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.sh...

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.

REAMDE's ending with those gun-preppers orgasming over the idea of finally getting an excuse for hunting human did it for me. Stephenson nerding out about that subculture is a thing I can't unsee, now it colors my perception of even his most liberal-leaning writings.

In a good or bad way? Like now you notice it more in other writings of his? There was a few pages like this in Snow Crash, and I remember breezing past it, but then re-reading it years later, could see the common thread.

But all in all. His take on that culture seems accurate. Not exaggerated that much for satire.

In a very bad way. I suspect that I'm really not doing him justice because he's probably not all too fond of any of the subcultures be portraits, but I can't completely shake off that change in perception.

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.

Anathem was my introduction and I feel that it has spoiled his other works for me.

Cryptonomicon was my introduction and none of his other works really compare, for me.. at least, it's the only one I've felt the desire to read again.

Cryptonomicon and Anathem were what got me into Stephenson, and I loved both of those. Then I read Quicksilver and it held my attention, but I had a really hard time slogging through The Confusion and never made it to System of a World. On the other hand, Reamde was a fun story along the lines of something a popular spy fic author my write. Not high art, but easy and entertaining and something that could be easily adapted for the screen (like Snow Crash). In the Beginning... is, I believe, his best and most pure writing from a tech POV, but he's always been sort of the information technology version of what Michael Crichton is to biotech.

You should read the Baroque Cycle, then Cryptonomicon, then REAMDE, then Fall, Or Dodge in Hell. You can think of it as all one storyline, so the ending of each book is less critical.

I'd actually go with publication order myself...

Nice username!

It's what happens when you sign up for Slashdot while reading Cryptonomicon without doing any checks as to where the name actually comes from!

I tried reading the first of the Baroque Cycle like 5 times. Could never make it more than 1/4 through it before losing steam. Anathem was the worst for me though.

The Baroque Cycle made double-entry bookkeeping click for me, bizarre as that sounds. The whole cycle is a long, long read. But there are nuggets that make it well worth it.

Anathem really picks up after the first 400-500 pages.

I am the rare Anathem reader who enjoyed the slow first part more than the active later parts. The initial world immersion was fascinating. The Big Event and subsequent faster paced developments were a lot less memorable. But I also enjoyed the instructional sections about whaling in Moby Dick.

I laughed. It's both true, and very not helpful. It's the equivalent of a fairly long not-so-great book before a pretty good book. Hard agree.

Also agreed, although I enjoyed some of the philosophical debate in the early portions of the book so I would put Anathem higher in books I enjoyed from Neal Stephenson

The first part of the book is super slow and boring, but it does get much better later on and what they setup is necessary for the story.

personally, I found Anathem to be fun the whole way through, but Baroque Cycle has like only one enjoyable part at the end of book two

You Should not read fall under any circumstances.

Seriously: life is too short.

(I say this as a huge NS fan)

Cannot possibly agree more. It's an absolutely terrible book.

REAMDE was ok, except the sections about the MMO which frequently left me catatonic with cringe. In Fall, the whole book is that cringe.

I really liked Fall, even before the Cryptonomicon tie-in.

It’s not high art, but I probably enjoyed it in my top 5 books of the year.

Different people have different tastes, I just find it funny when people make generalized statements like “this book is so bad, no one should ever read it.”

If you like mythology and scifi, then you should absolutely read it

I read Cryptonomicon, then the Baroque Cycle, then Cryptonomicon (or a long period of years) which has nice tie-ins to each other.

However I disliked Reamde enough that I didn't start Fall. Is it better?

Fall is, IMHO, nowhere near as good as Reamde. But I've always been a technothriller fan, and Reamde is pretty high on my enjoyment list.

I loved both in totally different ways.

But I would read the phone book if NS wrote it.

Baroque Cycle is my favourite, worth giving it a shot. Dodo is such a strange book because the beginning and middle are amazing and the ending is terrible

All his endings are weak. He builds momentum and reaches a climactic moment, and then…fizzle.

I think the ending of Anathem is possibly one of his best; it’s an acknowledgment that it is the ending, it’s rather tender and sweet, and it fits the mood perfectly.

Yeah, I think of Anathem as so far the only Reverse Stephenson book. Most of his books have killer starts and then end in a didactic "meh". Anathem starts with an incredibly didactic "meh" but then delivers a killer end.

> A great deal of content about whatever Neal Stephenson is nerding out about at the time

This was so true in SEVENEVES. There's a whole section about debris avoidance by a constellation of orbiting spacecraft and it was so tedious. I felt like I was reading someone describing an academic paper they'd recently read.

It's a progression. Story, style, characterization, and science in equal measure at first. Then more and more of the latter and less of the first three. Perhaps he did peak in Diamond Age, then it's basically Asimov after - pretty hard sci-fi with no story / characters (or at least no characters / story anyone cares about).

Snow Crash - most story / style / MEMORABLE characters

Diamond Age - same but with a very dramatic evolution from traditional Cyberpunk

Anathem / Seven Eves - virtually no memorable characters, interesting concepts and science though

Cryptonomicon - I couldn't.

I think I've read every one of his books. My favourite is The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O..

And D.O.D.O was one of only three Stephenson books I started and could not finish.

@mauvehaus, with your idiosyncratic spelling of emacs as "eMacs", you put Stephenson in a bad light. He knows how to spell. And edit.

As a vi guy, I trusted whatever my iPhone said was the canonical capitalization of emacs when it autocorrected it :-)

EDITED TO ADD: I just figured it out. My iPhone presumably thinks I'm taking about an obsolete Apple product. Doh. I'll let my error stand as a monument to not trusting everything a computer says.

I would also note that most of what we seem to be discussing is whether his writing is good or not. Spelling, I'll give him. The opinions on editing seem to be a little more divided.

There’s also usually “protagonist or major character has a weird method of travel”, “protagonist or major character goes through a period of loneliness as part of their heroes journey”, and a few other bits that are common across most of his fiction work.

He’s also largely absolutely shit at writing female characters.

Still enjoy his work, but it’s fun to find the common threads.

I have found that folks who don’t like Snow Crash will enjoy Seveneves.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

Does he hate it? The last thing I saw him say about the Big U was that he tends to omit it from his bibliography because it's not what his readers are looking for. Personally, I read him in chronological order and enjoyed both the Big U and Zodiac -- if nothing else, it was fun to watch him grow (and not) as an author.

As he put it: "The Big U is what it is: a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago."

It was out of print for a long time and he sort of had to be convinced to make the book available to read again after large demand.

The Big U has it’s faults; but is still an insightful look at the weird people and organizations within any large university.

I'd rate The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon as his peak -- the mid-to-late 90s.

I'd also say it's inaccurate, but mainly because of the wildly different preferences everyone has about which of his books to prefer.

For me, Snow Crash was great fun (though also seemed a bit too similar to William Gibson's Neuromancer), Cryptonomicon was an excellent historical novel with some weird "present day" scenes including an ending that made no sense, I couldn't get into Diamond Age, I hated Quicksilver, and Seveneves seemed to be two excellent books written in the same universe by completely different authors who only talked to each about the project for about five minutes.

Snow Crash is parodying cyberpunk (I think). Hence the strong Neuromancer vibes, it's intentionally derivative.

Cryptonomicon is my personal high point. The Baroque Cycle had set pieces just as good as those in Cryptonomicon, but there were too many characters for me to hold in my head.

It's all about the reader's preference, but if you don't enjoy either of those books, I'd argue (as I did) that you've given the man a fair chance. Likewise, if you don't like Small Gods, you probably won't like Terry Pratchett. I love Sir Terry, we were graced to have him while we did, but I'll stand by that.

I agree; everything he wrote post Diamond Age and everything he wrote pre Diamond Age are very different, with Diamand Age and Cryptonomicon being transitional. I read Cryptonomicon once with no plans to complete it. I didn't finish Anathem nor Quicksilver. Diamond Age was peak Stephenson for me, and I enjoyed all of his previous books (including The Big U).

[edit]

I didn't read anything Stephenson wrote post Quicksilver since everybody assured me that they were more of the "new" Stephenson than old. However, I see enough people in the comment threads panning README that I might give it a try.

Anathem has his best ending to date, so it actually pays off its early slog.

I thought Snow Crash was OK, Diamond Age was brilliant, Cryptonomicon was... holy fuck, did we need 1150 pages to tell this story? The subsequent books seemed to be of a similar page count, and I decided I had enough of Neal Stephenson.

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.

Snow Crash was one of the archetypical cypherpunk stories, which was a trend that often mocked if not outright took a piss over cyberpunk.

I find it a lot like a variation of "the cyberpunk dystopia arrived but not as cool as we imagined", but not as boring as what actually happens.

> I abandoned it halfway through because the style struck me as cringily cyberpunk.

I believe that was fully intentional.

The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist. He's definitely leaning into it.

Yeah totally! Just not my preference.

> 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?

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.

This to me feels like most of his plots.

For me, the ending was a little rushed, but fine. It tied up at least some of the plot elements from the first part. Yes, it was like two separate books, as if Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer was mashed together with the TV version of Asimov's Foundation, but both parts were pretty good.

I feel the same way. I’ve had a few false starts with Snow Crash, each time powering through about half despite my love of the imagery and the coolness. But have easily read Seveneves 2-3 times, with the last time somewhat skimming the third part, which isn’t as good as the rest.

I thought Snow Crash was basically a satire of cyberpunk.

I mean the dude's name is Hiro Protagonist.

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.

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.)

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)

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.

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.

Loved Seveneves, but it is one of the best examples of his not having an ending.

While some other of his books do not have the most satisfying endings, Seveneves was the only one where it seemed like he simply gave up trying when writing the last 5%. Compared to the previous sections, the end just seemed like it had no effort put into it. Everything after the death of the doc just seemed abrupt and clumsy. It seemed jarring compared to how much care he seemed to put into the detail of the earlier passages.

I love the world building of the 2nd half, and would argue it doesn't need a clear ending. Your imagination gets to fill in the blanks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hear people say that a lot but I don't get it. I experienced it as a hopeless, depressing slog, where things just got worse and worse. But fortunately I wasn't attached to the characters so it wasn't so bad watching them all suffer.

I agree with you, you are not alone. Seveneves had some great ideas, but he spent way too much time on the science and put almost nothing into character development. The characters were so flat, the interactions and motivations were lacking, and ultimately I just didn't care about any of them. I can't recall a single character from Seveneves but while I can't remember all their names I very much do remember the characters from Snow Crash.

Cryptonomicon has such an epic build up...

> 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...

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.

in the future our personal editors will create our own editions of these books. mine will have an even longer captain crunch section and yours will be abbreviated

Some people think those are the best bits of his books!

Yeah, agree. If you take away all of his digressions, how much would be left.

Everyone hating on the digressions.

But you can't just have a few pages of plot points and call it a book.

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.

Nice to see love for the Blue Ant books. I enjoy everything Gibson has written, but Pattern Recognition is by far my favorite.

It's wonderful! He gets the timbre of early 2000s forum culture exactly right.

There is also The Baroque Cycle which seems a bit different from other works.

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.

I prefer the beginning of Anathem. Once the plot stuff happens I'm less interested

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

I loved Snow Crash and could never finish The Diamond Age. I've read and loved almost every other book he's written.

I read Snow Crash a long time ago and don't remember much, found The Diamond Age boring and liked Cryptonomicon.

His writing matured quickly after Snow Crash. I think it's among his weakest. I like TDA quite a bit.

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".

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.

Termination Shock was pretty good, but seemed kind of low-effort, not a typical Stephenson blockbuster.

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.

I've always felt as though he's writing like someone excited to have researched something and wanting to tell people. It's not highbrow, more rollicking and as though you can imagine him grinning "this is so cool (for nerds)" while he's writing it out. My last exposure was Seveneves, and Reamde before that.

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.

Autism, like most personality traits in the DSM, is only a problem if it affects your every day life in three spheres (e.g. work/relationships/hobbies). Otherwise you might just have the superpowers without the side-effects.

I couldn't finish Seveneves :)

In spite of reading and mostly liking everything else by Stephenson.

Edit: but then I couldn't enjoy Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series (I did get to the end) too much. Because half the book was a RPG system manual describing game mechanics.

Think that was my problem with Seveneves as well. It read like a 'how to build and run a space station' manual.

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.

"The event" happens in the first sentence of the book.

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.

Pages and pages treatises about orbital mechanics, PhD dissertation on how space station docking works. Seveneves fast paced? yeah, no.

for years, every time I tried read Seveneves I got bored before I even found out what the plot was. There's something about the description of the ISS that I find tedious even by Stevenson standards

LOL. I read REAMDE on Kindle, so I didn't know its length. I thought it was a rollicking good time, and I recommended it to my wife for her book club. I assumed it was about 300 pages long. Turns out it's over 1000.

But it's a fast thousand pages.

I think it’s a lot more charitable to say that it’s writing for engineers who get excited about ideas. Lots of the ideas aren’t particularly realistic or plausible. The point of the technical sections isn’t for suspension of disbelief, it’s just for the fun of digging into new topics and speculating on how you might use it to build something. I’d say it’s a cousin of Randall Munroe’s what if series.

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.

> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk

Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that <i>Snow Crash</i> is satire, I recommend reading <i>Headcrash</i>, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to <i>Snow Crash</i>. If <i>Snow Crash</i> is the original <i>Robocop<i> (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then <i>Headcrash</i> is Paul Verhoeven's <i>Starship Troopers</i> (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 <i>Blade Runner</i> 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. <i>Johnny Mnemonic</i> (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of <i>The X-Files</i>.

I have heard this, but it seems more like laziness to me. Thanks for the perspective.

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.

Low-effort and high-tech, to paraphrase Gibson‘s M.O.

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

Yes, that pretty much sums him

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.

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?

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.

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.

"The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?"

I didn't have that takeaway.

I thought it was more just one group of elites versus other groups. And some of them happened to be monarchy.

I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics. At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.

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.

I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.

Maybe there isn't an alternative, so he is writing about what is more likely.

Not what he might hope for in an ideal world.

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.

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/

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.

"The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction"

Apart from the suspiciously well informed immortal character and the magical gold? I wonder what could explain those...

Ok, pedant.

> The Baroque Cycle is historical fiction

... written in a SciFi mindset, I would say.

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.

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.

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.

Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.

yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other writers could imply an entire world with a few well chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash which is basically caricaturing cyberpunk, he feels the need to explain how everything works. Which doesn't necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate.

Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters

That's not really that bad of a description of Gibson in any of his eras, but also that's what a lot of readers want, PKD without most of the madness.

"The Peripheral" is maybe worth trying as it is Gibson's most mad/trippy setting so far.

Interesting. I will give it a look.

I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.

Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose.

I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.

Part of your complaint is probably related to his style. Neuromancer was his first novel, and his style, while remaining distinctive, has improved substantially over the years. You may like it better in the The Bigend Trilogy: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: all vintage, recognizable Gibson, but not actually science fiction, and very much in tune with the world post-9/11. As much as I love all of Gibson, those three are my favorites, especially the first.

Dividing his books into "trilogies" is a little misleading; they all happen in the same shared universe and some common characters, but don't have deeply connected stories. Give Pattern Recognition a try, and see if 20 years makes a difference to you. (If you like audiobooks, Pattern Recognition is a gem, with almost the perfect fusion between story and narrator.)

In some of his books, he is supposed to engage with vèvès from voodoo as similar to electronic circuit diagrams, according to a long ago Guardian comment [1], and I’ve never been able to track it down in “the sequels to Pattern Recognition” (as opposed to Count Zero) to my satisfaction.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/nov/21/william-gi...

I liked the review comment he used to feature on his own website: "Umberto Eco without the charm".

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?

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.

While I generally agree with this well written criticism (ChatGPT?), you ignore Snowcrash's most interesting (to me) idea: the Sumerian "Nam Shub" (mind virus) and its intersection with the metaverse, which I found to be an all too plausible prediction.

One could write an equally scathing take on Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. (and I say that as an obvious fan given my username)

Of course Vonnegut is flawless, so any comparisons will be trounced...

I'm not sure whether to be appalled or flattered by the ChatGPT comparison at this stage of Language Model maturity, but I'm sure there's some hiberno-english artefacts in my breakdown that will advocate for my analog autonomy!

The "Nam Shub" was a nice parallel, but I felt Stephenson was re-treading ground already covered in Neuromancer with things like Space-Station Babylon:

"We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub."

or even the post-coital after-images of VR

"His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall."

My main contention with Snow Crash is that it's much lauded world-building often represents a feeble distillation of what came before it. Nowhere do you see the architecturally foundational yet throwaway references to things like the 'predatory-looking Christian Scientists' or the wonderful description of the subservient wives of the Sararimen dressed in Hiroshima sackcloth and adorned with faked signifiers of domestic abuse as a fashion statement.

Re: the sprawl Trilogy, I've already compared the post-Neuromancer books very unfavourably in other comments on the thread - what was done to Mary-Sue the Molly character was unforgiveable, and the only properly developed innovation in the plot was the collage boxes in Count Zero.

I'm not sure if you are GPT.

But if you aren't, you have a rather deep understanding and can rattle it off rather quickly and succinctly.

(it does sound like GPT, but so hard to tell now)

You'll turn my head sir. I'm privileged enough to have an English Degree, a passion for Science Fiction, and a debating background. I'm also composed almost entirely of strongly held, and often contrary, convictions, so revel in the thrust and parry of online debate. Particularly during office hours.

Re: ChatGPT - I'm guessing it would be more easily detected than you think. It's a paradigm leap from Markov chains and the like, but I'd imagine it would still hallucinate a quote or reference some non-existent book in making a comparison at some point.

If it ever gets adept at literary criticism or critical theory as opposed to just cargo-culting its way past the lower threshold of readers I'll probably be in despair. Let's keep it trained on JIRA rather than JSTOR just to be safe, lest something like Roald Dahl's 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator' come to fruition.

You're killing me.

I like the cut of your jib, good sir.

Kudos. I would read more of this.

Haha, you can sure pen a phrase. I’d be shocked if you’re a circa 2024 GPT.

I’ve seen few more ready and thorough responses in my time here, but despite the perfunctory acknowledgement that you might have, I can’t help but feel you still missed the point.

Comparing Stephenson to Vonnegut feels like comparing an inside joke to an epitaph.

The comparison was more to dissuade people from grouping them together in the Canon. If I was to be trite I might say that the likes of Slaughter House 5 and Neuromancer are Graphic Novels, whereas Snow Crash is a Graphic Novel.

When I learnt that Snow Crash was actually originally conceived as a Graphic Novel, it was like a large puzzle piece finally clicked into place. I would have preferred to judge it on its merits in that medium to be frank, as Stephenson is very passionate and has some interesting takes and somewhat Randian fascinations tertiary to his plotting, but ultimately I feel that his narrative reach always exceeded his grasp.

As for missing the point, I can only point to my acknowledgement of the existence of Snow Crash's TvTropes page, and my countless hours arguing the point online on this and other fora!

That's a terrific way of putting into words my thoughts about Stephenson, except I've thought of him as Thomas Pynchon for remedial readers rather than Vonnegut.

If I'd ever successfully made it through Gravity's Rainbow, I might have contended so as well!

I'd recommend Against the Day, then if you enjoy that, try Gravity's Rainbow again. It continues some of the timeline of Against the Day. GR is super tough for the first third but gets easier and more enjoyable.

AtD gets sidetracked with long stretches of s&m-laden filth. GR reads like a fever dream but it's interesting both thematically and in prose (it's also dirty, but doesn't linger as much).

Username checks out. Funny, I remember GR as being filthier, such parts don’t jump to mind regarding AtD. AtD is one of my all-time favorite books.

Having read them both twice (I like them all really) I remember more of the gross stuff in AtD than otherwise, maybe because it seemed more coherent on the page.

Love the username.

I don't remember AtD as being particularly filthy, but it has been a long time. It remains one of my all-time favorites. If nothing else, I'm indebted to the book for encouraging me to seek out literary westerns such as Warlock by Oakley Hall and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.

Gravity's Rainbow and The Diamond Age certainly both feel like they'd have been better books if the author could keep his fetishes to himself...

Crying of Lot 49 is short and sweet.

This checks out. NS is my favorite fiction author, but I am not intelligent enough, at least in the required way, to understand Gravity's Rainbow.

I'm sure there are numerous things that I didn't understand but could have if I were more intelligent or better read.

It became a lot more enjoyable for me on my second attempt when I gave up on the idea of understanding everything. Sometimes things get explained later in the book. Sometimes not.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I will give it a shot, thank you.

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.

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.

> 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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

They are not for the faint of heart. :)

But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 ;)