Every interview I've watched with Neal lately I feel like he's tired of talking about a concept from his 2nd (technically third but we don't talk about that) book 30 years ago. He's written so much better stuff since then and I would love to hear him talk about basically any of that.
I went to a book signing (Fall, or Dodge in Hell) and you could tell he was so worn out over discussing Snowcrash, and that was five years ago. Otherwise a very thoughtful Q&A session, though. A stark contrast from the Neil Gaiman thing I attended. I did find his vision of the internet being a dystopia of so much false information that people were hiring personal moderators to filter it very depressing and prescient. The book was a challenge, but by god I spent my money so I was finishing it. Felt like he had just discovered the book of Genesis and wanted a modern repeat of it. Always felt like you took a deep dive into Wikipedia when reading his books.
> Felt like he had just discovered the book of Genesis and wanted a modern repeat of it
Agree and I actually really enjoyed that part of it. He kind of seveneves'd it but I think the back half of them are fun. Wrapping up a story is never his strong suit. Lot of "and everyone sat down for a nice dinner. The end". Always worth it though.
Many well-known artists have this problem. Heck, my gf went to a K&D concert recently, and she described the same phenomenon. People were ok while the new stuff was being played. And since everyone was obviously waiting for it, they played their hits around the end, which is where the people were most excited. And thats justa a recent example. Some of the really good guys usually play over it, and reinvent themselves, ignoring what their fans want to hear.
That said, I personally also prefer his earlier books. Granted, snowcrash was a young mans fever dream, and you kind of grow out of it. A young ladies illustrated primer? That was kinda cool. Quicksilver? Yeah, an unexpected history lesson woven into a pretty long story. Liked it. But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
For me it was Termination Shock that finally convinced me to stop reading his books. He just likes to write really long, repetitive and wildly overly detailed books. I was entertained by SevenEves and Reamde but I'm open to the possibility that I might very well react as I did to Termination Shock if I tried rereading them.
Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.
Ahh, I dont feel alone, thats nice. I didn't even know Termination Schock. But glancing over the wikipedia page for it, I immediately know this is definitely not my genre. Climate fiction, no thanks.
> But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
The first and the second part of the book (which constitute most of the book) stand on its own. I think it's better to pretend the 3rd part doesn't exist (which is IMHO rather easy since it's just unnecessary) than to discount the whole book.
I am just here to thank HN for introducing me to Neal Stephenson. My life has been made better by reading his books.
It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
All and every book I read before were for the lowest common denominator level of people. Sure, smart, educated, cultured, wise people could get more out of some of them (like Anna Karenina), but the books were written to be made accessible to each and every human.
Getting to know Neal's works has brought in a paradigm shift in my reading and thinking, and now I read other authors like Greg Egan, too.
Thanks to Neal for being himself. And thanks to HN for suggesting his works on books threads.
I am reading Quicksilver right now, and read Anathem, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age before. Loved each one.
If you are reading this comment, feel free to suggest me other authors or works, although not from Neal, as I will read ALL of his works, anyway.
> It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
I've read a lot of Stephenson and I don't mean this as a knock against him exactly, just an observation: he writes in a way that is inclined to make the HN crowd (myself included) feel smart because we are the target audience.
If you look at a lot of the protagonists, many of them are startup founders and game designers and coders and cryptographers and mathematicians, going on "heroes' journeys" where they save the world and/or get the girl. Nerds (aka hackers) who save the day. It's almost like it's engineered to stoke the egos of technologists.
Stephenson (who - again - I have read a lot of, and admire in a lot of ways) will always feel to me like a bit of a relic from early Internet culture, where a sort of persona was idolized. The startup founder / hacker / clever man (it was always a man).
I disagree. Neal's characters are mostly weak and forgettable. Even the storylines often seem to be playing second fiddle. The real power is in his imaginative and thought-through world building. I have close to zero recollection who was the hero in Anathem, instead I often come back mentally to the ideas around the concents and avout society.
You may also like Philip K Dick. There seems to be a decent intersection between fans of each, and while they’re radically different authors, they have the same heavy cerebral load - Dick makes you put the book down, stare into the middle distance, and go “whoa”. The kinds of books that leave a lasting imprint on your mind.
Oh, and Iain M Banks. More accessible, I’d say, but no shortage of Big Ideas.
Neal's particular strength is in a detailed world-building. Dick created wild worlds, but they are not particularly fleshed out, kinda dream-like in their vagueness, therefore for me not "convincing" in the same way as Neal's worlds are.
With Banks, the worlds (Culture being a major one) are more fleshed out, but somehow to me not as interesting. I've read several of his books, but somehow didn't enjoy the Culture ones a lot (read Player of Games, Use of Weapons and Excession). I did like the A Song of Stone a lot, but that's not even sci-fi. I'm aware my opinion is quite unpopular regarding Banks.
I find Stephenson is detailed and wordy as you say, and the dream-like vagueness of PKD’s worlds also stands - but I would say that PKD uses worldbuilding as a narrative tool far more frequently, where through his impressionistic strokes of the pen you end up with an implied and coherent world - only for him to twist it, to shatter it, to absolutely subvert your expectations.
His shorts are where he shines, but I’ll admit to having read and enjoyed his entire corpus, down to the man’s withering legal correspondence.
I’ve gotta say I do love the culture series and his sci-fi works, but I have an equal amount of shelf space dedicated to Iain Banks - The Bridge and Whit stand out.
He's detailed (maximalist as he likes to say), but I wouldn't call it worldbuilding (with exceptions). A fantasy author does that. He just gets into the nitty gritty about tech or ideas.
Why can this be called "worldbuilding" in fantasy, but not in sci-fi?
His sci-fi books (Anathem, Diamong Age, Snow Crash) are not just detailing technology, but the whole society. All of the detailed descriptions about concents and avouts (in Anathem) is without any technology since they explicitly disawow technology.
Like I said, exceptions. I don't think tDA and SC do that much worldbuilding, speaking as someone who doesn't usually care for it. Those who ape the Tolkien high-fantasy school lean on it more, meandering descriptions. Anathem is actually my favorite.
> Those who ape the Tolkien high-fantasy school lean on it more, meandering descriptions
You seem to have a very specific idea of what constitutes "worldbuilding".
In my mind, every scifi has to do worldbuilding, because they deal with some non-existent worlds - they can't just rely on reader's being familiar with reality. They can't just say "imagine it exactly like today's US, just with faster than light travel". The authors have to describe the setting of the plot to the reader to at least some detail. Stephenson does that in my opinion very well and it's the main draw for me.
I haven’t read the books but based on the show, which I’ve just started re-watching, I’d say The Expanse is an exemplar of worldbuilding in sci fi. I agree that GP seems to have an odd idea of what exactly world building is.
I always found most of PKD’s short stories quite excellent, but all of his full-length books that I have read have been a slog. It’s quite telling that almost all of the movies based on his works have been based on his short stories, not novels.
I’m probably one of the rare HN subscribers with a formal education in film production rather than CS or engineering, and you are absolutely right. The first thing they teach about screenwriting is to temper one’s ambitions, because two-hours is nowhere near long enough to adapt a full novel without serious cuts. I imagine that’s obvious to anyone who’s been disappointed by a feature adaptation. I assume that it’s also down to the fact that it’s much more fun to expand on a good short story or novella than it is to have to choose what to cut from a good novel.
Well, obviously "Do Androids dream of electric sheep" simply because the movie left out a little bit too much, which you can catch up on when reading the book. Keyword "Mood Organ".
I also liked "Second variety" which has also been rendered as a audio play IIRC.
And, for the non-sci-fi part, A Scanner Darkly is pretty weird. Has also been rendered as a movie...
If you feel this way about the works of Neal Stephenson, might I suggest Cixin Liu?
Though well-done in it's own right, the 3-Body Problem Netflix series does not quite do justice to the intricacy of Liu's writing in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. You might find the change of pace to be somewhat jarring in comparison to Stephenson but it fulfills a similar enjoyment of Science Fiction.
I enjoyed 3 body problem. I found the sequels more of a collection of sci fi tropes than a good coherent story. You will get better original thoughts from David Brin, Stephen Baxter and Vernor Vinge
Karl Schroeder; Bruce Sterling; for far-future implications of tech, Linda Nagata. Elizabeth Bear's _Ancestral Night_. For magnificent scope, Sam Hughes (qntm)'s _Ra_ and _Fine Structure_.
I can recommend Lockstep from Karl Schroeder. Scifi books rarely tackle the problem of huge distances, slower thab light speed travel and the resulting long time scales and their effects on multi-star civilizations (FTL is the usual boring cop-out). Lockstep provides an interesting take on the problem.
Is that anywhere close to the Quantum Thief series in research quality/accuracy? I've read physicists who say they can't get time travel to work even in fiction, it's just that incompatible with everything else.
Yeah, that's how you have to do it, but the main issues are 1) what do you care about, which actually surprisingly mostly boils down to how you calculate probabilities in multiverse situations and 2) how the hell do you find anything? Sure, you somehow jump to a different universe, but I can't think of a physics based reason why you'd be able to 1) get back to your original universe and 2) find any other one you jumped to previously ever again.
I read Embassytown and Daemon and Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez close together. I find they have an interesting theme throughout regarding the role of truth and manipulation. I would not recommend the sequels to 3 body problem. If you like big picture space opera, Existence by David Brin and Exultant by Stephen Baxter are better.
In the same vein as Vernor Vinge, I would recommend Stephen Baxter. Stephen's writing always gives me the same feeling as when I look at the stars at night and am reminded that where I am is just a small part of everything. The manifold trilogy as well as the long earth series he did with Terry Pratchett are very good. The first is not anthropocentric, which I found was a refreshing change.
> I think that it takes a lot of discipline in the minds of technologists to separate the good from the bad of crypto. There is actually a great deal of good in the technology, separate from the bad uses of it that we've seen over the past, and I think we should be open-minded to the learnings to be made from there.
It's so hard to get past this, and it's intuitive and understandable to me why that's the case - given the state of "web3". IMO he is correct in that there are extremely interesting things going on there, but I think for many it's easier to dismiss it altogether.
I have always believed that the Metaverse is whatever modern computing (especially the Internet) has evolved into. It has nothing to do with VR googles. You don't need AAA graphics to make an immersing world -- in fact, some text adventure games are quite immersive, and by the same principle you don't need VR to enter the Metaverse.
Metaverse is escapism and alternative socializing in capital letters. For me, Metaverse in the 80s is me typing BASIC programs, playing Alley Cat, and watching a friend play Prince of Persia (in reality, not VR). Metaverse in the 90s is me borrowing pirated games from a friend and logging into BBS talking trash till early morning. It has always been here. It never left. It IS immersive. It doesn't need some VR devices to be "more" immersive. In fact, the more "modern" we become, the LESS immersive it seems to be, with all those online ads and other shits.
For a minute there I thought I had written your message and forgot about it. It resonates strongly with how I feel.
Infocom, the leading maker of the text adventures you talk about, used to advertise that the brain is the most powerful graphics technology (https://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=6312). When playing their games as a kid, I remember the sense of wonder with what then felt like an entire universe contained inside the computer. I tried to "trick the computer" into letting me go places that weren't technically part of the game!
When thinking about the games back then - and I say that not with a sense of nostalgia, but simply remembering how I felt about these games before I understood how they worked - I wanted to go to every house in the scenery, every city building I was driving by. I wanted to see if I could go there, knock on the door and there would be people and adventures waiting for me everywhere.
That dream was the metaverse indeed. Great graphics of course helps a lot, but they are not the main characteristic of this immersion. It's depth, content, the sense that every couch in the room could have a long lost and forgotten receipt under it.
Adding people often breaks the immersion, especially in Free to Play games. When you are in a medieval world and suddenly a player called "Memes4Ca$h" dressed in a pink armor shows up, it breaks the immersion. The ideal environment would either need true human role players or AGI-managed characters.
Stephenson and Sweeney mean something else: User-generated 3D worlds where people interact with their avatars, e.g. to play games. Roblox and Fortnite are semi-early examples. VR is not required.
I remember an anecdote I heard when I was in high school. A teacher recounted how they had been listening to a radio talk show, and on the talk show, the presenter was interviewing an elderly lady about why she eschewed TV and preferred to listen to fiction shows on the radio. Her answer, apparently, was "because the pictures are better."
I'm going to plug my open-source metaverse - Substrata (https://substrata.info/) - and talk about it a bit, since it seems relevant to a lot of the topics in this article.
A single world: There is a single main Substrata world, which is filled with user-generated content and scripts. Rendering this and running physics for it is such a difficult technical problem that most other metaverses don't even try! Instead they tend to have lots of separate worlds / rooms. A single main world was important for me, partly as a result of reading Snow Crash.
Technology sharing:
I recently added Luau scripting, which is a fantastic Lua fork from Roblox. It allows sandboxed script execution, has a JIT mode, and has all the usual benefits of Lua (easy binding code etc.).
Substrata also imports standard formats like GLTF. GLTF actually allows pretty good reuse of assets between metaverses.
Crypto: Substrata optionally uses Ethereum NFTs for land - people can pay for land in Fiat, and then optionally mint the land as NFTs.
The big advantage of using NFTs here is that allows land to be traded on the 'secondary market', without me having to do anything, and without my permission and involvement.
If I didn't use crypto then i would need to implement some kind of marketplace myself, perhaps with an escrow system for land transfer etc, and have to deal with fraud and chargebacks etc.
The Metaverse is something companies want to happen (and monetize) more than any users actually want it. VR is a niche. Wearing a clumsy headset will I think pretty much always be a niche. I didn't realize Sweeney was so bullish on it.
The Metaverse is a bit like federated services: it springs from some idealism rather than giving users anything they actually want or need.
The Apple lawsuit, in hindsight, I think was a serious miscalculation. I think Apple's (and Google's) monopolies will end but they won't let them go willingly and it'll be worse for both companies because it'll be Congress and the EU who will decide how that works.
A court action is a way to force the issue earlier under existing legislation but only if you win. And Epic most clearly did not. So Apple is emboldened. There should be no reason that Netflix or Amazon or Epic should have to pay the Apple 30% tax (it's probably less by some agreement they have) on digital purchases purely through their existing payment platforms. That seemed like the most natural way to attack the monopoly (which is both a monopoly on distribution and payments).
Anyway, I put the Metaverse in the same category as the Star Trek transporter except a transporter would have utility.
Roblox is a hit and that's what they wanted to replicate: you would be able to take items from game to game, but in reality that doesn't happen since 9 times out of 10 it would clash with the game's art style or reduce the value of the game's own cosmetics. Being able to create marketplace-style item trading would be a big cash cow (see: steam's fee on marketplace sales).
But it's obvious why it's mostly under 18 who play it and spend money on the hats specifically to look cool or to impress others. At a certain point you realize there's not much value in it unless you enjoy specifically seeing those hats yourself whenever you use the product.
In addition, roblox a third-person game, so you see your own character constantly - while a lot of value is lost in a first-person title without getting creative (e.g. weapon skins in shooters).
What I find especially frustrating with all the Metaverse stuff is that everybody aims for the pie-in-sky solution (VR, realtime 3D worlds, etc.) instead of fixing the main problem with the Internet first: Computers can't talk to each other directly due to NAT.
That's the root of so many issue with the modern Internet, but every "solution" is just more cloud nonsense, instead of addressing the core connectivity issue.
I don't need virtual reality when even just the act of moving a file from one computer to another is already such a dysfunctional mess.
I'm kind of shocked Stephenson would associate with the kind of person that runs a company like Epic. I guess Epic's unethetical behavior is just not widely known. Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux. Now on those platforms there are no native clients for multiplayer.
> I'm kind of shocked Stephenson would associate with the kind of person that runs a company like Epic.
A person with one of the very longest runs in history as CEO of a tech company? A tech company CEO who is also involved in all the company's engineering and knows what he is talking about?
> Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux.
Didn't they stop developing the macOS and Linux versions and give those players their money back?
What a monster. I can see why people wouldn't want to be in the same room as him for some reason.
I have my doubts. For example, he claims that they won't support Linux because it's too niche but Linux has been (slightly) ahead of MacOS in the Steam survey for a while now (context: Fortnite is available on MacOS). Making is mistake is human, but he's sticking to his guns despite objective metrics to the contrary - I would expect more from a renowned CEO.
It seems rather irrational of a company to turn away paying customers, right? Except his view isn't at all unique. They judge that Linux and its user base isn't big enough to be worth much of their time, but it's not like they're the only ones.
Of course if you include the first half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious that I was talking about engineering when it comes to "knows what he is talking about." The question of whether Linux is worth supporting is at least half a marketing question. I doubt they're wrong about it, but I try to keep an open mind...
I think Tim took the right approach for the both the right and wrong reasons. We don't need more system programming, but more agnosticism.
This is what SteamPlay and tools like proton and WINE solve. Why develop for Windows when you can build with respect to tools like those, and if the customer base exists, then allocate resources?
> objective metrics to the contrary
Of the 2ish% of the market gaming on Linux, what subset will buy your software? If I had one customer in 50 who submitted nearly half of all of our support tickets for development that wasn't transferrable to the other 49 and I couldn't charge them to cover it, I'd fire them, too.
I expect macOS is cheaper to support and develop for (if for no other reason then because it's a well supported Unreal Engine target) and judged to be, at least potentially, more profitable. But I imagine the relationship with Apple carries a huge amount of weight in a decision like that as well, and I can't even guess how that factors in.
UE supports Linux (via Wine/Proton) just fine. There are tons of games that use it. The main issue is the anti-cheat solution, which does support Linux, but needs to be enabled (they have not). While I am sure there would be issues beyond that, they would almost certainly be minor.
> at least potentially, more profitable.
This is because MacOS is more widespread as a general purpose desktop operating system. Those statistics are irrelevant here. Linux is a more widespread gaming operating system. Dogma is pointless drivel.
They also moved the servers from Steam to Epic around the same time, and it's unmitigated rubbish ever since. Match-ups are a joke. People with a lower ping than you basically have superpowers. With the addition of machine-learning bots becoming popular just after all that, it's made the game pretty hard to like these days.
Epic's behavior has been consistently ethical as long as I can remember (and I've been following them since the 90s). The reason Sweeney is an interesting person is that he has been developing the industry (not just his company) for the past 30 years, and has interesting things to say based on that experience because he has a strategic vision and also continues to be deeply technically involved (he was the original architect of the Unreal Engine and continues to personally design tools and entire languages/frameworks for game engines). He was a technical founder role model long before pretty much every operator on scene today even started their career.
I fully agree with him on Apple. The current App Store rules are insanely anti-competitive. It is as if Microsoft would launch Windows 12 where all software, I mean apps, had to be downloaded and purchased (30% goes to MS) via the Microsoft store. Valve's Steam would be forbidden, browsers other than Edge as well.
Could be Apple contributed if it was around the time they dropped 32bit support. I'm kind of amazed the new Doom+Doom2 re-release doesn't support even Intel Macs, despite moving to Kex. IDK whose at fault but it's lame if they let support drop and don't at least offer refunds to recent purchasers.
This was a great answer:
"Stephenson: My overarching answer is that the actual market and actual users find ways to do things that we don't necessarily imagine in advance, just with our own limited perspective. And so cyberpunk had a whole aesthetic about it and still does, which to a large extent, revolved around having cool shit on your face. Mirror shades. Actually, one of the original anthologies of cyberpunk fiction was called Mirror Shades. And it was easy to assume back then that in order to truly experience a three-dimensional environment in an immersive way that you needed stereoscopy, you needed to have a different image slightly in each eyeball to give you a fully three-dimensional effect.
And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse."
I am glad to hear about Neal. As he great American Writer and I love read his books. During this journey I started learning about marketing and joined (https://balloonslane.com/) for hand one experience.
I really feel like epic games should be paying games to let people use their consistent character across games. It doesn't need to be significant. Just the metahuman mesh.
I'm a big sci-fi reader. Snow Crash is one of those books that I really wanted to like, but I was unable to get past the odd writing style and run-on sentences. I got about half-way through but never finished it. I know some people swear by Stephenson, so maybe I should give it another chance later in life.
It’s not my favorite of his books. Try Cryptonomicon (if you like history/math) or Anathem (if you like sci fi/math) or The Diamond Age (if you like sci fi).
Those three and REAMDE (which I'm currently rereading) are just fantastic. Snow Crash was very stylized; too much for some tastes, not enough for others.
IMO, Stephenson's books are too long for the stories they tell, especially the final 25-33% - those can be a real slog. I gave up on Seveneves at about 90% or the book, reading it was no longer fun. I read a handful of his prior work to completion when I was a book completionist, so I can't tell of it says anything about the nature of the novels, or my own perseverance.
With Cryptonomicon I had to keep stopping to look up every other word in a thesaurus. It made me feel incredibly stupid and just made the experience a slog.
One of the biggest pros of a reading device like a Kindle is that you don't have to interrupt the flow, just tap the word and get your definition. Same for footnotes. It was the only way I could get through Infinite Jest.
An odd writing style is a defining feature of the cyberpunk genre according to the canonical cyberpunk anthology "Mirror Shades" (edited by Bruce Sterling). Stephenson actually mentions the anthology in the interview. Snow Crash is relatively tame compared to some books by Williamson and Sterling.
I think the idea is that you wouldn't understand everything either if you were actually transported into the future: there would be a ton of new terminologies, unfamiliar concepts, and a changed culture that takes different things to be a matter of course.
I had a somewhat analogous experience with Seveneves, which many people have recommended endlessly.
At some point in the book, around half way IIRC, there is an event that happens which explains the title. And it goes from something like an interesting hard sci-fi, to a sort of weird meandering fantasy thing that took a nuke to my suspension of disbelief. It also felt like the book was basically two entirely different books at that point. I simply could not get into it, or passed it.
Stephenson had a rough start in my opinion—Snow Crash isn’t really his best. Try Anathem instead. If you don’t like that, you probably won’t like Stephenson.
I also read a lot of sci fi and honestly I never really got Stephenson either. In particular the most popular stuff, Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the history trilogy just has so much Encyclopedia like infodumps in it, it was a slog for me.
Honestly his books that people don't talk about often I found more interesting, like Zodiac which is a shorter eco thriller and even Reamde even though it was long it at least has a really interesting plot going for it.
My biggest problem with him is, and I don't really mean it as an insult, but he's like a poor man's Pynchon or Hesse. If you like maximalist and historical fiction or like reading about people in monasteries might as well pick up GR or The Glass Bead game.
I don't recall laughing out loud reading Siddhartha, but man I laugh my ass off every time I read Cryptonomicon, as well as a lot of his other books. They're often over-the-top wink-wink caricatures and often full of humor and clever references.
Stephenson is for me a hit and miss author. I adore The Diamong Age, Anathem, Seveneves. I didn't finish the first book of Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon. Some of his other books I don't plan reading since I don't expect them to be good.
I'd say Anathem is his best book overall, but the first 100 or so pages is almost pure world building without much action which might turn people away.
Seveneves is close and is more accessible from the beginning. Just skip the last (after time jump) part of the book which is... unnecessary and bad.
After the time jump was fantastic. Is it directly related to the first half? Maybe not, but it's a well thought out picture of what happens as that timeline continues on. Plus it's just fun. I love the entire book (Seveneves).
> a well thought out picture of what happens as that timeline continues on
TBH it seemed very ... "idealistic" in a way, "racist" would be another word, but I'd like to avoid the word's moral connotations. Just the idea that the descendants of this particular Eve are physically strong and then descendants of this Eve are intellectuals. It kinda seemed like a fairy tale instead of an actual development, which would realistically end up way more "messy".
My impression was that with this part he was trying to come up with his own version of the fantasy trope of different races with different characteristics (orcs, elves, men, etc), and imagining a situation that could produce such.
I had trouble with the Baroque Cycle and did not bother to finish, but stuck with Cryptonomicon and it was completely worth it. Otherwise agree with your picks.
On Seveneves, no two people seem to agree on which half of the book is "bad", but I will say in general that the first half is more popular among the base. I thought the latter was fine.
Anathem was almost unreadable due to the aforementioned world building but also apparently needing to redefine every single last word in the dictionary.
But Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and REAMDE were amazing.
I found the first one a slog, but the second one more than made up for it. It’s end to end swashbuckling fun. The third one is pretty clever, painting a colourful, accessible summary of how englightenment philosophy and science, and debt-based capitalism shape the modern global economy.
I'm a big sci-fi reader as well, and I'm on a tear this year after neglecting the genre for about a decade. I find Stephenson's books to take a lot of headspace, and I don't always have that. But I do like giving books another shot at my time after a few years. I finally gave Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl another attempt and I'm enjoying it much more than I thought I would.
Thought it was just me. I'm into sci-fi for the ideas and there were too few interesting ideas and too much fluff around them. Better authors have been able to communicate more interesting ideas in many less pages. It's why I think short stories are the ideal medium for sci-fi.
Also a big sci-fi reader. I think I lasted about 20 pages in snowcrash, something about pizza delivery or something, it was so silly it left me confused. It really soured me on trying to approach anything else by Stephenson.
You're really missing out. Hiro Protagonist is a great character, and the idea of modern capitalism (Pizza delivery chains) combined with the yakuza underworld makes for some excellent cyberpunk imaginings.
Definitely Snow Crash was challenging and shows its age. Some of his older books have similar bizarro vibes, I could not get into The Diamond Age the first try.
Seveneves was much more accessible, as was The Rise and Fall of DODO, and the Baroque Cycle. Fall or Dodge in Hell is a bit more challenging but for different reasons than his early works, the subject matter is just more abstract.
No doubt they are all meandering and longwinded, the newer ones perhaps more so, but that’s Stephenson, it can be a strength and a weakness.
I feel like this happens a lot with seminal works: the concepts get remixed (or simply regurgitated) by others down the decades to the point where the original often doesn't feel original to a modern viewer/reader.
I too started on Snow Crash feeling like "this is going to be great", since it was recommended next to books I enjoyed like Neuromancer. But the pseudo-scientific feel of the Sumerian stuff just completely turned me off, I couldn't decide whether it was meant to be serious or a parody of really bad cyberpunk.
> The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist, for example.
It actually isn’t. That is the name he works under, a sort of stage name, as he styles himself as a sort of programmer celebrity. His actual name is Hiroaki. (This is mentioned in the book.)
I'm not sure that really works out too much better, because his last name is still Protagonist. Unless there's some other part of the book that says otherwise.
