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Comment by wolfram74 | Hacker News Reader

I can't find it, but somewhere I read the sentiment that `Snow Crash` is best read by young men. I know I read it when I was in my early 20's and enjoyed it, have at most skimmed some amusing passages (like the bits from the perspective of the dog) since.

Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seven-Eves have a bit more staying power for me.

slight non-sequitor, but was anybody else disappointed with Termination Shock? The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?

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I liked Termination Shock and I don't regret spending the time to read it in the slightest.

However, to me, compared to the Baroque Cycle and Anathem, my favorite works of his, Termination Shock was, how to describe it, non-memorable. Like a half-decent adventure movie, you enjoy seeing it but afterwards you go home thinking about what to make for dinner, and don't think about that movie anymore until someone or something makes you remember it again.

In contrast, the Baroque Cycle and Anathem were mindblowing. I spent ages thinking and daydreaming about the worlds he described in those books.

FWIW, I really liked Termination Shock. Much more than Fall (I read them in that order). I had to kind of force myself to finish Fall.

>The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?

What does it mean if the fate of the world lies in the people that may not be arsed to actually give a shit until it's too late? I thought it was an interesting take.

"The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?"

I didn't have that takeaway.

I thought it was more just one group of elites versus other groups. And some of them happened to be monarchy.

I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics. At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.

I wills say this: I enjoyed Termination Shock, but I felt it was the second-weakest of his novels after REAMDE (Not including co-authored ones like D.O.D.O) I still thought it was a great read overall, both for the story, the dive into cultures I wasn't familiar with, and the climate change story. TS was too... normal? of a novel, without some of the points that makes Stephenson's other novels shine in a league of their own.

I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.

I described his last books as a love letter to billionaires. All that is missing is a long, flowery, baroque dedication in the front to a wealthy patron, Bezos or currently more topical Marc Andreesen or Musk.

There may be a structural literary need for billionaires - to finance and start those big projects. But it's rather sad that a guy as creative as Stephenson doesn't seem creative enough to find alternatives.

Maybe there isn't an alternative, so he is writing about what is more likely.

Not what he might hope for in an ideal world.

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