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Comment by devilbunny | Hacker News Reader

If you don’t like Snow Crash, you probably just won’t like Stephenson. If you don’t like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, you definitely shouldn’t bother with the rest of his works. You’ve tried him fairly; he’s just not for you.

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I think that is quite innacurate. He wrote Snow Crash in 1992, if you compare it to Diamond age in 1995 or later stuff like Anathem or Cryptonomicon its pretty obvious his writing changed (in my opinion improved) quite a lot over the years.

Snow Crash has similar themes to the other works, but its more raw, less polished and kinda less professional than the writing he did later on. Its definitely possible for someone to not really get on with his early stuff, but really like his later stuff (or even vice-versa if you enjoy the less polished style).

He wrote The Big U in 1984 and that's a super fun, approachable, readable book. He also hates it.

I didn't find Snow Crash to be particularly inspiring but The Diamond Age is absolutely where he peaked for me. After that there's just too much fart-sniffing.

Stephenson's work has a lot of ideas worth wrestling with but as far as crafting a narrative he's weak and fans of his use the former to cover for the latter.

That's interesting. I haven't read The Big U, I should pick it up.

For me my enjoyment of his books is pretty close to inversely proportional to the amount of weird sex stuff he puts in them. Anathem has none, and I think its one of his best, Snow Crash goes pretty hard, Diamond Age is mostly good but then the end of the book is randomly a weird sex-powered computer thing.

The Big U has it’s faults; but is still an insightful look at the weird people and organizations within any large university.

> After that there's just too much fart-sniffing.

If I'm correctly identifying what you consider "fart-sniffing" in his works, then often those farts are my most favorite bits. The little digressions, the impromptu lessons, the D-plots - love 'em.

I'd rate The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon as his peak -- the mid-to-late 90s.

Does he hate it? The last thing I saw him say about the Big U was that he tends to omit it from his bibliography because it's not what his readers are looking for. Personally, I read him in chronological order and enjoyed both the Big U and Zodiac -- if nothing else, it was fun to watch him grow (and not) as an author.

As he put it: "The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."

It was out of print for a long time and he sort of had to be convinced to make the book available to read again after large demand.

I'd also say it's inaccurate, but mainly because of the wildly different preferences everyone has about which of his books to prefer.

For me, Snow Crash was great fun (though also seemed a bit too similar to William Gibson's Neuromancer), Cryptonomicon was an excellent historical novel with some weird "present day" scenes including an ending that made no sense, I couldn't get into Diamond Age, I hated Quicksilver, and Seveneves seemed to be two excellent books written in the same universe by completely different authors who only talked to each about the project for about five minutes.

Snow Crash is parodying cyberpunk (I think). Hence the strong Neuromancer vibes, it's intentionally derivative.

Cryptonomicon is my personal high point. The Baroque Cycle had set pieces just as good as those in Cryptonomicon, but there were too many characters for me to hold in my head.

I agree; everything he wrote post Diamond Age and everything he wrote pre Diamond Age are very different, with Diamand Age and Cryptonomicon being transitional. I read Cryptonomicon once with no plans to complete it. I didn't finish Anathem nor Quicksilver. Diamond Age was peak Stephenson for me, and I enjoyed all of his previous books (including The Big U).

[edit]

I didn't read anything Stephenson wrote post Quicksilver since everybody assured me that they were more of the "new" Stephenson than old. However, I see enough people in the comment threads panning README that I might give it a try.

Anathem has his best ending to date, so it actually pays off its early slog.

I thought Snow Crash was OK, Diamond Age was brilliant, Cryptonomicon was... holy fuck, did we need 1150 pages to tell this story? The subsequent books seemed to be of a similar page count, and I decided I had enough of Neal Stephenson.

It's all about the reader's preference, but if you don't enjoy either of those books, I'd argue (as I did) that you've given the man a fair chance. Likewise, if you don't like Small Gods, you probably won't like Terry Pratchett. I love Sir Terry, we were graced to have him while we did, but I'll stand by that.

I strongly disagree about Snow Crash. I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk. Relatively cool plot but the style just wasn't for me.

However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for in a sci-fi book, and I Anathem had amazing world building. I can't speak for Diamond Age, but based on the four books I've read (Termination Shock being the other), I thought Snow Crash was wildly different from the rest.

I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk.

I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.

Underlined rather emphatically in The Diamond Age by the literal murder of the clichéd cyberpunk character right out of the gates. Quite an unambiguous statement about What Will Not Be Happening In This Book From Now On.

That's probably the key part. If someone goes in expecting earnest sci-fi like Neuromancer and the satire part doesn't click early on, they're likely to be disappointed. (That being said, IMHO there are some aspects of Snow Crash that come off as low-effort, independent of the satire.)

> However, Seveneves to me is everything I could hope for in a sci-fi book

Serious question: what did you think of the ending and plot closure?

To me, the first 2/3 of Seveneves was a good thriller, followed by and then a miracle happpened, followed by probably the book Stephenson wanted to write.

This to me feels like most of his plots.

For me, the ending was a little rushed, but fine. It tied up at least some of the plot elements from the first part. Yes, it was like two separate books, as if Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer was mashed together with the TV version of Asimov's Foundation, but both parts were pretty good.

I feel the same way. I’ve had a few false starts with Snow Crash, each time powering through about half despite my love of the imagery and the coolness. But have easily read Seveneves 2-3 times, with the last time somewhat skimming the third part, which isn’t as good as the rest.

> I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk.

I believe that was fully intentional.

The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist. He's definitely leaning into it.

Yeah totally! Just not my preference.

Snow Crash was one of the archetypical cypherpunk stories, which was a trend that often mocked if not outright took a piss over cyberpunk.

I find it a lot like a variation of "the cyberpunk dystopia arrived but not as cool as we imagined", but not as boring as what actually happens.

I didn't like either of them very much, but I've really enjoyed other books of his.

- The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

- Seveneves

- Cryptonomicon

- Anathem

- Reamde

- Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Although the metaworld parts in that get a little tiresome)

Yeah honestly he just keeps getting better IMO. Seveneves in particular gives me chills just thinking about -- so dark at points.

Likewise, I think the Blue Ant books are Gibson's best work, though I have a strong attachment to Mona Lisa Overdrive just because of where I was in life when I first read it.

Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy everything Gibson has written, but Pattern Recognition is by far my favorite.

It's wonderful! He gets the timbre of early 2000s forum culture exactly right.

Loved Seveneves and Fall, in particular the little slice of Ameristan in the Fall, but I feel like in both cases they are great books with a mediocre book attached to the end.

Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...

> Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...

And was probably the most prophetic of all his work, to be honest Snowcrash was total satire, and fan-service: it was much like the Crypto-anarchist Sloath short-story he wrote (THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER) it was meant to appeal to a a certain audience and really no one else. It was widely distributed (it was in TIME back when that was a big deal in the 90s at the peak of Silicon valley's foray with Crypto Anarchy) but ultimately targeted content to a specific demographic, which would illicit a certain response. Few if any every bring this up when discussing NS' bibliography.

Its like Solar Opposites is a riff of Rick and Morty where the Rick character is put in a different universe and rides that story-line as far as it can before it gets tiresome but has a b-plot to carry it through for the audience to make it an entire season.

And while Snowcrash was... mediocre (in my opinion) things like Sushi-K rapping or the hi-jinks of Uncle Enzo's Pizza delivery business are exactly the kind of hokey material one would expect from such subject matter that would land for said demographic. Is it a good representation of the Cyberpunk genre, as a fan, absolutely not.

Also wasn't Amazon supposed to make a series about Snowcrash and has been 'in the works' [0] for like 7 years now? They canceled The Peripheral which was kind of a rip-off Snowcrash and that had good reviews, I can't imagine they'd really try to try to flesh-out the Metaverse when 85% of Snowcrash is just filler with an incredibly bad ending.

Hell, Amazon canceled The Expanse despite having a ton of more original content and being quite the cash cow, the books still sell incredibly well and the fans are die hard, many of them signed up for Amazon specifically for the last seasons and canceled when it was over.

Personally, I think with costly shows like GT getting the axe and Clacrkson's Farm (something I enjoy more) being what is left from the trio it shows that Amazon doesn't have the wear-withal to see such immense things through in my opinion so we may never see Hiro or YT on screen.

0: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383994/amazon-streaming...

And it has the several page digression about the best way to eat captain crunch where one of the characters has just gotten out of jail and is thinking about inventing a spoon to deliver milk perfectly to the cereal!

Good book, but Neal would benefit from a stronger editor.

Some people think those are the best bits of his books!

Yeah, agree. If you take away all of his digressions, how much would be left.

Everyone hating on the digressions.

But you can't just have a few pages of plot points and call it a book.

in the future our personal editors will create our own editions of these books. mine will have an even longer captain crunch section and yours will be abbreviated

Seveneves is probably my favorite book, ever. I have the audio book and I'll probably listen to it for a 3rd time here soon.

I stopped reading Seveneves after we zoom forward to the future and stuff got weird, a bit too weird for my suspension of disbelief. Does it get back to more hard sci-fi stuff or remain as something which, to me, felt more like a sci-fantasy hybrid?

Oddly enough I love books like Dune, but the dramatic change in Seveneves was just too jarring for me to continue enjoying it.

I would argue the sci-fi indeed gets so hard, that it becomes soft again by nature. The technology falls away from the focus, as it should, but it is still very much there.

I think it's pretty clear from the comments here that there are those of us who just can't really buy the jump-cut and there are those who can.

I was listening to it on audio book and after the "5000 years later" I paused it and didn't pick it back up for a long while. Slogged through the rest. Won't read/listen to it again. The ending was ok. This was my first Stephenson book. Not going to do more.

I think Seveneves would have worked better for me had the jump cut been a significantly shorter period of time, had there been a shorter more hand-wavy epilogue that didn't get into all the detail, and (frankly) had it thrown out a lot of the last part of the novel. But I'm not Neal Stephenson either.

Loved Seveneves, but it is one of the best examples of his not having an ending.

I love the world building of the 2nd half, and would argue it doesn't need a clear ending. Your imagination gets to fill in the blanks.

While some other of his books do not have the most satisfying endings, Seveneves was the only one where it seemed like he simply gave up trying when writing the last 5%. Compared to the previous sections, the end just seemed like it had no effort put into it. Everything after the death of the doc just seemed abrupt and clumsy. It seemed jarring compared to how much care he seemed to put into the detail of the earlier passages.

I hear people say that a lot but I don't get it. I experienced it as a hopeless, depressing slog, where things just got worse and worse. But fortunately I wasn't attached to the characters so it wasn't so bad watching them all suffer.

I agree with you, you are not alone. Seveneves had some great ideas, but he spent way too much time on the science and put almost nothing into character development. The characters were so flat, the interactions and motivations were lacking, and ultimately I just didn't care about any of them. I can't recall a single character from Seveneves but while I can't remember all their names I very much do remember the characters from Snow Crash.

There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different from other works.

The Baroque Cycle books and Seveneves are my favourite of his, after that my enjoyment drops of pretty quick. Anathem is good once it finally gets going.

I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff happens I'm less interested

Novels are art and all art is subjective. Stephenson's earlier work I liked but I had to push myself thru Cryptonomicon. I don't force myself through something anymore, if a few chapters in I'm not compelled naturally to pick it up and read it, I move on.

As I've gotten older I just ignore some content based on topic, genre, etc. entirely since I'm either tired of it or have found I don't enjoy it. Anything super hero related is definitely in that bucket, so are all comics/cartoons, just don't enjoy them to spend my free time on them.

I don't agree with that - I pretty much love everything from Cryptonomicon onwards (apart from REAMDE) and I'm not keen on Snow Crash or The Diamond Age.

Edit: I even really like "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"

Eh, everyone likes different NS books (just look at all the replies).

I like Snow Crash and love Cryptonomicon, and I couldn't go past the first volume of the Baroque Cycle.

The first volume can be a long slog as it takes a huge amount of time to get moving in any plot-like fashion and feels very dry until you get to Jack Shaftoe's introduction. My opinion at least.

I found the audiobook of Quicksilver much easier to consume than the paper book - so much so that I've listened to the entire Baroque Cycle a few times now.

I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age. I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.

I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much, found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.

His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.

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