Author: Neal Stephenson
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
See in goodreads

Review:

Better than Fall and REAMDE, and happily free of most of the mythos he started building back in Cryptonomicon (that ended up being a really bad move, let's not do that again)

This book has all the trademarks of a NS book. The detail in irrelevant things just because he probably thinks they are cool. The characters that don't really make much sense. The multigenerational biographic excursions because Zeus forbid someone was just part of a regular family, then got a job and did something. Oh no, everyone must be the scion of a seven-generation chain of ... something.

BUT: it's a page turner. I read it in a bit over a day. I had fun. I was not offended by much in it. The stupid parts are not THAT stupid (except a few) and ...

We must at some point give up the idea that Stephenson is some sort of transformational writer who will create a genre or whatever. The closest he got was the Baroque Cycle and TBH the sheer size of it discourages most readers, so it would be a more important book/series if it were 75% shorter.

There is a nice quote about him in Snowcrash, the book he wrote when he was roughly 30, you know the one, the one that starts "Until a man in twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world."

Neal Stephenson is no longer 25, and neither are we. He is what he is, and he got old becoming it, and we got old reading it, and it was not so bad.