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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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