Neal Stephenson's earlier work has "more soul" - Snow Crash / Diamond Age actually has characters you care about and like, his later novels get increasingly more abstract, though even better in the technical sense. I think the only character I remember from Seveneves is the cannibal leader, that's it.

"A Deepness in the Sky" was REALLY good. The Forever War was good for the concept.

In short, yours looks like a great list I will come back to, thank you.

However, I do strongly dislike Remembrance of Earth's Past / The Three Body Problem - it's vastly overrated in my opinion and the characters make no sense. The best part of it was the intro to the first book which gave an interesting glimpse at history.

I really couldn't get into Snow Crash and I didn't finish Diamond Age but I love everything from Cryptonomicon forward.

Jack Shaftoe is one of my favourite fictional characters!

I can totally relate, except Snow Crash stayed on my stack for both its popularity and its brevity. The fourth time I took a stab at the first chapter I was in a much lighter mood, broke through the jarring entry to an AnCap society with an unemployed hacker working as a pizza delivery driver for the mafia, and this time I found myself simply laughing at the absurdity of it. Then I was hooked. One or two passages (the library research scene?) drag out a bit. Overall: highly recommended, mostly for the sense of humor.

I know what you are talking about, despite being on the opposite end of that spectrum. Snow Crash / Diamond Age are cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk ala Gibson and completely different from Stephenson's other books.

I couldn't even get through Cryptonomicon, and Jack Shaftoe did not strike me as a believable genius, nor his story. Anathem kind of strafed the line - it had SOME character development, and SOME action, but was mainly world-building / intellectual exploration. Stephenson's other books fall too far on that spectrum for me.

Are you by any chance referring to "Bobby" Shaftoe the WW2 Marine Raider or his ancestor King of the Vagabonds, L'Emmerdeur, Half-Cocked Jack, Quicksilver, Ali Zaybak, Sword of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner...

This gentleman, by whatever named you call him, is perhaps my favorite Stephenson character. I hated him after the first book... it felt too difficult to related to his decisions and mistakes, but loved him by the end.

I can't remember a single character from Anathem, but its world and some of the scenes are burned into my connectome.

Remembrance of Earth’s past had some of the weakest protagonists in a book I’ve read. It also has this weird thing where characters plan for things and that just … happens. It was strange seeing book arching plans go without a hitch.

But I think it was incredibly interesting for me to see the Asian perspective on the west. I’ve read it more as an allegory of the different peoples of the world, shown from a perspective totally different than my own.

I do think though that you have to be a bit of a hard sci-fi fan to finish it, but the science-y ideas are very interesting. I think it changed how I view the vast cosmos, at least a little bit.

I agree, re The Three Body Problem. It's a fun story, but not hard sci-fi in the way Stephenson etc are. I also enjoyed the dive into mid-century communist China - it was a jarring, immersive journey into living-memory history I hadn't learned about before.

I think Diamond Age was my favorite overall Stephenson story in terms of both story and neat scifi concepts, but all of them were enjoyable. I agree on Seveneves chars all being forgettable. Dodge (The most recent one) had perhaps the dullest start, but I really liked the Dodge, Corvis, and Daisy characters.

+1 for Seveneves. I found it so engrossing that just thinking about it now I can picture the shapes of that chain in zero-G, and the unexpectedly long-lasting hellscape consequences of the very early reveal. The CB radio...

eh, 1st 1/2 great. 2nd half ... really falls apart

To be honest I think I really like “long jumps in time”. It’s like the author builds up a world that you understand and care about, and then it becomes a backdrop of this new world, which adds another layer of complexity. There are parallels to notice and explore, “how things might turn out” tales, etc.

The one other author I’ve seen pull it off was Brandon Sanderson in his Mistborn trilogy, though he does it 2 times (once for each book) where the previous one becomes “the legends” for the next one, with all the misunderstandings that this usually entails.

Yeah, they're really 2 different books.

BUT, I enjoyed the 2nd half as well. The 1st book is already obsolete technologically in some ways (launch technology has progressed a lot in the last 5 years)[0], although very interesting. Which is one reason I like the 2nd part in that it extrapolates from the sociocultural/technological developments of the first book to see what the ultimate consequences could be.

The book is also a sharp commentary on the destructiveness of social media...

[0]side note: the speed of progress that SpaceX is achieving with Starship in Boca Chica is comparable to a pace you'd want in the first book... They're going so fast in Boca Chica, as if the Moon fell apart and they only have a couple years left before the Hard Rain to make humanity a multiplanetary species...

Also, the author has an inexplicable obsession with chains moving in free space. (Okay, I get it, it's cool physics, but how is it any more practical than using a mega-catapult as an airport?)

Agreed, the first half was semi-realistic hard science fiction, the second half felt more like fantasy almost. It wasn't bad, but such a huge shift from the first half.

Strong agree. Luckily you can just stop reading at the end of part 1 and it’s still a very satisfying book.

I hated Seveneves. The first part was grim and unremitting and almost everyone died. It left me feeling kind of depressed, and unwilling to put up with what seemed to be a self-indulgent second part. Plus the premise was so unlikely and the ending felt unsatisfactory. I should have known: Stephenson doesn't really do endings.

The "Stephenson doesn't do endings" meme again. Sigh. Yes, the novel ends and it's obvious that the characters' lives keep going. Lots of authors do that. Real life often doesn't have endings or clear resolutions.

I wasn't aware that it was a meme. My comment was based on my own observations from reading a number of his books.

> Yes, the novel ends and it's obvious that the characters' lives keep going. Lots of authors do that. Real life often doesn't have endings or clear resolutions.

The characters lives do end with the end of the book (unless there's a sequel). You can certainly imagine how their lives might proceed, but a satisfactory ending doesn't preclude that either. Drawing together the elements of a story, completing the arcs, creating some kind of resolution: these are part of the storytellers craft.

With Seveneves I thought he just ran out of steam. It felt like leaving a film ten minutes before the end and stumbling out into the daylight. Pretty dissatisfying at the end of a long book.