Stephenson as a Sci-Fi Author always struck me as Kurt Vonnegut for remedial readers, or as part of the Cory Doctorow league of Cyberpunk Authorship compared to the peaks of the genre like William Gibson.
Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters
"The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's most mad/trippy setting so far.
I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.
I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
Dividing his books into "trilogies" is a little misleading; they all happen in the same shared universe and some common characters, but don't have deeply connected stories. Give Pattern Recognition a try, and see if 20 years makes a difference to you. (If you like audiobooks, Pattern Recognition is a gem, with almost the perfect fusion between story and narrator.)
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/nov/21/william-gi...
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.
One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given my username)
Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will be trounced...
The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon:
"We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."
or even the post-coital after-images of VR
"His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall."
My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement.
Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.
But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly.
(it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)
Re: ChatGPT - I'm guessing it would be more easily detected than you think. It's a paradigm leap from Markov chains and the like, but I'd imagine it would still hallucinate a quote or reference some non-existent book in making a comparison at some point.
If it ever gets adept at literary criticism or critical theory as opposed to just cargo-culting its way past the lower threshold of readers I'll probably be in despair. Let's keep it trained on JIRA rather than JSTOR just to be safe, lest something like Roald Dahl's 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator' come to fruition.
I like the cut of your jib, good sir.
Kudos. I would read more of this.
Comparing Stephenson to Vonnegut feels like comparing an inside joke to an epitaph.
When I learnt that Snow Crash was actually originally conceived as a Graphic Novel, it was like a large puzzle piece finally clicked into place. I would have preferred to judge it on its merits in that medium to be frank, as Stephenson is very passionate and has some interesting takes and somewhat Randian fascinations tertiary to his plotting, but ultimately I feel that his narrative reach always exceeded his grasp.
As for missing the point, I can only point to my acknowledgement of the existence of Snow Crash's TvTropes page, and my countless hours arguing the point online on this and other fora!
I don't remember AtD as being particularly filthy, but it has been a long time. It remains one of my all-time favorites. If nothing else, I'm indebted to the book for encouraging me to seek out literary westerns such as Warlock by Oakley Hall and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.
It became a lot more enjoyable for me on my second attempt when I gave up on the idea of understanding everything. Sometimes things get explained later in the book. Sometimes not.