Stephenson occasionally fields questions about his endings in talks. Here's one of them, from his Google talk for the Anathem book tour [1]:
Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.
A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.
But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things.
...
So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about.
I don't mind Stephenson's endings. I feel like there are to many authors out there that write until they lose interest in the story then force themselves to bang out another 50-100 pages in order to give the story a 'proper' ending. Steven King comes to mind, I find most of his longer books just reach a point were the stories momentum just stops and feels like it is being dragged to the finish line.
I've read a fair bit of Stephenson, and have never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings. I enjoy reading his stories enough that I still read (and have re-read) them. Maybe it's that I want more from the characters, or an epilogue lunch at shawarma palace (or, more appropriately, Uncle Enzo's Pizza) where they show things returning to normal.
The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
> I've ... never felt _satisfied_ by any of the endings
It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
Crypto's ending is still better than Snow Crash's (though I prefer SC overall). Someone sent me a great meme yesterday showing the back half of the horse fully drawn and the front half barely a stick figure of a horse and the back half said "Stephenson starting a book" and the front was "Stephenson finishing a book." I dunno if I've ever seen a truer meme in my life.
I love the first chapter of Snow Crash, it brilliantly establishes the world, the tone and (the) Protagonist. There’s a breathless pacing that makes it incredibly fun to read aloud. The rest I can do without.
It is also a possibly a (sort-of) sequel to Snow Crash.
There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash;
> "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
> "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
> "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
I would not have people start with that book. It's easy to get confused. It is very tough to get through some parts (unless you've read it multiple times and are a super-fan).
I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve).
I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
Anathem has easily his most complete ending, where there's even something of an epilogue after the plot threads are wrapped up, but sadly a lot of the stuff after it was a bit of a regression either in quality of ideas or of ending or both.
(Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)
At least that one ended in a burst of new threads for my imagination to chew on; the second half of Fall slowly dwindles into the petty, boring squabbles of gods, leaving a ton of more interesting questions unasked and unanswered.
Yikes! I'd decided to take a pass on anything he's written unless it received unanimous critical acclaim after slogging through Seveneves and not even finishing Reamde, so it's kind of sad to hear that things aren't getting better.
The beginning of Seveneves is pretty bad, but the rest of the book makes up for it. It's as if the first part of the book exists soley to set up the plot and characters for the second part of the story which is where the interesting bits are.
I’m convinced the ending (and other parts) of Cryptonomicon were inspired by A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, but I have no evidence to support this claim.
Huh—I'd have said Cryptonomicon's the only one of his I've read that didn't turn into a directionless mess halfway through, and/or have a bad ending. Also read The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Anathem.
I just finished _Reamde_ and was, overall, fairly satisfied with the way the story built towards the conclusion. It moves in unexpected directions, but I enjoyed the entire ride.
I keep hearing & reading enough good things about that one that I'll likely check it out eventually. I kinda swore him off after The Diamond Age gave me the novel but unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author, but if/when I backslide on that Reamde will probably be what does it.
Reamde is basically gun porn (in the same way Seveneves was orbital dynamics porn) with a protracted hostage situation for plot tension and some videogaming/spy craft stuff thrown in for flavor. Not really sci-fi IMO.
I was angry at him for taking such an excellent start to a novel, and then spending... what, 300, 400 more pages, just wasting it.
I think the part where the anger really took over, as my main feeling toward and about the novel, was a scene he wrote that exists only to have one character explain another character's motivation "to them"—but actually to us, because we'd spent the last 1/3 or so of the novel with a character whose motivations and behavior didn't seem consistent, like Stephenson had recycled the early-in-the-book character straight into another role that was actually a whole different character, without explanation, without transition, without foreshadowing, without the character themselves seeming to reflect on their own change (which might have justified this scene), without doing the work to make it fit. Moreover, and as a sign of just how "whoops better patch that up without actually putting in any effort" that was, the explanation is entirely lame and unconvincing.
It felt like a chapter that got inserted because test readers or his editor went "WTF?" about all that, and it was just so, so lazy and bad, and retroactively made the treading-water-and-pointless-but-not-offensive middle section of the book worse, to know that, no, it wasn't going somewhere good, Stephenson just wrote it poorly and now, at the end, he's lazily writing his way out of his own mess, rather than fixing it.
(this is the scene between—and I'm a little fuzzy on the characters, as this was years ago—the Chinese emperor-dude and the father who tried to get an off-books Primer for his daughter, from the beginning of the book, with the scene in question occurring, IIRC, near the beginning of what you might call the last act)
I've read all, and Anathem and the Diamond Age remain favorites. They had clearer direction than Cryptonomicon to my mind, which meanders a tad more. I recall a chapter with characters reading a memo/email from a guy explaining his stockings fetishism.
I’ve found Stephenson a mixed bag, I enjoyed his early work, especially Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and Reamde was fine. However Ive struggled to enjoy his more recent work, I’m usually excited to see a book coming, but recent works seem to lack something for me.
I gave up on Stephenson at Quicksilver. I didn't like Cryptonomicon, but liked his previous work so I gave Quicksilver a try. It's very rare that I don't finish a book, but I didn't finish that one.
Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.
Now that you say it, I think his later books spend too much time on "putting you into the world" and not enough time of actually interesting things happening in the world for my tastes.
I lived that series. I think his books depend on how much time you can devote to them. If you can read for hours on end the. They are great, you can really immerse yourself in them. They are not books you can read a few pages of every now and then.
The same with Seven Eves. Absolutely amazing book, but you better enjoy it while you're reading, the end feels like your book has missed the last pages.
