Tier List: Neal Stephenson Novels

Neal Stephenson is a better writer than most nerds can even comprehend 

because we don't read outside our genre

Oh his books are long!! — yes, that happens when you thoroughly work out some ideas that have never appeared in print (Anathem) or cover a lot of actual history (Baroque Cycle), with explicit shout-outs to the long, long, very long adventure fiction of the 19th century. Some books are short, some books are long, how is this even a thing? Because Stephenson isn't just long, he's leaning on you to think about consciousness, and complex social structures that do not exist, and periods of history you know less than nothing about (because you believe wrong things about WWII and Big Wig Times), and he blows up the fucking moon and kills all life on the surface of the earth, and you are not used to reading scifi that challenges you. 

In the sea are countless treasures; 

    if you desire safety, it is on the shore 

     — Saadi.

But he can't write an ending! — hey kids ever read The Castle? Gravity's Rainbow? Dhalgren? Finnegan's Wake? Sometimes a book comes to a rapid end and nobody's holding your hand and telling you how to feel about your aspirational hero winning life. A novel doesn't have to wrap up in a satisfying narrative little bow, it's gone on for hundreds of pages doing all kinds of stuff that you are into or you are not. If you want to climax and spoon at the end of a story with a strong narrative structure, i suggest watching TV.

Anywhom, i put his books in a tier list anyway. You're welcome.

S— Anathem, Cryptonomicon

A— Snow Crash^ Quicksilver, Seveneves^, Fall^

B— System of the World, REAMDE^, Termination Shock

C— (or even D really, it's a true lost in the middle of a trilogy book): The Confusion

Carets ^ because of uneven development or sections he cared about less than the Big Ideas, and he is above being offended by nerds raised on Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars EU pushing up their glasses and claiming the future society in Seveneves is totally unbelievable. REAMDE might be a C but has truly amazing set-pieces.

I haven't read Snow Crash or Diamond Age in so long i can't rank them with the same nerd certainty. Nerdainty. Snow Crash is probably an A-; it gets a caret because it is a little more manic than stays on the page.

Fall in particular could have benefited from being much longer or two books; there is fascinating stuff about the devolution of american society into radically differing cultures, one of which crucifies people (but not well). You've got to actaully know how to execute someone on a cross to kill Enoch Root, hehehe. Enoch and Solomon are bigger in this one than in their previous appearances in Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle; questions of biblical proportions are answered, kind of. But the long, long, very long Baroque Cycle may have broken in him the desire to write it all out to ever jot and tittle, may have left him more disposed to sketching parts in or dropping one ball to keep bouncing the big shiny one.

Stephenson also wrote some books in the 80s nobody reads because he was just a young white midwestern writer writing about white midwestern dude bullshit in clipped midwestern prose.