11 ms·

I'll probably get roasted for this, but- After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age,

I'll probably get roasted for this, but- After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age, etc), intending to power through them. I am a pretty avid reader when I am in the mood and enjoy fiction including sci-fi, fantasy, *punk, etc. I couldn't get through Snow Crash. It didn't feel like a finished book to me. If I remember correctly it seemed like things like river names had placeholders and even saw some errors in the text. What am I missing?

imp0cat 3y ago
They are not for the faint of heart. :) But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.
devilbunny 3y ago
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.
- MarcScott 3y ago
  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)
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    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.
    - themadturk 3y ago
      Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy everything Gibson has written, but Pattern Recognition is by far my favorite.
      - ElevenLathe 3y ago
        It's wonderful! He gets the timbre of early 2000s forum culture exactly right.
  - tsujamin 3y ago
    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.
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...
    - Melting_Harps 3y ago
      > 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-video-ringworld-snow-crash-lazarus-sci-fi-tv https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383994/amazon-streaming...
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      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.
  - 2024throwaway 3y ago
    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.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      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.
      - 2024throwaway 3y ago
        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.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        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.
      - auspiv 3y ago
        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.
        ghaff 3y ago
        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.
- eigenket 3y ago
  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).
  - busterarm 3y ago
    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.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      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.
    - nickhalfasleep 3y ago
      The Big U has it’s faults; but is still an insightful look at the weird people and organizations within any large university.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      > 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.
- infthi 3y ago
  There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different from other works.
  - simonbarker87 3y ago
    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.
    - jes5199 3y ago
      I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff happens I'm less interested
- histories 3y ago
  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.
  - touisteur 3y ago
    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.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      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.
- chrisshroba 3y ago
  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.
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk. I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.
    - tonyg 3y ago
      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.
    - AlanYx 3y ago
      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.)
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > 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?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      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.
- arethuza 3y ago
  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"
- protomolecule 3y ago
  I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much, found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.
- greedo 3y ago
  I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age. I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
  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.
abraxas 3y ago
My first and only exposure to Stephenson was Seveneves. I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in his novels buries the story and any character development in a mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical consistency is much higher than for those who are more neurotypical.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Man, and I thought 'Seveneves' was a quick one, fast moving. Should I see a doctor? I honestly didn't realize others saw it that way. Now I'm worried. Lol, if you like Stephenson, you might need help.
  - abraxas 3y ago
    Pages and pages treatises about orbital mechanics, PhD dissertation on how space station docking works. Seveneves fast paced? yeah, no.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    To me, 'Seveneves' took longer than usual to world build and get things going. Once it got going after 'the event', things moved along as a pretty good clip. Don't know if he has any plans to revisit that world but it would be interesting to explore things from after the time jump in more detail.
    - 2024throwaway 3y ago
      "The event" happens in the first sentence of the book.
      - ckozlowski 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure OP is referring to either the ramifications of that event (the climax of part 1), or perhaps the end of part 1 which sets part 2 in motion (with a drastic change in focus). I'm being deliberately vague in order to not reveal spoilers.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I read half of Snow Crash and it felt like there was no plot that emerged? I dunno how to explain it. Half the book felt like a context-building prologue.
antihero 3y ago
I read Snow Crash as a young teenager and it inspired me in some way.
keiferski 3y ago
His books have a certain…tone…that you either like or don’t like. Personally, as much as I enjoy cyberpunk literature, I didn’t really enjoy Snow Crash. Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me.
- noch 3y ago
  > Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me. Neal Stephenson is decidedly not a good prose stylist. But I guess he doesn't aim to be. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and "Anathem" are piles of really mediocre, ungainly sentences. What he has are many interesting ideas and he is a fun conveyor of those ideas, for the most part. But he's not a Nabokov nor a Cormac McCarthy nor a Samuel Delany. But we love him for he's "one of us". He wrote that excellent essay that placed a geek at the beginning of the Creation myth: "In the Beginning was the Command Line" https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt Stephenson is also the one said the words of caution that inspired many a young nerd to be active in the world and work hard and always remember that someone somewhere has to know exactly how keep the lights on and the water running: > Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. _Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out._ (https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673 https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673)
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Yeah, I guess I just prefer William Gibson's take when it comes to cyberpunk lit. It's just more...serious? Plausible? Less of a "nerd inside joke" activity.
BirAdam 3y ago
So, I look at the entire genre of cyberpunk as well as related genres as pulp sci-fi. It isn’t always “good” if we’re comparing to Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert, but there are often some entertaining ideas and interesting themes in them. I love Nosferatu, but I can still enjoy Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
- piltdownman 3y ago
  Neuromancer is genre defining and defying. To categorise it as 'just' cyberpunk is a disservice. Pity about the rest of the Trilogy; the 'Go Set a Watchman' to Neuromancer's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' if you will. Heinlein I love, but to pretend he's not serialised pulp-fiction outside of maybe 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is fairly disingenuous.
azangru 3y ago
I hated Snow Crash (it aged poorly), but loved REAMDE. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves were decent; Termination Shock got fun in the end; whereas The Rise and Fall of DODO was more interesting in the beginning. Not sure how I feel about Fall - there were certainly some good parts to it, especially in its parallels with Milton.
- abakker 3y ago
  REAMDE was like reading a movie. Just great stuff. I enjoyed Snow Crash, but agree it had some unfinished-ness feelings to it. like a stronger editor could have shaped it a bit better.
alexitorg 3y ago
I love Snow Crash. I was wearing my Black Sun night club (from snow crash) t-shirt to work today. That being said, it does feel like an early book. It is possibly over packed with ideas and possibly so edgy it feels like it is trying too hard.
- Vecr 3y ago
  What does a "Black Sun night club" t-shirt look like? I've had people (claiming to be US police) joke online about shooting anyone wearing a plate carrier with a black sun patch on it on sight.
wolfram74 3y ago
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?
- brk 3y ago
  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.
- jabl 3y ago
  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.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago
matthiaswh 3y ago
Similarly, I wanted to love Stephenson. I even enjoy the intense technical details in a good sci-fi story (I'm talking to you Red Mars). I started with Seveneves and could not finish it. After 20 pages I wanted to quit, but I stuck it out for another 150 pages before folding. The premise of the story was fantastic, but the writing was not enjoyable to me, and IMO, not very good. Where Robinson and authors like Weir and Clarke weave the technical details into the story in a fascinating way and show understanding of the topic, I felt Stephenson was copy-pasting Wikipedia articles into the middle of a book. Furthermore, he treated the reader like an idiot - by the end I couldn't help but laugh painfully when he felt the need to explain to us for the 30th time that A+0.150 means 0 years and 150 days after the agent event. His characters are vague and annoying. While Robinson's characters were similarly lacking in depth in Red Mars, at least they represented something bigger, were deliberately chosen, and served a storytelling purpose. Here's an example I pulled out of Seveneves that made me cringe. "In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no mass. Once Amalthea (a comet) had been attached, it was like a kite with a big rock strapped to it." Weir would have pulled that line off easily as a slightly sarcastic, self-aware remark. I didn't get the impression that Stephenson meant it anything other than a serious statement.
np_tedious 3y ago
Snow Crash is definitely overrated. I loved Cryptpnomicon, Baroque cycle, Anathem, REAMDE, Diamond Age
snapcaster 3y ago
I feel similarly about Dune, not a big fan of the writing style but the ideas are so cool that I'm willing to "power through it" like you say
mauvehaus 3y ago
The format of a Neal Stephenson book is: A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is nerding out about at the time he's writing the book that forms the world-building (The metaverse in Snow Crash, MMORPGs in REAMDE). There will be random digressions about other things he's nerding out about that don't amount to enough to be a major feature of the world (volcanic glass knives in Snow Crash, tuck-pointing masonry in REAMDE) that he nonetheless works into the story. Some plot happens in this world, followed by an ending of highly variable quality. He ties Snow Crash together fairly well, as I recall. REAMDE, I was less impressed by. For context, I've read everything of his except the Baroque Cycle up to Seveneves. He's pretty consistent in sticking to this format. In my opinion his best writing is In The Beginning Was The Command Line[0]. I particularly like the quote "I use eMacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor." It makes me smile despite the fact that I'm a vi person. It's also uncharacteristicly short for his work. [0] https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sh...
- ghaff 3y ago
  I found REAMDE maybe his worst book that I've read. For one thing, it was one of those books where, if a lot of things don't line up just perfectly again and again, there's really no story. I mostly liked Cryptonomicon and Anathem--but I probably wouldn't push a reader into the latter as an introduction.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    Yeah, REAMDE was a weird mashing together of what if things were happening in WoW and IRL and it all was somehow about the global war on terror? I concur that it's probably his worst novel that I've read. And that Anathem probably shouldn't be anyone's introduction to his work.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      Anathem was my introduction and I feel that it has spoiled his other works for me.
glitchc 3y ago
I thought Cryptonomicon was his best book. It's okay not to like Stephenson.
andyjohnson0 3y ago
I don't think you're missing anything, really. Unlike his non-fiction essays and articles [1], which are mostly excellent, his fiction just isn't all that good. Typically the concept and ideas are interesting, but the story/characterisation/ending is poor and the digressions aren't able to hide this for very long. I read Snow Crash and it was fun, but I had to skip over huge banks of filler. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves and REAMDE were tedious and ultimately unrewarding slogs that persuaded me not to touch his work again. I'm just glad I never attempted the Baroque Cycle. I never understood HN's enthusiasm for Stephenson's fiction, so I suspect I'll get roasted too. But bring it on I guess. [1] In the Beginning was the Command-Line, Mother Earth Mother Board, etc.
- adolph 3y ago
  Mother Earth Mother Board was my introduction to Stephenson. Glad to see a mention of it here. I reread many of Stephenson's words periodically because I enjoy it, but I can appreciate how the characters are perhaps lacking. Its hard for me to put my finger on why, but the Judge in Blood Meridian seems more like a live person than Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
yaky 3y ago
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piltdownman 3y ago
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.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do you mean) for us lay people?
  - piltdownman 3y ago
    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.
alienicecream 3y ago
It was poorly written and the story was something a teenager would dream up, but your complaint is that the editing wasn't finished? Is that how you judge a story?
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Cryptonomicon is one of my all time favorite books. Diamond Age and Snowcrash were only ok.
LegitShady 3y ago
you are not alone. I think he has interesting ideas he incorporates into his books/stories but I don't think he's a very good writer. Personally I need someone to be a good writer for me to enjoy reading their books - otherwise the experience is draining instead of uplifting.
foobarbecue 3y ago
Snow Crash was supposed to be a graphic novel, and then the illustrator quit. It's not at all like any of the other Stephenson novels. On the other hand, I find your fixation on errors odd -- sounds like your complaint is with the editor, not the author.
mnky9800n 3y ago
I choose to accept Snowcrash as a clever satire on how vapid and empty cyberpunk is as a genre.
bigie35 3y ago
I have read three of his books so far - Snow crash, Cryptonomincon, and Seveneves. By far his most fully formed and epic book for me has been Seveneves. It is hardcore Sci-Fi at an epic scale both in world building and time. I got 700 pages in when I had to return it to the library or be sent to collections.
AsthmaBoy 3y ago
One or two decades ago I read on some newsgroup on the internet (and having experienced it myself), that Neal Stephensons storylines never actually
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Yes, that pretty much sums him
slothtrop 3y ago
He's written far better, both on the sci-fi side and otherwise. imo, it goes Anathem > Cryptonomicon > The Diamond Age > Seveneves > Termination Shock > Snow Crash. The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction, but I didn't get into it. REAMDE is a techno-thriller, and a divisive one, where it lands depends on whether you enjoy that style.
- arethuza 3y ago
  "The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction" Apart from the suspiciously well informed immortal character and the magical gold? I wonder what could explain those...
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    Ok, pedant.
- ttepasse 3y ago
  > The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction ... written in a SciFi mindset, I would say.
packetlost 3y ago
I personally can't stand his style of writing. Tried to power through Snow Crash but couldn't do it. Just not my cup of tea.
jackgavigan 3y ago
Try Zodiac and Interface (authored under the co-pseudonym Stephen Bury).
- batch12 3y ago
  I will give it a shot, thank you.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  Came here to say this. Both of those books are underrated. Interface is a particular favorite of mine and it has help up fairly well.
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TheCleric 3y ago
Yeah I’m in the same camp. Tried to read Cryptonomicon and immediately felt lost.
dougmwne 3y ago
Stephenson is an ideas guy. The books are just loose vehicles for all his ideas and things like plot, characters and (gasp) endings are not center stage. There are so many ideas in his books, mountain upon mountain that it’s no wonder some of them ended up being real products in following decades. They are great fuel for the technical imagination.
readingnews 3y ago
I have only ever read Snow Crash. I enjoyed it. However, I read it in 1992. When I think about it now, I bet reading it today would seem odd... like watching old 1950s shows that make predictions about the world of tomorrow.
_yb2s 3y ago
Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk like Gibson. You’re missing that the low effort and placeholder names are part of the joke, making fun of how cyberpunk tries to seem cool by trying to be raw, gritty, and low effort… like rock stars that try too hard at pretending to care about nothing. Stephenson does it to a comical extreme, e.g. naming his main character Hiro Protagonist. His other books are not in that style.
- batch12 3y ago
 I have heard this, but it seems more like laziness to me. Thanks for the perspective.
 - _yb2s 3y ago
 The density of creative jokes about being gritty and low effort in Snow Crash isn't possible without substantially more thought and effort than writing normal fiction. Laziness won't produce a book that has people laughing out loud as they read it 32 years later. If anything, I think the problem with Snow Crash is it has become so popular and lasted so long, people get less of the jokes now, because nobody remembers what he was satirizing anymore.
- busfahrer 3y ago
 Low-effort and high-tech, to paraphrase Gibson‘s M.O.
- blincoln 3y ago
 > Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that Snow Crash is satire, I recommend reading Headcrash, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to Snow Crash. If Snow Crash is the original Robocop (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then Headcrash is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (completely over-the-top). > like Gibson. It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it. Almost everyone gets a gritty Blade Runner image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin. Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. Johnny Mnemonic (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of The X-Files.
ecocentrik 3y ago
Snow Crash must feel really dated in 2024 so I don't recommend starting with that book. Diamond Age is a fairly accurate description of the present and a possible near future, but somehow written in the 90s. We aren't choking on nanite dust and still haven't quite gotten 3d printers to the level described in the book but the Neo-Victorian social stratification is on track and machine learning is transforming education in ways hinted at in the book. What are you missing? His books that take place in the present or the future are thought experiments focused around the ways technology can transform society. He is pretty good at grounding his characters in fairly complex social landscapes and then describing the ways technology (real or imagined) interacts with and influences that landscape. You might also be missing his surreal sense of humor if you thought names like Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash were placeholders. As a new reader you might be more I'd start with his newer books and work backwards. I haven't read "Termination Shock" yet but I would recommend both "Fall" and "Seveneves".
- themadturk 3y ago
  Termination Shock was pretty good, but seemed kind of low-effort, not a typical Stephenson blockbuster.
- jimmygrapes 3y ago
  I found Termination Shock to be his worst by far, in large part because it felt too contemporary. It felt awfully similar to a music album mandated by the studio to an artist that really didn't have anything to say, so he just skimmed trending news of the time, went down a shallow rabbit hole or two then wrote a half-hearted but verbose blog post and called it a novel. I didn't get any sense of passion from it.
BeetleB 3y ago
Neal Stephenson doesn't write novels. He writes novel-length entries in an encyclopedia.
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  Each of the novels is the size of an encyclopedia, which is why I gave up after Cryptonomicon.
flohofwoe 3y ago
TBH I had to start Snow Crash multiple times until it 'clicked' (e.g. "what's with the bizarre writing style..."). It's more of a "super hero comic" than a "science fiction novel". I still like to read it about once a year if I want a quick fix. I haven't noticed any of the errors in the text you describe though. The thing with the classics is that three decades later the topics that where novel back then are science fiction tropes today, because everybody copied them over and over again. Same with Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, etc... FWIW though, I'm not a big fan of Neal Stephenson's more recent books. The last one I really enjoyed was Anathem, and the last one I attempted but didn't finish was REAMDE. Now for something where I really don't understand the hype: Ready Player One. What a drivel ;)
Krasnol 3y ago
I feel you. I felt for the hype on Reddit around this author and read two books. Snow Crash felt like he wanted to jump on Gibson's train and save the world building altogether because people are supposed to know Gibsons Cyberpunk already. Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending. Stephenson is not for me I guess.
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  > Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending. That's how I felt the first time I read it. After the second it started to grow on me, and gets better with every read through. The audiobook is excellent as well.
vonjuice 3y ago
I got through it, but I see more value in it for the ideas than how they're executed and how it's written.
hiidrew 3y ago
I agree. I usually finish most books I start but Snow Crash was an exception. I can't quite articulate my distaste. Looking back, one of the small things that ticked me off was Hiro Protagonist – I couldn't take the book seriously at all. Felt almost overly cheesy and clichey. I'd like to give him another shot with Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age. I've appreciated him elsewhere, like as a podcast guest. He definitely has an interesting mind, just didn't enjoy Snow Crash.

imp0cat 3y ago

They are not for the faint of heart. :) But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.

devilbunny 3y ago

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.

MarcScott 3y ago
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)
- ElevenLathe 3y ago
  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.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy everything Gibson has written, but Pattern Recognition is by far my favorite.
    - ElevenLathe 3y ago
      It's wonderful! He gets the timbre of early 2000s forum culture exactly right.
- tsujamin 3y ago
  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.
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...
  - Melting_Harps 3y ago
    > 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-video-ringworld-snow-crash-lazarus-sci-fi-tv https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/29/16383994/amazon-streaming...
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    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.
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  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.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    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.
    - 2024throwaway 3y ago
      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.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      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.
    - auspiv 3y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        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.
eigenket 3y ago
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).
- busterarm 3y ago
  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.
  - eigenket 3y ago
    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.
  - nickhalfasleep 3y ago
    The Big U has it’s faults; but is still an insightful look at the weird people and organizations within any large university.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > 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.
infthi 3y ago
There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different from other works.
- simonbarker87 3y ago
  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.
  - jes5199 3y ago
    I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff happens I'm less interested
histories 3y ago
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.
- touisteur 3y ago
  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.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    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.
chrisshroba 3y ago
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.
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk. I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.
  - tonyg 3y ago
    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.
  - AlanYx 3y ago
    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.)
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > 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?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    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.
arethuza 3y ago
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"
protomolecule 3y ago
I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much, found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.
slothtrop 3y ago
His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.
greedo 3y ago
I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age. I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.
mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
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.

abraxas 3y ago

My first and only exposure to Stephenson was Seveneves. I think he writes for autists and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense. Stephenson's focus on technical details in his novels buries the story and any character development in a mountain of minutiae making them a chore for anyone who does not need exhaustive technical explanations to suspend disbelief. Thus my guess is that his books really hit the spot for people on the spectrum as their bar for technical consistency is much higher than for those who are more neurotypical.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Man, and I thought 'Seveneves' was a quick one, fast moving. Should I see a doctor? I honestly didn't realize others saw it that way. Now I'm worried. Lol, if you like Stephenson, you might need help.
- abraxas 3y ago
  Pages and pages treatises about orbital mechanics, PhD dissertation on how space station docking works. Seveneves fast paced? yeah, no.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  To me, 'Seveneves' took longer than usual to world build and get things going. Once it got going after 'the event', things moved along as a pretty good clip. Don't know if he has any plans to revisit that world but it would be interesting to explore things from after the time jump in more detail.
  - 2024throwaway 3y ago
    "The event" happens in the first sentence of the book.
    - ckozlowski 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure OP is referring to either the ramifications of that event (the climax of part 1), or perhaps the end of part 1 which sets part 2 in motion (with a drastic change in focus). I'm being deliberately vague in order to not reveal spoilers.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I read half of Snow Crash and it felt like there was no plot that emerged? I dunno how to explain it. Half the book felt like a context-building prologue.

antihero 3y ago

I read Snow Crash as a young teenager and it inspired me in some way.

keiferski 3y ago

His books have a certain…tone…that you either like or don’t like. Personally, as much as I enjoy cyberpunk literature, I didn’t really enjoy Snow Crash. Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me.

noch 3y ago
> Too much snark and Reddit-style humor for me. Neal Stephenson is decidedly not a good prose stylist. But I guess he doesn't aim to be. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" and "Anathem" are piles of really mediocre, ungainly sentences. What he has are many interesting ideas and he is a fun conveyor of those ideas, for the most part. But he's not a Nabokov nor a Cormac McCarthy nor a Samuel Delany. But we love him for he's "one of us". He wrote that excellent essay that placed a geek at the beginning of the Creation myth: "In the Beginning was the Command Line" https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt Stephenson is also the one said the words of caution that inspired many a young nerd to be active in the world and work hard and always remember that someone somewhere has to know exactly how keep the lights on and the water running: > Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. _Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out._ (https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673 https://archive.is/RdxVT#selection-497.0-497.673)
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yeah, I guess I just prefer William Gibson's take when it comes to cyberpunk lit. It's just more...serious? Plausible? Less of a "nerd inside joke" activity.

BirAdam 3y ago

So, I look at the entire genre of cyberpunk as well as related genres as pulp sci-fi. It isn’t always “good” if we’re comparing to Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert, but there are often some entertaining ideas and interesting themes in them. I love Nosferatu, but I can still enjoy Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

piltdownman 3y ago
Neuromancer is genre defining and defying. To categorise it as 'just' cyberpunk is a disservice. Pity about the rest of the Trilogy; the 'Go Set a Watchman' to Neuromancer's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' if you will. Heinlein I love, but to pretend he's not serialised pulp-fiction outside of maybe 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is fairly disingenuous.

azangru 3y ago

I hated Snow Crash (it aged poorly), but loved REAMDE. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves were decent; Termination Shock got fun in the end; whereas The Rise and Fall of DODO was more interesting in the beginning. Not sure how I feel about Fall - there were certainly some good parts to it, especially in its parallels with Milton.

abakker 3y ago
REAMDE was like reading a movie. Just great stuff. I enjoyed Snow Crash, but agree it had some unfinished-ness feelings to it. like a stronger editor could have shaped it a bit better.

alexitorg 3y ago

I love Snow Crash. I was wearing my Black Sun night club (from snow crash) t-shirt to work today. That being said, it does feel like an early book. It is possibly over packed with ideas and possibly so edgy it feels like it is trying too hard.

Vecr 3y ago
What does a "Black Sun night club" t-shirt look like? I've had people (claiming to be US police) joke online about shooting anyone wearing a plate carrier with a black sun patch on it on sight.

wolfram74 3y ago

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?

brk 3y ago
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.
jabl 3y ago
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.
the__alchemist 3y ago
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.
- 3y ago

matthiaswh 3y ago

Similarly, I wanted to love Stephenson. I even enjoy the intense technical details in a good sci-fi story (I'm talking to you Red Mars). I started with Seveneves and could not finish it. After 20 pages I wanted to quit, but I stuck it out for another 150 pages before folding. The premise of the story was fantastic, but the writing was not enjoyable to me, and IMO, not very good. Where Robinson and authors like Weir and Clarke weave the technical details into the story in a fascinating way and show understanding of the topic, I felt Stephenson was copy-pasting Wikipedia articles into the middle of a book. Furthermore, he treated the reader like an idiot - by the end I couldn't help but laugh painfully when he felt the need to explain to us for the 30th time that A+0.150 means 0 years and 150 days after the agent event. His characters are vague and annoying. While Robinson's characters were similarly lacking in depth in Red Mars, at least they represented something bigger, were deliberately chosen, and served a storytelling purpose. Here's an example I pulled out of Seveneves that made me cringe. "In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no mass. Once Amalthea (a comet) had been attached, it was like a kite with a big rock strapped to it." Weir would have pulled that line off easily as a slightly sarcastic, self-aware remark. I didn't get the impression that Stephenson meant it anything other than a serious statement.

np_tedious 3y ago

Snow Crash is definitely overrated. I loved Cryptpnomicon, Baroque cycle, Anathem, REAMDE, Diamond Age

snapcaster 3y ago

I feel similarly about Dune, not a big fan of the writing style but the ideas are so cool that I'm willing to "power through it" like you say

mauvehaus 3y ago

The format of a Neal Stephenson book is: A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is nerding out about at the time he's writing the book that forms the world-building (The metaverse in Snow Crash, MMORPGs in REAMDE). There will be random digressions about other things he's nerding out about that don't amount to enough to be a major feature of the world (volcanic glass knives in Snow Crash, tuck-pointing masonry in REAMDE) that he nonetheless works into the story. Some plot happens in this world, followed by an ending of highly variable quality. He ties Snow Crash together fairly well, as I recall. REAMDE, I was less impressed by. For context, I've read everything of his except the Baroque Cycle up to Seveneves. He's pretty consistent in sticking to this format. In my opinion his best writing is In The Beginning Was The Command Line[0]. I particularly like the quote "I use eMacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor." It makes me smile despite the fact that I'm a vi person. It's also uncharacteristicly short for his work. [0] https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sh...

ghaff 3y ago
I found REAMDE maybe his worst book that I've read. For one thing, it was one of those books where, if a lot of things don't line up just perfectly again and again, there's really no story. I mostly liked Cryptonomicon and Anathem--but I probably wouldn't push a reader into the latter as an introduction.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  Yeah, REAMDE was a weird mashing together of what if things were happening in WoW and IRL and it all was somehow about the global war on terror? I concur that it's probably his worst novel that I've read. And that Anathem probably shouldn't be anyone's introduction to his work.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    Anathem was my introduction and I feel that it has spoiled his other works for me.

glitchc 3y ago

I thought Cryptonomicon was his best book. It's okay not to like Stephenson.

andyjohnson0 3y ago

I don't think you're missing anything, really. Unlike his non-fiction essays and articles [1], which are mostly excellent, his fiction just isn't all that good. Typically the concept and ideas are interesting, but the story/characterisation/ending is poor and the digressions aren't able to hide this for very long. I read Snow Crash and it was fun, but I had to skip over huge banks of filler. Cryptonomicon and Seveneves and REAMDE were tedious and ultimately unrewarding slogs that persuaded me not to touch his work again. I'm just glad I never attempted the Baroque Cycle. I never understood HN's enthusiasm for Stephenson's fiction, so I suspect I'll get roasted too. But bring it on I guess. [1] In the Beginning was the Command-Line, Mother Earth Mother Board, etc.

adolph 3y ago
Mother Earth Mother Board was my introduction to Stephenson. Glad to see a mention of it here. I reread many of Stephenson's words periodically because I enjoy it, but I can appreciate how the characters are perhaps lacking. Its hard for me to put my finger on why, but the Judge in Blood Meridian seems more like a live person than Shaftoe in Cryptonomicon. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

yaky 3y ago

[dead]

piltdownman 3y ago

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.

theGnuMe 3y ago
That's a great sentence, and would make a great opening line to a book. You'd have to know your audience though. Do you have a couple more sentences to flesh it out (as in what do you mean) for us lay people?
- piltdownman 3y ago
  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.

alienicecream 3y ago

It was poorly written and the story was something a teenager would dream up, but your complaint is that the editing wasn't finished? Is that how you judge a story?

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

Cryptonomicon is one of my all time favorite books. Diamond Age and Snowcrash were only ok.

LegitShady 3y ago

you are not alone. I think he has interesting ideas he incorporates into his books/stories but I don't think he's a very good writer. Personally I need someone to be a good writer for me to enjoy reading their books - otherwise the experience is draining instead of uplifting.

foobarbecue 3y ago

Snow Crash was supposed to be a graphic novel, and then the illustrator quit. It's not at all like any of the other Stephenson novels. On the other hand, I find your fixation on errors odd -- sounds like your complaint is with the editor, not the author.

mnky9800n 3y ago

I choose to accept Snowcrash as a clever satire on how vapid and empty cyberpunk is as a genre.

bigie35 3y ago

I have read three of his books so far - Snow crash, Cryptonomincon, and Seveneves. By far his most fully formed and epic book for me has been Seveneves. It is hardcore Sci-Fi at an epic scale both in world building and time. I got 700 pages in when I had to return it to the library or be sent to collections.

AsthmaBoy 3y ago

One or two decades ago I read on some newsgroup on the internet (and having experienced it myself), that Neal Stephensons storylines never actually

madaxe_again 3y ago
Yes, that pretty much sums him

slothtrop 3y ago

He's written far better, both on the sci-fi side and otherwise. imo, it goes Anathem > Cryptonomicon > The Diamond Age > Seveneves > Termination Shock > Snow Crash. The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction, but I didn't get into it. REAMDE is a techno-thriller, and a divisive one, where it lands depends on whether you enjoy that style.

arethuza 3y ago
"The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction" Apart from the suspiciously well informed immortal character and the magical gold? I wonder what could explain those...
- slothtrop 3y ago
  Ok, pedant.
ttepasse 3y ago
> The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction ... written in a SciFi mindset, I would say.

packetlost 3y ago

I personally can't stand his style of writing. Tried to power through Snow Crash but couldn't do it. Just not my cup of tea.

jackgavigan 3y ago

Try Zodiac and Interface (authored under the co-pseudonym Stephen Bury).

batch12 3y ago
I will give it a shot, thank you.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
Came here to say this. Both of those books are underrated. Interface is a particular favorite of mine and it has help up fairly well.

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TheCleric 3y ago

Yeah I’m in the same camp. Tried to read Cryptonomicon and immediately felt lost.

dougmwne 3y ago

Stephenson is an ideas guy. The books are just loose vehicles for all his ideas and things like plot, characters and (gasp) endings are not center stage. There are so many ideas in his books, mountain upon mountain that it’s no wonder some of them ended up being real products in following decades. They are great fuel for the technical imagination.

readingnews 3y ago

I have only ever read Snow Crash. I enjoyed it. However, I read it in 1992. When I think about it now, I bet reading it today would seem odd... like watching old 1950s shows that make predictions about the world of tomorrow.

_yb2s 3y ago

Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk like Gibson. You’re missing that the low effort and placeholder names are part of the joke, making fun of how cyberpunk tries to seem cool by trying to be raw, gritty, and low effort… like rock stars that try too hard at pretending to care about nothing. Stephenson does it to a comical extreme, e.g. naming his main character Hiro Protagonist. His other books are not in that style.

batch12 3y ago
I have heard this, but it seems more like laziness to me. Thanks for the perspective.
- _yb2s 3y ago
  The density of creative jokes about being gritty and low effort in Snow Crash isn't possible without substantially more thought and effort than writing normal fiction. Laziness won't produce a book that has people laughing out loud as they read it 32 years later. If anything, I think the problem with Snow Crash is it has become so popular and lasted so long, people get less of the jokes now, because nobody remembers what he was satirizing anymore.
busfahrer 3y ago
Low-effort and high-tech, to paraphrase Gibson‘s M.O.
blincoln 3y ago
> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that Snow Crash is satire, I recommend reading Headcrash, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to Snow Crash. If Snow Crash is the original Robocop (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then Headcrash is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (completely over-the-top). > like Gibson. It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it. Almost everyone gets a gritty Blade Runner image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin. Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. Johnny Mnemonic (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of The X-Files.

ecocentrik 3y ago

Snow Crash must feel really dated in 2024 so I don't recommend starting with that book. Diamond Age is a fairly accurate description of the present and a possible near future, but somehow written in the 90s. We aren't choking on nanite dust and still haven't quite gotten 3d printers to the level described in the book but the Neo-Victorian social stratification is on track and machine learning is transforming education in ways hinted at in the book. What are you missing? His books that take place in the present or the future are thought experiments focused around the ways technology can transform society. He is pretty good at grounding his characters in fairly complex social landscapes and then describing the ways technology (real or imagined) interacts with and influences that landscape. You might also be missing his surreal sense of humor if you thought names like Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash were placeholders. As a new reader you might be more I'd start with his newer books and work backwards. I haven't read "Termination Shock" yet but I would recommend both "Fall" and "Seveneves".

themadturk 3y ago
Termination Shock was pretty good, but seemed kind of low-effort, not a typical Stephenson blockbuster.
jimmygrapes 3y ago
I found Termination Shock to be his worst by far, in large part because it felt too contemporary. It felt awfully similar to a music album mandated by the studio to an artist that really didn't have anything to say, so he just skimmed trending news of the time, went down a shallow rabbit hole or two then wrote a half-hearted but verbose blog post and called it a novel. I didn't get any sense of passion from it.

BeetleB 3y ago

Neal Stephenson doesn't write novels. He writes novel-length entries in an encyclopedia.

kagakuninja 3y ago
Each of the novels is the size of an encyclopedia, which is why I gave up after Cryptonomicon.

flohofwoe 3y ago

TBH I had to start Snow Crash multiple times until it 'clicked' (e.g. "what's with the bizarre writing style..."). It's more of a "super hero comic" than a "science fiction novel". I still like to read it about once a year if I want a quick fix. I haven't noticed any of the errors in the text you describe though. The thing with the classics is that three decades later the topics that where novel back then are science fiction tropes today, because everybody copied them over and over again. Same with Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, etc... FWIW though, I'm not a big fan of Neal Stephenson's more recent books. The last one I really enjoyed was Anathem, and the last one I attempted but didn't finish was REAMDE. Now for something where I really don't understand the hype: Ready Player One. What a drivel ;)

Krasnol 3y ago

I feel you. I felt for the hype on Reddit around this author and read two books. Snow Crash felt like he wanted to jump on Gibson's train and save the world building altogether because people are supposed to know Gibsons Cyberpunk already. Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending. Stephenson is not for me I guess.

twisteriffic 3y ago
> Anathem felt like, outside of buildings, he just isn't able to provide a proper world at all. The rest seems to consist of a Wikipedia article without losing too much thought on an ending. That's how I felt the first time I read it. After the second it started to grow on me, and gets better with every read through. The audiobook is excellent as well.

vonjuice 3y ago

I got through it, but I see more value in it for the ideas than how they're executed and how it's written.

hiidrew 3y ago

I agree. I usually finish most books I start but Snow Crash was an exception. I can't quite articulate my distaste. Looking back, one of the small things that ticked me off was Hiro Protagonist – I couldn't take the book seriously at all. Felt almost overly cheesy and clichey. I'd like to give him another shot with Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age. I've appreciated him elsewhere, like as a podcast guest. He definitely has an interesting mind, just didn't enjoy Snow Crash.