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

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.