The Big U
The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious"...but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
23mentions
21people
2009–2026years
43% recommend52% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have you ever read "Travel by Wire!"? It was the first story that Arthur C. Clarke published. It's... youthful in its writing.
Or how about Pebble in the Sky?
> Boucher and McComas were disappointed by the novel, saying that despite Asimov's good ideas, "his heavy treatment and routine plot are disappointing.
Try to find a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ("When Stephenson's Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.")
Or Sundiver being a much weaker book than the rest of the Uplift series.
Or A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card (which was even worse when I reread it as an adult).
Old Man's War was Scalzi's first "real" story... one that he had in the back of his mind to write in his college years.
He has matured as a writer since then.
- And an even bigger influence in Stephenson's first book, The Big U.
- I agree; everything he wrote post Diamond Age and everything he wrote pre Diamond Age are very different, with Diamand Age and Cryptonomicon being transitional. I read Cryptonomicon once with no plans to complete it. I didn't finish Anathem nor Quicksilver. Diamond Age was peak Stephenson for me, and I enjoyed all of his previous books (including The Big U).
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I didn't read anything Stephenson wrote post Quicksilver since everybody assured me that they were more of the "new" Stephenson than old. However, I see enough people in the comment threads panning README that I might give it a try.
- People complaining about university bureaucracies is as old as the whole notion of universities. Neal Stephenson's first novel, the Big-U, is essentially about that. Not his finest work but entertaining. It's set at a fictional college near Boston. But it seems interchangeable with just about any university. Money, power, corruption, bureaucracy, etc. are all themes in that novel.
The thing is, universities are places that combine a large number of people that go there, large budgets, and wide varieties of weird things that need funding, attention, etc. with lots of groups of people favoring one thing over the other and quite a bit of alumni, politicians, and other people in power obsessing over how it is all administered. So, a certain level of bureaucracy and politics are pretty much a given. As are disagreements over how this is administered. And any such organization that exists for a while inevitably develops some Kafka-esque bureaucracies. It would be anomalous if that wasn't the case. Literally almost every university on this planet has this issue. Some might regard this as a feature and not a bug. Learning to thrive in such a place helps prepare people for the real world a bit.
Obviously some universities do better than others. But overall, it seems Stanford is still doing fine in producing some world class research, maintaining good academic standards, and generally attracting new generations of students that are willing to pay up the stupendously large tuition fees. I don't see what the big deal here is other than some immature people being immature, which if you think about it is the whole point of a university.
- Most Stephenson fans think I'm nuts when I say The Big U is my favorite. What can I say? I like my sci-fi cheesy with lots of interesting concepts.
- If you enjoy Stephenson (specifically Snowcrash or The Big U) you should read this book. It is formative of many of the ideas in both books.
