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Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!

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Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.

In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.

Stevenson's endings are "pregnant endings" as in the Aeneid:

https://old.reddit.com/r/mythology/comments/196r7mn/i_just_f...

It's not a bad way to end a book in principle.

I can't actually recall how snowcrash ends, I think I was losing interest by the end.

Swordfight (which is very stephenson to have in the ending) and nuclear-powered robot dogs showing extreme loyalty to the person who saved one of them from overheating.

I found the second part of Seven Eves to be a surreal experience. I think I might have stopped reading Stephenson after that.

Howso?

(Not parent)

The second half differs dramatically in tone. If you were really into the specific feeling of the first half, it is very jarring.

I found the whole thing very interesting and enjoyable, but I can imagine being excited for more content similar to the first half and being disappointed by the drastic shift in scale/tone/focus/etc.

That's definitely true.

I saw the book as two parts:

I: We have a problem, how do we solve it?

II: What are the (very long term) consequences of how we (and possibly others) solved that problem?

From that perspective, it fits pretty well, though yes, the tones of the two parts are decidedly different.

Wouldn't mind hearing from OP on their specific concerns.

I just found the transition extremely abrupt and a bit jarring.

Fun fact, Snow Crash was originally written as a video game script (and it shows.)

Was visiting a university bookstore few months ago and came across it used in paperback. Never read it but know it has modern/tech significance. Read some of it and went "well, naah" and passed. Ironically the book I ended up purchasing instead was really bad and I couldn't finish it (something by Maureen Down the NYT columnist, I love her opinion work but the book was horrible)

There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.

William Gibson's writing really fell off a cliff post-Trump. Agency was one of the dullest reads I've encountered in a long time.

Speaking of Fall, after a couple hundred pages I ended up just skipping the chapters about Bitworld.

I didn't bother reading Termination Shock and if Gibson ever finishes Jackpot, I doubt I'll pick it up either. What a bummer.

I experience this as me being a ridealong on my friend's random diatribe. Oftentimes it feels like something he just learned and needs to tell someone about.

I believe REAMDE included an entire page dedicated to the virtues of lashing tires to fishing craft.

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