Comment by jordanb
4 months ago
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.
In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.
Stevenson's endings are "pregnant endings" as in the Aeneid:
https://old.reddit.com/r/mythology/comments/196r7mn/i_just_f...
It's not a bad way to end a book in principle.
I can't actually recall how snowcrash ends, I think I was losing interest by the end.
Swordfight (which is very stephenson to have in the ending) and nuclear-powered robot dogs showing extreme loyalty to the person who saved one of them from overheating.
I found the second part of Seven Eves to be a surreal experience. I think I might have stopped reading Stephenson after that.
Howso?
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Fun fact, Snow Crash was originally written as a video game script (and it shows.)
Was visiting a university bookstore few months ago and came across it used in paperback. Never read it but know it has modern/tech significance. Read some of it and went "well, naah" and passed. Ironically the book I ended up purchasing instead was really bad and I couldn't finish it (something by Maureen Down the NYT columnist, I love her opinion work but the book was horrible)
There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.
I experience this as me being a ridealong on my friend's random diatribe. Oftentimes it feels like something he just learned and needs to tell someone about.
I believe REAMDE included an entire page dedicated to the virtues of lashing tires to fishing craft.
William Gibson's writing really fell off a cliff post-Trump. Agency was one of the dullest reads I've encountered in a long time.
Speaking of Fall, after a couple hundred pages I ended up just skipping the chapters about Bitworld.
I didn't bother reading Termination Shock and if Gibson ever finishes Jackpot, I doubt I'll pick it up either. What a bummer.