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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 th

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.

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.