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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> ....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 :-)

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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