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.
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)