Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre.
This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its name.
His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity.
You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the Korean War.
Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation of the American University system as it geared towards research over pure academia.
The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.".
The plotting characterisation and story beats when not directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of Neuromancer.
Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre. Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA audience.