favourite books.

It's the only book that, has had me in fits of laughter/crying, despite it not being a 'comical' book. I've had most of a train car turning around to figure out what's going on, on multiple occasions. (It's that 'RAM' chapter that always gets me).

But the ending of the book is just... disappointing, at best. Many/most of the plot lines are wrapped up, and it just stops. It could be argued that "Leave them wanting more" is true, but it felt like such a sudden conclusion.

I've always said that Cryptonomicon is either 300 pages too long - or 600 pages too short.

As a riposte, I have been informed that Quicksilver supposedly contains those missing 600 pages that complete the second storyline. Haven't verified personally.

I said this about Neal Stephenson on Slashdot about 20 years ago, but… I don’t think it was particularly original thought at the time, my guess is you probably weren’t inspired by me :)

The thought that Neal Stephenson's books often don't have great endings is perhaps not very original, but the phrase "he just declares victory and stops writing" was, at least to me, fairly unique. I was a pretty avid /. reader back then (especially if it was about Stephenson) so I think I would have noticed if it was used a lot.

I'd say odds are fairly good it was you then :-)

Obligatory.

https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-...

I've certainly run into "Let's just declare victory and move on" in many different contexts. And it really is a pretty good philosophy for many situations.

I see, thanks for letting me know :) I'm not a native English speaker, and my main use of (spoken) English is with other non native speakers (such as my multinational dev team back then), so I'm sure there's a lot of common expressions I haven't run into. This is apparently one of them.

And yes, sometimes it's definitely a good philosophy.

The beginnings of his books are pretty difficult too, since he just drops you into a world with its own vocabulary and weirdness that takes forever to understand or in the case of Seveneves does many hundreds of pages of infodump details on how they build their space stuff. I guess the middle parts and ideas of his books are usually a thrill enough to make it worth the other parts.

Besides his endings, his couples intimacy scenes are also absolutely awful and the women can be cartoonish. He makes up for everything with his worldbuilding skill though. Authors lean heavily on the parts of writing they're good at. For example, I've been reading Asimov's foundation, and he almost ignores characterization and describing any of the locations in the book. The whole thing revolves around the plot.

This, so much. Stephenson is a great worldbuilder, but please don't let that guy describe any human emotion other than curiosity / passion for discovery.

Following his stories has always been for me a mix of "oh, this is a cool world / tech / mechanics!" and facepalms over how and why the half of his characters do what they do.

[Stephenson] To this very day, I still cannot purge the phrase "imperial pint of semen" from my brain.

I _HATED_ Foundation as a kid. Only now do I realize that Asimov basically wrote a history book.

Rewrote.

Foundation has been described as a condensed retelling of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Terminus is an outlier and an observer in a universe that goes through the convulsions of the slow, but inevitable breakdown.

"Decline and Fall" has been an inspiration for maybe the first book. Being that it started the series, it set the pieces for the worldbuilding, but not the narrative of the whole saga. The later books are way more exploratory in how a society can / should be reconstructed.

That being said, it's still 1950's science fiction. Good writing, but nowhere near the complexity of Stephenson's worldbuilding or G.R.R.Martin's politics / narrative threads.

Good observation. I wonder if this is a reason the TV adaptations have been tough. Plot seems best enjoyed in written form whereas world building shines on screen.

The TV series is almost entirely disconnected from the novels. It’s like they picked and used some minor details at random and that’s it. It was bizarre.

It's clear he can do it: the ending of Anathem ties up everything very neatly and it is hard for me to imagine any major events happening in the characters' lifetimes that would rival the plot arc they've been through.

I don't think Anathem had a good ending per-se; rather the whole novel sets up a gimmick revealed at the end that explains away the lack of a good ending.

It's still my favorite Stephenson novel though.

I'm not sure "the whole novel sets up" and "gimmick" work together there. :)

I think a well set up gimmick is still a gimmick. And I think probably for the first two thirds of the book at least, the reader will have no clue what's coming even though it's being set up.

Anyway I do like the book, but the ending wraps up very abruptly thanks to the employment of this gimmick.

Yeah, first half of Anathem was captivating, second half went off the rails.

Going by the comments on this thread, it's hard to believe everyone's talking about the same book... (which I haven't read, and I'm now torn as to whether I should!)

It's doesn't go "off the rails" at all, it completely and satisfactorily explains everything. It goes fast but it's good. I highly recommend it. You won't want to miss the worldbuilding, it's absolutely incredible.

Yeah it's wild! Second-guessed myself a tiny bit after seeing all the conflicting views.

Minor spoilers:

I loved the world-building and mystery in the first half, the main character lives in a post-apoc monastary, tons of great details and tidbits. It felt vibrant, deep, reminded me of Redwall and the 5th Harry Potter, with the sexual repression and small-scale rebellion against authority.

He leaves the walls in the second half and stuff happens, I forgot most of it. The journey part felt like an afterthought. Something something aliens, really didn't feel earned or connected.

Anathem is one of his few books with a denoument. It's not super long, but it's nice to have some scene hinting at where things are going next after the main crisis is resolved.

That sounds great; I have had Anathem on my bookshelf for years after life got in the way just after starting it; I had planned to finally read it this fall. Your observation makes me look forward to it even more, thank you!

I like about 2/3 of Stephenson’s novels and Anathem took some work for me to get into. It really gets moving several hundred pages in and then the last 1/3 makes it all worth it.

It took me a few tries to get past the first 1/3rd of Anathem but once I did, it became one of my all time favorite books. Stephenson paints a rich rich world which I have often thought about outside of the major plot points of the book.

It's one of those books where you have no idea what's going on for the first chunk of the book--and probably don't really realize what's fully going on until close to the end. Reading a book in at least partial confusion can be taxing and hard to hold interest. (Though I certainly liked Anathem quite a bit overall.)

Fraa Jad, being able to dimension-hop like Arbre's Rick Sanchez, probably has a few cool adventures left in him.

LOL man I was looking for this comment. I cannot upvote this enough.

He needs to cowrite something with Andy Weir. One can start, they collaborate on the middle, and then the other finishes.

Fantastic idea, but PLEASE let Weir be the one to finish!

Oh man, I could already imagine a much extended Project Hail Mary…

I really felt this with Seveneves, which was otherwise one of my favorites of his. That book (or series maybe...) was nowhere close to over.

One of my all time favourite books too.

I'd recommend 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson if you've not read it - it's in a similar vein / world to the third part of Seveneves.

Thanks so much for the recommendation! I love Kim Stanley Robinson - Aurora and the Red Mars series are some of my all time favorite books - but have had trouble getting into the one of his I'm on right now (The Ministry for the Future). So I'm very pleased to get a different recommendation.

Came here to say this. Both Seveneves and Fall have long unending psuedo-epilogues which add little to the main story, but also don't really wrap anything up satisfactorily either.

My issue with Seveneves is the first part (two parts I guess) was a pretty first-rate thriller then hard to believe transition to equally unlikely and not very interesting IMO outcomes which, as you say, weren't really wrapped up either.

I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which forms the second part. (Part of the problem being that... there's really not a good reason for it - Stephenson's grasp of biology is much worse than his grasp of computing technology.)

Oh I pretty much agree. There's a good argument that the whole first part of the book was to get him to a point where he could write the story he wanted to write. But, if so, there were probably better ways of getting to that point.

And, even if you accept how they got there, the last part of the book just wasn't very compelling for me.

I kind of liked how openly seveneves seemed to be about building some fantasy world for stories (or perhaps even for some video game or p&p rpg, with a number of clearly cut out character classes?), then getting gloriously sidetracked in the background explanation story and finally accepting that the world just built isn't remotely as interesting as that background explanation story. It's as if at some point half way through he realized just how much he was being "typical Neil Stephenson" and decided to go with it, to ten-up himself.

That last part almost seems like a form of trolling, the smallest viable story to claim "I had you on a sidetrack all the time and you did not even notice"

It ain't just Stephenson who can't write endings. This seems to be a general failure mode of science fiction and fantasy writers from the last 4 or 5 decades.

The reason I forgive Stephenson is because he can write a genuinely smart character. One the most infuriating things is reading a story where the "smart" character is clearly what a not-so-smart writer thinks a "smart" character is. Fantasy and alternate history is more prone to this than sci-fi, thankfully.

Yep! I love his works but both Cryptonomicon and Snow crash, its like... oh, that's the end? lol. I get its an artistic decision, because he clearly can write endings but I can't say I'm a huge fan of it. It can be ok when pulled off well (i.e. Sopranos) but I'm always thinking "this would be perfect with just one more chapter, at least."

Neal Stephenson discussing the “Stephenson can't write endings” meme:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/5jjwmq/neal...

I think in the last decade or so he certainly learned how to end (REAMDE had like 90 pages of climax) but I'm not sure the reader is actually better off for it. Seveneves denouement is almost its own book with its own characters and the end of Fall and Termination Shock just left me wanting to know the next development in their respective worlds.

Snow Crash is probably the one formative book that made me who I am. I bought this book in the English section of a Norwegian bookstore while on a bike trip there. I was just out of school and I had not decided yet what to do with my life. My English was just barely good enough to understand Snow Crash.

At its essence, Snow Crash introduced me to the idea of hacking. That is, hacking in the abstract sense of using knowledge about the inner workings of things to influence the world. At the time, I didn't know anything about software yet. Even though the main hero of the book is a master hacker and part of the book plays out in cyber space, it never really talks about the act of writing code. I would learn about that later.

Snow Crash was my red pill. Re-reading it today, after having been a professional software engineer for a number of years, I can't overstate how influential this book has been in my life. It instilled in me the desire to understand the deep structures of things. And with that, the ability to influence and create the world around me. It set me on the path to becoming who I am today.

Snow Crash also served as my introduction to modern utopian cyberpunk. Even though I spent my youth playing video games and reading bad sci-fi, I still remember Snow Crash as my formal introduction to cyber space, virtual avatars, megacorporations, and light cycle races. And it told of the awesome power of reason.

My second favorite Stephenson is Zodiac, strangely.

I read this book for the first time fairly recently, and enjoyed it. I'd seen quite a bit of media that was influenced by it so some parts felt a little more old hat to me than they otherwise would have.

Not sure how you see it as utopian cyberpunk though. It sure seemed like a dystopia to me!

It's always fascinating to read people's takes on Stephenson's corpus.

For me, Cryptonomicon to this day remains one of my most favorite books of all time. It harkens back to Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that it meanders through what many would describe as filler. Some seem to dislike that. To me it helped paint such a great picture.

I guess some people are more interested in the destination than the journey. Stephenson is much more about the journey.

I love his description of those who just seem to have a gift for cryptography with the example of the street map of London [1]. Likewise his satire of academic writing with the paper on beards [2].

But it also captured (at least for me) the spirit of the dot-com era like nothing else I've ever read. It also wove together a cohesive mix of the (then) modern era and the code breaking of the Second World War (eg the abhorrent treatment of Alan Turing by the British Government).

I really don't know if it would translate to the small screen (it's too long for the large screen and it would be a crime to try).

Snow Crash, which I read years earlier, was highly memorable. It was really the closing days of the Cyperpunk era and I loved the world building.

Both of the above suffer from Stephenson's achilles heels: actually ending a story.

Anathem I also enjoyed. But the Baroque Cycle I never finished. I can't even remember where I stopped. I think it was early in the third book. I just found it so tedious. Early on I find it way more interesting.

[1]: https://tentacle.net/~chrisr/bookshelf/Stephenson,%20Neal%20...

[2]: https://tentacle.net/~chrisr/bookshelf/Stephenson,%20Neal%20...

Small nitpick:

> the abhorrent treatment of Alan Turning by the British Government.

What the British Government did to him reflected what the people who elected that government thought at the time; it was in-line with the moral and civic expectations of the time. It is just that for all us it is often easier to blame the government than to admit the culture of the people of a time or place was at fault.

This issue is all the most jarring in writing: government X that is democratically elected does something bad (e.g. spies on its citizens or invades Iraq), and then writers, who are culture-makers, blame the government wholly instead of being more equitable and handing some blame to Joe Plumber, voter, as well.

On baroque cycle, try the audio book version. It’s fantastic and the voice acting is top notch and helps really illustrate the story.

I love Cryptonomicon. I almost put it down though, before I really figured out what it was, so glad I finished it.

Stephenson is by far my favorite fiction author. His style of sci-fi is what draws me to the genre: It's filled with on-the-edge-of-plausibility concepts that makes me wonder "What if we could do that", or gets me hacking on a project. The only other sci-fi I've found on his level have been the Children of Time books.

I've read them all except Reamde, and found Termination Shock to be the tamest, so perhaps if you're new to Stephenson, don't start there.

Even though Termination Shock wasn't super out there, I thought it's better than a lot of his book wrt characterization (even if there were a few moments that didn't work for me)

Count me as a Zodiac reader. I grew up in the era where falling into the Charles River bought you a tetanus shot, and the opening scene is in an industrial corridor I used to explore. I also liked Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and thought the Baroque cycle was a bold achievement, tying science and credit and warfare together. I haven’t invested in his later work enough to have an opinion, but he must have a lot of pages left in him - I hope he keep going and give us another good yarn with an ending.

His early work is definitely interesting. The Big U is also missing from the list. And since they are tracking weirdness, this one hits a 5 out of 5.

He also did a few thrillers with his uncle (Cobweb and Interface), and a series of medieval martial arts novels with a group of writers (The Mongoliad). And as a few longish essays and articles for e.g. wired (Motherboard Earth). And some short stories. All worth reading.

Most Stephenson fans think I'm nuts when I say The Big U is my favorite. What can I say? I like my sci-fi cheesy with lots of interesting concepts.

Not mentioned but somewhat related: The Mongoliad series, for which Stephenson is one of the co-authors. (It's a collective work that came out of a failed startup; it's complicated.)

This is historical fiction and it's very long, but I found it interesting. You might say it arose in part out of Stephenson's interest how historical fighting might have actually worked.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Mongoliad-Series-5-book-series/dp...

I really loved the Baroque cycle; Is there any other author that writes similar stuff?

I've liked other Stephenson novels I've read (Cryptonomicon and Diamond age), but to be honest they haven't been the mind blowing experience of the Baroque cycle.

I'm planning to read Anathem and Termination Shock in the hopefully not too far future, but we'll see.

Not quite at the same scale, but Dan Simmons writes some pretty great alternate/fictionalized history that tend to be pretty lengthy (if that's your thing). I particularly enjoyed Drood and The Terror (from which the TV series was adapted), and Black Hills is pretty nice as well. He also did Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos series if you're more into s-f.

Hyperion is absolutely wonderful, I enjoyed all four but the first two are definitely worth reading.

The first one is the best SF Pilgrims Progress update ever.

In my search for more works like the Baroque Cycle, I was led to Thomas Pynchon, who's writing far surpass that of Stephenson (in my opinion). In particular, Against the Day, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. They are all historical fiction of sorts, with long detailed excursions into well researched nooks and crannies of history. Pynchon's writing is sublime once you get used to it.

I think you'd really like the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian. Surprising amount of history-of-science in his historical fiction.

For straight up history of science, Simon Winchester is pretty great.

> I think you'd really like the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian. Surprising amount of history-of-science in his historical fiction.

Oh yes, I've read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series. I loved it! Good catch! ;)

The baroque cycle was great, if a bit long. Connie Willis, another great sci-fi author, has some good historical fiction like Doomsday Book

Anyone successfully convert their "I'm not into sci-fi" friend into a Stephenson fan? If so, with what book?

(Having read em all, I would not recommend Fall; Or Dodge in Hell as an entrypoint)

For educators i always suggest "The Diamond Age". In the last few years, AI has just catched up enough for non-tech people to take it serious.

I really liked the first half of Fall; Or Dodge in Hell. But it has been the only Stephenson book where i needed discipline not to get enough sleep, but to get through the second half.

I really enjoyed Zodiac. It’s reads like a thriller novel but it’s a little more grounded and less weird than Snow Crash. I think it’s a good entry point for Stephenson novels.

The first half or so of Snow Crash is a great entry point if the recipient already read some cyberpunk and thought "this has something interesting but also has a stick up its arse, it's about time someone ripped the piss out of it" - and I say this as a fan of Gibsonian prose excess.

The only problem is this puts the recipient in a too-cynical, too-stylistically-demanding mode for the rest of Stephenson.

- Posted on my Ono-Sendai Rig, from some kind of Zone, while experiencing Hacker News as some kind of geometric hallucination, under a sky the colour of a television switched off...

Zodiac is the easy introduction because it's the least Neal Stephenson book of the lot: short, minimal infodumps and tangents, and it really doesn't get much nerdier than the protagonist being a chemist [as well as a wetsuit-wearing crime fighter] or much weirder than there being a metal band in there because Stephenson wanted there to be a metal band.

I’ve had good luck on that with Diamond Age, but I feel the need to couple that with a strident warning about how incredibly unsatisfying the ending is (which to me is a recurring thing with his books).

I disliked Fall intensely. I either didn’t finish it, or skimmed the last third of it or so just to try to get a sense of what happened. I think I did finish it, but only because I was on vacation and had nothing else to read by the pool.

I feel that his novels are becoming more and more mainstream friendly, and Termination Shock is my suggestion. The world is very similar to our own, set in the near future (versus The Diamond Age) of our planet (versus Anathem) and is very relatable.

My other suggestions would be REAMDE for people who are into action movies or spy novels, or the first half of Seveneves for space nerds.

I think they are becoming more mainstream friendly as, well, the world has caught up with him, more or less - I find he's a master at grasping what technologies will explode into the mainstream a few years early, then spin a wonderful yarn around that.

Cryptonomicon, REAMDE (to some extent) and The Diamond Age seemed really future-y when released - but now, their basic concepts are all over the media and on people's minds.

REAMDE came out a very short time before awareness of ransomware went from "a handful of people in the hacker world" to "infosec industry starts becoming aware of it".

To more than a few people, it seemed very prescient.

Reamde is much more thriller than SF. My big objection to it is that it was one of those novels where if everything didn't fall right into place again and again, there wouldn't be a story.

I’ve leant my copy of Cryptonomicon to many people who went on to read his other books.

Snow Crash is maybe the most accessible. And, while one of his older books, the association with the metaverse, etc. makes it rather timely.

Try Zodiac. It's not even sci-fi (or if it is, it's _barely_ sci-fi, and only near the end).

If they like the writing style and etc. of that, should be easier to talk them into maybe Cryptonomicon or something next. Cryptonomicon might also be a good entry point, but it's long, so it's a harder sell.

Agree, "Fall" is not one of the more accessible of his works IMO. Neither Anathem, even though it's my favorite of his books. I feel like if Neal Stephenson wanted to write a DND campaign, he'd revolutionize that niche with his incredible world building and excellently pervasive themes.

Diamond Age has been a hit with a lot of my friends, even ones not into scifi.

Agree with you re Fall. Terrible book.

I thought Fall was outstanding; the apes, MOAB, and Ameristan parts were remarkably relevant, and the last part was fun.

I really liked everything about Fall except the main plot. The Ameristan parts felt almost prophetic - that’s the book I wanted to read.

(spoilers) the part where Dodge's e-consciousness conceives of consciousness starting from static was...a tedious read hah. Good summary.

I think the concepts were pretty neat, I agree. However, it felt like two books in one. I will admit that I'm not a fantasy reader -- aside from LOTR, I'm not a big fan of the genre. Spending so much time on that was just not interesting to me. If that entire section was missing, the book would've been extremely compelling.

But to each their own! :)

This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy thriller, Seveneves (as noted elsewhere here) has a big genre change some way through, and arguably The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O also blends a few different genres together, some of them historical. He's certainly more egregious about it in Fall, but it's something he obviously likes doing...

Anathem if you can convince them the to stick through the beginning and learn the words.

Absolutely not Cryptonomicon unless you're sure they're libertarian and male. I reread this recently and I think it aged very poorly for women and liberals because what was once a quirky set of characters in the modern part of the story are now a widespread and polarizing demographic today (our free thinking hero has to deal with some very exaggerated wokeness, and spends a few pages explaining that women aren't as obsessed with tech because they're so good at everything else).

This is not the author to start people who aren't into sci-fi on though. I really love some of his books but I think anyone who can get through one of them is probably already a sci-fi fan. There's more immediately fun books that people can get hooked on like Vinge and Brin or more literary and less tech-describing stuff like Ursula le Guin that appeal to wider audiences and from which they can look for other books with the same themes

Stephenson's take on e-gold might offend some libertarians too! In all seriousness, as I recall it the weirdness about women was mostly in-character views of nerds whose perception of the wider world isn't necessarily supposed to be that reliable, and the male-dominated cast actually makes sense in context. There are other Stephenson books more likely to annoy people in terms of gender roles and digressions about liberals and universities...

But yeah, Stephenson isn't the author to start non-sci fans on (though Vonnegut fans might love Cryptonomicon and spot an influence or two). Atwood's Oryx and Crake is probably my answer to that, since it's classic near future sci fi disguised as literature. The first book is all about near future society and the implications of plausible tech, she just writes about the people in it and doesn't waste words describing the details of stuff they wouldn't know or how it actually works. And the subsequent books are cliche-trope heavy dystopic sci-fi and still probably doesn't feel that way to people who tend to avoid that stuff.

Yeah people don't seem to realize that Lawrence Waterhouse is kind of an unreliable narrator.

Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books, but I also once described it to a friend as "one very long dick joke".

On the other hand, if your problem is with the thin portrayal of women, and you like a more conventional Space Opera kind of thing, Atwood isn't interested in "robots and spaceships and all that" so maybe try Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy ("Ancillary Justice" etc.)

Neal is terrible at writing female characters, which is probably at its most obvious in Cryptonomicon.

he's gotten better at it. I really don't like his more tech bro-ish books but I liked Reamde a lot, which features a pretty good set of characters.

Reamde does still have rape as character development which is... it's one of those tropes that once you notice an author keeps doing it you wince when it comes up again. This is of course in The Big U, and in Snow Crash, and in Diamond Age, and here it is again in Reamde.

I really like Diamond Age, it's probably one of my favourite books, and if that was his only novel which did it I'd say well, fair enough it sort of makes sense in context - but it happens over and over, so that's not great. It's in the same category as Fridging in comics. Twice is coincidence, three times is lazy writing.

Yep, that's something I kind of flagged as a big "oof" as well after reading Reamde and noticing the repeat use in other books :/

I still enjoy his writing, and generally think he isn't a bad writer, but also...

Snow crash

I am probably not going to make myself a lot of friends here but my issue with Stephenson is that he is not really a good writer.

I liked Snow Crash. It’s a very fun book. It doesn’t overstay its welcome too much. Of course, the ending is awful and the prose average but I could forgive that for the enjoyment value.

I then tried to read Cryptonimicon and the Diamond Age. I couldn’t go further than thirty pages. I’m sure there are interesting ideas somewhere in these books but I can’t really imagine having to plod through the rest to reach them.

I had to scroll down way too far for a critical comment...

I feel the same. Having grown up on SciFi I found him to be the most overrated author in the genre.

I don't know how the author of that article came to the conclusion that Stephenson writes "realistic characters" when all the characters I've seen in the only two books I read by him (Snow Crash and Anathem) were pure cliche.

I understand that it was supposed to be a joke in Snow Crash but after reading Anathem I'm not so sure if he really intended it to be a joke in the first place.

Female characters are especially bad.

Than there is the world building: yes he can go forever about a single small thing quoting wikipedia for pages. Than a few pages later the character leaves the enclosed environment and what you get is a rough sketch of the rest of the world. As if he ran out of "describing". In the end you're left borrowing from other authors like he somehow expects you to do. Also...all those single small thing describing was completely irrelevant.

It's quite sad because he does have good ideas but he neither has a clue how to bring them to an interesting end nor when to stop beating it.

1/5 would not recommend.

He just isn't a very good writer. That's ok I guess. Some folks seem to be able to get past the alternately dull or cartoonish characters (I did get a chuckle out of the fact that the blog post mentioned realistic characters are one of his strong suits).

If you like his books but haven't read "Mother Earth Mother Board", a piece of hacker tourism published in WIRED in 1996, do yourself a favor:

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Also “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”

Yes, a site with 'Nerd' in the title on Neal Stephenson really needs to mention 'In the beginning was the command line' an analogy-fest on the state of personal computing in the late ninties https://web.archive.org/web/20180218045352/http://www.crypto...

There's a Blood Knife article https://bloodknife.com/inadequacy-of-inspirational-scifi/ critiquing Stephenson that makes an interesting companion read to this. I have enjoyed Stephenson's novels tremendously, but when OP says they're not "preachy," that is rather a whopper — particularly thinking of _Cryptonomicon,_ but _Termination Shock_ also digresses into it.

I really loved Snow Crash. That's a perfect balance between science fiction and reality, without crossing the cringe-threshold. Really wish someone adapted it into a mini-series.

Encouraged by that lecture, I tried Cryptonomicon and liked it even more. I then listened to the audio-book version read by Stephenson himself. It's actually hilarious in this way.

REAMDE has actually been quite disappointing. I put it down after 2 chapters (it crossed the cringe-threshold for me). Haven't picked up any of Neal's books since.

Author here forgot The Big U and Zodiac. The writing wasn't as polished as his later stuff, but still good stories. U's weirdness rating would be a 5/5.

And, since D.O.D.O being included means we're evidently including collaborations, The Interface, which reads as more prescient of modern political discourse every year.

The Interface is a criminally underrated book. Same with the Cobweb, under written by him under the pseudonym Stephen Bury.

The Baroque Cycle made me understand maths and the impact of the 18th century renaissance on computing. It made me more curious to learn algebraic concepts that I had neglected. Plus he wrote those long books by hand with ink and a feather dip pen! It has a kind of crazy genius stupidity to it that is serious and light at the same time.

I reread Cryptonomicon every couple of years. It's so very 90s, so very startup, I revel in it every time. It's delightfully appealing and appalling

Stephenson has an incredible style that I appreciate more with every book I read because he has some regard for what you're probably thinking while reading it.

Some of his books are incredibly easy to read. Some, like Quicksilver, are a slog. However, pretty much all of his books have a point near the end where a couple of characters sit down together to talk about what the story was really about in a way that puts a new lens on everything that happened. Usually, I never see it coming.

His ability to obfuscate the theme until he's ready to surprise you with it is an impressive mental feat. I don't think I've encountered another author that's so consistently good at it.

Since adaptations of some of Neal's earlier work are in development now for the streaming services, I think he's about to become much more popular.

That said, every time I read the Baroque Cycle, I feel like he wrote it just for me. It will be a bit - but I suspect that just like Snow Crash seems to be taking over from Neuromancer in terms of the great metaverse work of fiction, I think his later work will also eventually come into vogue. I also adore the ending of the Baroque Cycle. Unlike virtually every other conclusion to a Stephenson novel, it feels like the ending is the satisfying moment where the whole story comes together - the total synthesis of the thesis of his works.

I wish I could get the time back in invested in reading "Cryptonomicon." I had high hopes after "Snow Crash", but they never materialized. It's my fault: I knew I should have quit after the author indulged himself by going on about his furniture sorting algorithm. Inexcusable in a book over a 1000 pages long.

"What is your favorite rambling, tangential aside from a Neal Stephenson novel and why?"

https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/362bej/what_is_you...

It's not the author's furniture sorting algorithm. It's the Waterhouse family's. It tells us a considerable amount about the Waterhouse family's particular dysfunctions, and the various Shaftoes' ability to tolerate, or slot into supporting roles around that, and in particular it digs deeply into the conflicts that arise between hyperrational people who think 'we can build an algorithm that will permit a fair and equitable distribution of wealth' and the reality of people who will abuse the properties of that algorithm to make sure they get what they want.

If you think that was an irrelevant aside to the rest of the book's themes, I dunno what to tell you.

Snow Crash appears on at lists of the best Science Fiction books of all time, while Cryptonomicon is in no danger of appearing on any list of favorite Science Fiction books. Cryptonomicon is 25 times less popular than Snow Crash on Amazon (rank #6,737 vs #153,999) and no one on reddit challenged the assertion that Stephenson sometimes writes "rambling, tangential asides." I prefer my Science Fiction books have a good story, not teach me about math and game theory. There are better books for that. If you liked Cryptonomicon, congratulations, you have the same taste as the author. I stand by my disappointment going from Snow Crash to Cryptonomicon.

“Cryptonomicon is in no danger of appearing on any list of favorite Science Fiction books”

That’s an odd claim. It was a Hugo nominee and won the Locus award the year it came out. But it also shows up on lists of the best books of the 1990s, not just ‘sci fi’ lists.

You don’t have to have liked it, but trying to argue that the ‘rambling asides’ which are the signature of what many people love about Stephenson’s work somehow make it objectively worse sci fi than Snow Crash is a bizarre way to approach literature.

Cryptonomicon is trash but will continued to be held up by Sci Fi snobs to signal their refined tastes. It's ever been so in the two decades since I suffered through it.

Okay, you didn't like Cryptonomicon. Maybe you don't like longer books, which is fine.

Personally, it's my favorite book of all time. I'm not a Sci Fi snob and rarely read the genre, so I'm not sure what the signaling is.

Never mind me, I'm just on a tear over this book because invariably some intellectual insinuates that I'm not bright enough to understand it. I have a strict policy of not commenting on this book that I hate with a passion because I always get caught in the same loop with other people about it, but in a moment of weakness I did once again.

I don't see that insinuation in this thread. Your comments are legitimate from the perspective of a reader that doesn't want long tangents and asides, but your attacks on the book itself are hyperbolic - "Cryptonomicon is in no danger of appearing on any list of favorite Science Fiction books". The book literally is on lists like this.

We're all allowed to like different things, and you shouldn't take that difference as commentary on your intelligence. I think an unemotional reading of this thread lacks condescension or insinuation.

What is your favorite SciFi novel? Maybe highlighting that will help see the difference in style preference. Personally, of the SciFi I've read, after Stephenson I liked Weir and the Altered Carbon series. There's another book that I think of all the time but don't recall the title or author - future dystopia where the USA has split into two countries - conservative middle America red states and liberal coastal states with strongly defended but crossable borders.

I already said I loved Snow Crash. What more do you want? As I said in another comment, my emotions are based on years of being condescended to about this book. The book is like a Sacred Cow and I regret breaking my moratorium on commenting on it.

I'm sorry that you read a book that you didn't like. It sounds like that was very difficult for you.

Here's a good example of the snobbery associated with this book. Implying it was "difficult" like it was over my head. It wasn't difficult, it was tedious, boring and meandering.

It's not a good example -- he's implying that you're irrationally upset over not liking a book while other people do like it, not that the book itself was too difficult for you.

If this is what you're interpreting as people talking down to you / claiming that you're too dumb to understand a smart book, you may want to consider that it's a you being overly defensive thing. You're allowed to like what you like. If some people have been dicks to you about your taste, I don't see how that has anything to do with this book. Forget those people.

I stand by my disappointment going from Snow Crash to Cryptonomicon.

If by "disappointment" you mean Cryptonomicon stretched the turgidity of Snow Crash to its theoretical page limit, you may have a point.

The stuff about the physics of chains/whips in Seveneves comes to mind. It seemed like something that tickled Stephenson's brain and so he had to write it into something.

I consider the entire bit about Sumerian history in Snow Crash to be an unnecessary aside.

I actually really enjoyed Cryptonomicon. For it being a long book, I thought it moved pretty good.

Oh yes, I read snow crash when I was a kid. Bought Cryptonomicon and it was a slog, it got a a bit better later on, but I dropped it and never went back.

Does anyone have recommended books or authors for people who like Stephenson?

My primary recommendation is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time books; their attention to detail is almost on Stephenson's level, although without as much edge in their tone and metaphors. I think most Stephenson fans would like them.

I'd also recommend Carl Sagan's Contact, and any of the Andy Weir books, although these are milder in tone, scope, and world-building.

Steven Baxter is a good one, he’s an ex-NASA guy so he’s got the science cred, and wrote with Arthur C. Clarke a few times early in his career. His Manifold trilogy absolutely captured the modern era of rich-startup-dudes-trying-to-reboot-space-flight about fifteen years ago.

I also can’t recommend Iain M. Banks highly enough; start with Player of Games.

[edit] a little more on Banks… his Culture novels take the best aspects of Star Wars (the drama, but none of the magic space wizards) and Star Trek (the pretention of trying to write about politics, but actually succeeding instead of muddling around), and all written by a guy who somehow maintained a parallel career in Serious Literary Fiction (done via a hack of writing his genre fiction with the middle initial, and without it for the “serious” stuff, thus leading booksellers to thinking he was two different guys).

Simply the best space opera ever written.

A bit random, but I always think about how Seveneves could be a fantastic RPG.

I’m (very slowly) writing a video game mostly based on this book.

I'd love to learn more!

I would play it!

yeah, sign me up as well, email is nick @gmail.com

> Stephenson’s worlds are not populated predominantly by Heinleinian larger-than-life characters than can do anything …

Funnily enough I have in Stephenson’s more recent books the contrary impression. The last near future books read more like a love letter to billionaires, all that seems missing is the long flowery dedication to patrons like authors did it in the 1700s. Maybe twenty years ago I was to young or blind to register it but modern Stephenson has just with this trope put himself from my must-read into the meh/maybe category.

(Contrapoint: I can see a structural need for billionaires in his storytelling: He needs a source of financing for the fictional projects. But somehow Stephenson seems to be to unimaginative as to consider other means of realization than the magic billionaire.)

Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves, but the "Dodge" sequence (REAMDE and Fall) becomes blatant to the point that much of the latter is full of people you just can't identify with, because they're all stupendously wealthy tech people.

This captures a lot of what makes me tired of Stephenson now. Elon Musk is his Gandalf.

Not even mentioned in the article, but a book I really like: Zodiak

Not sf exactly, it's an "eco-thriller" but it has its fair share of science. And it's a pretty good thriller.

This is a curated (or annotated) list of Neal Stephenson's scifi novels. Very helpful if you're trying to decide which of his books to start with.

It's interesting that it simply leaves out:

The Big U

- About 7/5 on the weirdness scale of the other books. It was out of print for quite a while. Strange things happen at a thinly disguised Boston University. The Citgo sign becomes The Big Red Wheel.

Zodiac

- About 1/5 on the weirdness scale, except for the protagonist himself, who is about a 3/5. Modern thriller about pollution in Boston Harbor.

Interface

- About a 2/5 weirdness: a candidate runs for US President, aided by a direct brain interface that feeds immediate polling results and media reactions.

Was going to mention Interface! It's very much Cambridge Analytica vibes - you feel that there are teams as described doing pretty much the same things, just without the direct brain interface.

Personally, I think Anathem is the best of his works, although I enjoyed DODO - the sequel, which he wasn't directly involved with was less good though.

Neal Stephenson, I love his work. I accidentally fell into seveneves, while that has it's problems, especially near the end, I absolutely devoured it. from there I just started reading all his stuff. Such a cool way to integrate science with story telling.

Fall, dodge in hell has a super interesting take on post fact reality.

Ai spam can get a lot crazier.

He’s worth seeing in person. A very thoughtful question and answer session. His books are an exhausting read, but he does have a beautiful command of language.

Just read Cyptonomicon (the only Stephenson book I have read so far) and was thinking about what to read next, so this post was timely for me :)

My first Stephenson book was Seveneves and I feel like its discussion of social media feedback loops in the 2nd act was eerily prescient

Stephenson is one of my favorite storytellers and one of my least favorite writers. It’s quite maddening. :)

Again. Why no love for "The Years of Rice and Salt"?

Am I the only one who is continually disappointed by his inability to write a good ending?

He does an _excellent_ job building worlds, creating compelling characters, intriguing plots... but I've just been let down by so many bad endings I stopped reading him.

Thanks, I was looking for exactly this only.

I'm probably in the minority opinion here, but I'd say his newer work is in some ways less inventive than his older work. I think a lot of it boils down to being around silicon valley weirdos for too long wherein the books take on themes the extremely wealthy technocrats are actually trying to accomplish. It goes from being Sci-Fi to Sci-we-really-are-doing-this.

I read Termination Shock and was pretty let down when it seemed like the innovative new social dynamic to resolve climate change was monarchy. It was a fun enough read, but I don't think I'll revisit it like I do with Cryptonomicon or Anathem.

Could be. I really liked Fall except for its opening moves, but Termination shock was... in terms of inventiveness, mystery, and thrill... not on the same level as his older books.

I agree with you. Avid Stephenson fan, I read all of his works but 'The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.' was the last novel I actually enjoyed..

To me he writes like a person who mainly likes hearing his own voice. Further, all his female characters are morons and serve only to hamper the guys or as sexual objects. If the later they tend to be teenagers or at least have the brains of teenagers.

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