Any recommendations on what to read after this one? I also have Piranesi Susanna Clarke on my backlog, but would like something in a similar technological fashion as Snow Crash
Unrelated, but I can never not recommend Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon .
Magnum opus. ~1000 pages of what-happens-next, unresolved until the very last paragraph of the very last page.
Cryptonomicon is his best work imo. It is such a vibe all the way through, and absolutely hilarious at times. The masturbation analysis and graphs, and the cereal tangent get me every time.
Just looked this up and it has gone straight on to my backlog, thanks for the recommendation!
Cheers and enjoy!
Snowcrash is such an entertaining romp, made all the more spectacular considering that when published, ideas like avatar and cyberspace (both terms coined by Stephenson I’m told) were wildly futuristic, bordering on precognitive, considered now passé only a generation later.
Stephenson is a seer.
Neuromancer is great and has a similar tech level, though it’s more abstract and a little harder to follow. Ready Player One is also in that vein but not as good as Snow Crash. The video game Cyberpunk 2077 was heavily influenced by Snow Crash and it’s sister anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is excellent. You don’t have to play or know anything about the game to watch the show
I’ve read all three but in terms of quality Ready Player One shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Neuromancer or Snow Crash. Those two was genre defining unique originals that were a departure from sci-fi of that time. Ready Player One was a list of movies the author enjoyed. It can be a funny, silly, relaxing read if you just want junk food, but it’s not really comparable to the others.
Diamond Age
Despite loving Neuromancer and a lot of cyberpunk literature I couldn’t really get into Snow Crash. It’s too ironic and over the top for my taste. I did love Anathem though, it’s probably one of my favorite books! Would you say I’d enjoy Diamond Age?
I preferred Anathem over Snow Crash but they’re very different, for instance Anathem has a very slow start. I thought the Sprawl sequence (Neuromancer etc) got more and more like Snow Crash with each book.
I loved Anathem, and the fact that it takes 300 pages before anything happens is wonderful. It’s been 15 years or so since I read it once and I still remember most of it; while I read Diamond Age twice but don’t have much that got retained over a decade later
Oh absolutely. I was kinda disappointed when it turned into a relatively standard action adventure near the end. I was hoping for a couple hundred more pages of slice-of-math-life.
