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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

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.

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“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.

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