Noted!

Slashdot is still there.

It's kind of tiny compared to here (<1/5th the articles maybe?) but it still has an older/Slashdot-y crowd.

Oh man, remember when getting a BMW was the high of excessive greed?

given how Neal never goes online, i wonder how long he sat on this to reply

It was still an awful lot to ask of a reader, and IMO, not worth the "reward." I agree with the person you are responding to. His early works are really amazing, but beginning with Cryptonomicon he became increasingly verbose and I found his later books a lot less fun to read.

Anathem is written in English. There's just some made up words that are generally easy to figure out the meaning of.

Anathem and Seveneves are my favorites of his, in that order. The orbital launch and operation in Anathem is probably my favorite piece of writing ever.

I’d argue that Seveneves DID end 2/3rds of the way through! There’s at least another third of a book that would’ve cleanly followed the end.

Anathem, please reconsider. Do you remember the part about Artificial Inanity? Right before the entire book is revealed as an elaboration of Everett's MWI? It's right up there with Snow Crash's reflection on Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592

Polostan went down very easy. only read Anathem, Snow Crash, Reamde, Fall;, and Cryptonomicon. Plolostan was a novella compared to those. finished in a day or two on vacation and im a sorta slow reader

i like Polostan and generally recommend it. looking forward to the sequel in a few weeks. havent read anything Stevensons said about Polostan but if i had to guess id say it targets a YA audience instead of a high school/undergrad audience

amazing none of his books have been adapted. they play out like movies in my head, albeit a lot of men participating in the socratic method and waving at white boards

Cryptonomicon definitely differs from Stephenson’s first phase but he’s had other phases since then. I’d lump that into the Shaftoe/Waterhouse small universe alongside the Baroque Cycle; some of the same names show up in REAMDE. (Sort of how there’s universe/character overlap between Snow Crash and Diamond Age.) Anathem has a similar vibe, though IIRC no character overlap.

These were indeed verbose. Some folks love it, some not as much. Then there was a deliberately semi-utopian near-futurism phase (Seveneves, whatever one it is with the cloud-seeding gun in West Texas) and now we’re into some historical fiction (Russian spy stuff).

Might be worth dipping in a toe again to see if any of these fits your fancy. Stephenson didn’t just swap to Cryptonomicon and stop there.

"Remember Moab" has become a sort of in-joke/shibboleth/curse for my close friend group as a reaction to (or identification of) the sort of FB/Instagram things that make real, normal people lose their minds forever.

... Reamde and it's definitely the fastest I've managed to get through a novel relative to length.

Same here. But I skipped far fewer paragraphs of his earlier works.

:)

Ah, I always wondered how Vancouver Island came to be - a fight between Stephenson and Gibson makes perfect sense.

https://federate.social/@mattblaze

That was the best explanation of litfic vs. commercial/genre fiction I've ever read.

Neal is one of two living authors whose all books I buy. Happy to have found him during Covid, thanks to HN comments. I found Greg Egan during that time, and I am grateful to HN threads and comments on books.

Another classic of his, Mother Earth, Mother Board: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

I know he’s well liked, but damn. It’s difficult to take him seriously when he says things like “The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate.”