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Reverbreview #1

Author Focus – Neal Stephenson

By Paul Lenz

As this is the first of our author focus articles, it is worth saying a couple of words about the approach and the structure. The aim of these pieces is to give an overview of an author’s work through the eyes of a reader – we are not attempting a great work of literary criticism here, rather to give you a feel for the books and our opinions of them. Just because an author has been selected it doesn’t mean that we necessarily like all of their books – the criterion for selection is that they have produced something that has made us think and want to share their work with others.

Each piece starts with a rationale – why the author has been picked, a brief biography and then a chronological review of their books.

Neal Stephenson – Rationale

I guess I knew that I had to write about Neal Stephenson when my annual "Christmas Presents for Friends and Relations" Amazon Order relatives arrived and I realised that I had ordered six copies of Cryptonomicon. Stephenson writes with such assurance over an astonishingly detailed historical landscape that the appeal of his work spreads from my history-loving father to my crypto-hacker friends.

Neal Stephenson - Biography

Neal Stephenson was born on Halloween 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland. The son of a professor of electrical engineering and a biochemist and the grandson of two science professors, he started a degree in physics at Boston University but switched to Geography as this subject gave him better computer access. After leaving university he had a range of jobs, including computer coding. He now ‘attempts to make a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article'.

Neal Stephenson – The Books (click titles to order)

The Big U (1984)

 Stephenson’s first novel and the only one of his solo novels I haven’t read – mainly because it was out of print for a long time – so I have to interpret other people's views on this one. It is a comic send up of college dorm life in the mid eighties. The broad consensus is that it is humour is patchy and his in-experience as a writer shows. Stephenson himself has said that in many respects The Big U is a juvenile work, and should be viewed as such. Will I read it? Yes, as I am a bit of an anorak and like to ‘read out’ authors, but my expectations are fairly low.

Zodiac (1988)

 Billed as an eco-thriller, Zodiac follows a radical environmental activist (very much in the Earth First mould) as he attempts to track down and stop the illegal dumpers of toxic waste in Boston harbour. As a page turner, it is effective, and it displays some of imagination and technophilia that would mark out his later books. Despite it contemporaneous setting, the plotting and events are in no way credible and the book suffers as a result. In his later work Stephenson is able to effectively suspend disbelief through the strength of his characterization and humour – he was still developing his style at this point, and this shows.

Overall – Fine if you want an above average page-turner to read on the beach, but don’t go out of your way to find it.

Snow Crash (1991)

 Stephenson’s breakthrough book (though one that would designate him as an SF writer – leading to many of this later books being inaccurately labelled) a tense adventure through the streets of a near future America (which exists as a series of franchised city states) where Hiro, a samurai former pizza delivery guy (when the mafia run pizza delivery, being late can result in sudden death) is thrown on the trail of Snow Crash – drug come computer virus that is stalking the Metaverse (an alt. internet). While some reviewers have tended to liken the book to those of William Gibson (Neuromancer) I believe that it bears more similarities to the work of Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward) and Jeff Noon (Vurt).

Overall – If you have read and liked the books of Smith, Noon, Gibson, Bruce Sterling then this is a must-read

The Diamond Age – Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)

 Continuing the maturation of style shown in Snow Crash, The Diamond Age is a highly imaginative and accomplished book – distinctive in style from conventional Cyberpunk though often banded with it. The book is set in a future where communities of Neo-Victorians (who hold the society and ideals of the 19th Century in the highest regard) rub shoulders with Confucian Chinese and nano-technology is ubiquitous. An industrial mogul creates the Primer (a vastly complex inter-active book) to guide the education and self-development of his grand-daughter. In an obvious debt to Pygmalion the Primer falls into the hands of an orphan girl and the effects resonate through the world. My only criticism is that the book loses its way a little in the second half, but is still strong.

Overall – Highly recommended

Cryptonomicon (1999)

 To my mind, Stephenson’s strongest book. For reasons best known to bookshops it often ends up in the science fiction section, even through it is about as SF as Catch-22, but I’ll save my rant on book categorisation another time (in a nutshell, stick all fiction together guys!). The narrative flits between the Second World War, where mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse a contemporary (and friend) of Alan Turing works breaking codes and spreading mis-information and marine Bobby Shaftoe attempts to liberate the Philippines for very personal reasons and the present day where Lawrence’s grandson Randy is working to create a data haven – distracted by the attempts of Douglas Shaftoe (Bobby’s son) to track down a cache of Japanese war gold. The book is vast, not simply in length (920 pages) but in scope – including Haiku poetry, data protection law, imperialism of many kinds, holocaust survival, mining, van Eck phreaking and much more besides. The Second World War segments are the better written to my mind, I suspect precisely because it was less familiar to him than the present-day setting - my only minor gripe is that at times Stephenson indulges himself a little too much on the technical details, but this is easily forgiven. It is compelling, page-turning and packed with enough detail to support multiple re-readings.

Overall – Buy it!

The Baroque Trilogy – Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World

It is hard to convey the scale of the Baroque Trilogy to anyone who hasn’t read it – and impossible to do justice to in a brief review It is a fairly comprehensive history of Europe from 1650 to 1715, it is an exploration of the foundation of the Royal Society and clash between alchemy and true science, it is an overview of European trade and banking, it is a compelling consideration of the nature of money, it is a text-book of political operation, it is a swash-buckling romantic adventure, it is 2,500 pages long. One could describe it as a vast prequel to Cryptonomicon, though this would be doing it a disservice. Broadly speaking it follows the scientist Daniel Waterhouse as he is caught up the in the politics and personalities of the founding of the Royal Society and Jack Shaftoe, vagabond king, as he crosses the world in an attempt to prove his love for Eliza, a formal slave turned arch manipulator of the European courts. But there is so much more. Not only do the families of Cryptonomicon recur (or 'precur'), so do the themes – gold, logic, cryptography, misinformation and freedom. I have to confess to liking long books, I’m a fast, greedy reader and so the prospect of a couple of thousand pages of well-written, meticulously researched prose is my idea of heaven. Alas not all of the world is like me, and some people will find that Stephenson dwells in unnecessary detail in some areas and doesn’t drive the narrative with sufficient force to sustain the length of the books. I can understand the problems an editor would have with the text – none of it is badly written, none of it is without value – but as a whole some would find it too much. To give you some idea of my strength of feeling for these books, I bought The Confusion and The System of the World in hardback after reading Quicksilver – I pretty much never buy fiction in hardback, partly because of the price, and partly because of the inconvenience. Overall – an astonishing achievement, and one that I would recommend to anyone who has an interest is history, science or politics – but make sure you have plenty of spare time on your hands.

Interface (with George Stephenson, 1994)

 Originally published under the pseudonym and co-written with his uncle, this is one of two books Stephenson knocked out basically to make some money while developing his ‘proper’ fiction. A techno-thriller that has a presidential candidate wired into the view of the electorate it is aspiring to be better than your average Michael Crichton, but ends up being worse.

Overall – don’t bother

Cobweb (1998)

 Another pseudo-collaboration, now out of print and probably no better than Interface – the only other (fiction) book of his that I haven’t read) and I am enough of an anorak to try and track it down at some point in the future, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else does.

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line (1999)

 For the sake of completeness, Stephenson’s only non-fiction book – a meditation/review on computer operating systems. Well regarded by the hacker/coder community, though now outdated it isn’t something that I know anything about I’m afraid – I’m sure if you are interested in it then you would probably have already heard of it/read it.
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