The Big U (Audible Audio Edition) Neal Stephenson Fred Berman Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : The Big U (Audible Audio Edition) Neal Stephenson Fred Berman Audible Studios Books
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.
The Big U (Audible Audio Edition) Neal Stephenson Fred Berman Audible Studios Books
I'm a big Neal Stephenson fan and thought I should read some.of the earlier books to be complete. Zodiac was really fun, but this one, while it showed some sparks, was quite a mess. The very long last chapter was quite a drag, and while I guess there was a resolution, the explanations were fairly trite. Yes, university life is silly, but for stuff razzing academia, there were much better bits in Cryptonomicon, Baroque, Anathem and even briefly in D.O.D.O.Product details
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The Big U (Audible Audio Edition) Neal Stephenson Fred Berman Audible Studios Books Reviews
Neil shows hints of his later writing genius. All I still want to know is why Shekondar? And was he an computer and DandD nut like me?
Neal developing his craft. Get it for completeness and inside jokes...
Not a genre I would ordinarily choose, because I often find them tedious and a little precious, but for what it is, it's pretty cleverly done. I often found myself chuckling out loud, actually.
The title should have been Dante's U, as the world Stephenson describes seems to fall deeper into the hell we knew as college. Quite frankly, the only reason this book is of interest is because of Stephenson's later works. I don't know how anyone can take this book seriously or say it has much to do with college in the eigthies. There is so much material from the eighties college experience and this book barely scratches the surface. It starts as a slightly over the top skewering life on the big campus, but to stick to the book's themes, the story turns into one huge (and not so funny) acid trip. The second half of the book is so over the top, nuclear waste, giant rats, and submachine gun toting heroes that it lost all sense of 'fun' or satire. One can see a little genesis of his later writings, especially 'Zodiac', but anyone who is not a fan of Stephenson's is going to be rolling their eyeballs and wondering how he made the huge leap from this to outstanding 'Snow Crash'.
What's really fascinating about The Big U is how early Neal Stephenson hit upon so many of the themes that he follows through so much of his more recent fiction. Others have commented about the interest in computers, programming, and worms--these come in as plot points here, but Stephenson hadn't figured out how to use them in detail without losing the reader, as he did later in Cryptonomicon. The fascinating blend between absolutely ludicrous plot twists, believable detail, and weird, geeky heros is here already. And I noticed some more incidental ideas germinating here; I was struck by how the decaying University, once the epitome of higher education, resembled the decaying palace of Louis XIV, complete with bats and rats and crumbling ceilings and walls. Also, the dumping of cement into the hole occupied by the "B-men" in the Big U was surely a forerunner of two scenes in Cryptonomicon--if you haven't read it, I don't want to spoil it for you here. We are missing a red-headed immortal, but Stephenson was just getting warmed up. Fans should not miss this; but if you haven't gotten bitten by the Stephenson bug, you might want to start elsewhere.
Neal Stephenson is always great fun, and the Big U is far from an exception. An exciting story that snowballs from minor collegiate drama to life-and-death struggles in an engaging way.
I guess this is what you get when you let a brilliant but immature writer try to cover Catch-22 in a university setting. The first half of The Big U is a fun but overbroad campus satire; then Stephenson gets tired of that and shifts the story into a full-out action-adventure in which the groups he set up earlier as amusing satires of real university phenomena become warring factions when law and order breaks down. Although this part is a disappointment from a satirical perspective, it is more inventively written than the first half -- Stephenson's version of such chaos is complex and realistic in the way everyone's schemes are immediately trampled by everyone else's. Stephenson recycled and improved this "every man for himself" chaos in the riot scene in The Diamond Age years later. We also see Stephenson's early interest in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which he later raised to wild heights in Snow Crash.
You can see the training wheels -- this is by no means a great novel (as Snow Crash is) -- but The Big U will have historical interest for Stephenson fans, and it is a frothy, fun diversion in its own right.
I'm a big Neal Stephenson fan and thought I should read some.of the earlier books to be complete. Zodiac was really fun, but this one, while it showed some sparks, was quite a mess. The very long last chapter was quite a drag, and while I guess there was a resolution, the explanations were fairly trite. Yes, university life is silly, but for stuff razzing academia, there were much better bits in Cryptonomicon, Baroque, Anathem and even briefly in D.O.D.O.
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