| The Big U by Neal Stephenson |
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| First published in 1984, disappeared, and reappeared in 2001. This is the first book written by Neal Stephenson, and it shows. Anyone familiar with his Zodiac, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, or Cryptonomicon should not expect the sophistication that one say in The Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon. One can see the evolution from The Big U to Zodiac to Snow Crash, then the leap to The Diamond Age and the continued progress to Cryptonomicon. I hope Quicksilver continues the development. What makes The Big U different from all his novels, except maybe Zodiac, is that it is decidely not a cyber-punk, or even any technologically-influenced punk novel. This novel is also one of his shortest, having 308 pages with 35 lines each, compared to Zodiac's 308 pages at 40 lines, and Cryptonomicon's 910 pages at 42 lines. This a book read over the week, versus two months for Cryptonomicon. |
| Read the excellent review at slashdot.org. |
| The Stephensonian style that loyal readers expect and new readers should expect is found in this book, albeit in an undeveloped form. The characters are many, the plotlines varied, and then-modern society satired. The satire is of college life circa late Consciousness Revolution/early Culture Wars, though the book is more about a war of cultures than a revolution of consciousness. This is one thing that I love so much about Stephenson's books. The conflicts build and build and build, and finally explode near the end. Another is that his characters -- and they are many of them -- are by and large both protagonists and (helpless?) observers of the larger catastrophe. Finally, he creates a setting more of place than time. While flow of time isn't a strong feature in his stories, his settings are places that you may have been to before, though Stephenson presents them freshly.. There are some flaws in this book that afflict his later stories. First and most upsetting is the poorly built endings. His endings have impoved a bit, from book to book, though they are his weakest point. Secondly, the troubles with the flow of time can get confusing. The problem of ending and time-flow actually converged in Zodiac, but in this book, they occur when a large build-up to a certain scene is occuring. It is frustrating especially as the scene itself is probably important or at least funny, but you often don't have a clear picture as how thing came about the way they did. Lastly, his character involvement in this story is uneven. A lot of time is spent on a given character, then that character fades, only to be seen again in brief glimpses. Thankfully, this problem has not afflicted his later stories. Set in a time that is roughly somewhere between 1981 and 1984, the time is a transition from a Boom-dominated campus to an X-dominated campus. The early-1980s are references as if that time is the past, but for all the hi-tech wizardry that some students use, CD players aren't among them (there are at least two references to phonographs) and owning a color TV is a something that is still really neat. The good thing about being stuck in the post-disco pre-yuppie nether world that was the early 1980s is that it is free of the cultural stereotyping that occurs when you hear the phrase "the late 1970s" or "the 1980s". Stephenson is free to create his own satirical college culture. The culture of The Big U's American Megaversity is primed for collapse, war, and self-destruction. There are many subcultures of which to speak: political extremists, religious extremists, violence-for-the-sake-of violence extremists, ditzy airheads, and of course geeks/nerds. Of all of these, the geeks/nerds are most sympathetically portrayed, but they are just as destructive as anyone else. It is no secret that these groups hate each other, even though there are some alliances. Safe to say, school spirit is zero. The building itself doesn't help at all. The structure is an architectural Modernist disaster of the 1960s/1970s. All the dorms are held in high, Corbusier-style towers, as if straight from his Radiant City. The classes are held in the 9-floor (sub)structure below, and the whole thing is surrounded by massive freeways interchanges and the so-called Death Vortex (a kind of ramp similar in principle to the South I-35 connection to West I-10 in downtown San Antonio). I'm not going to go into detail into how Modernist architecture is a failed architecture, but let's just say that they never solved any social problems nor prevented problems from occuring. In this hell-hole exist our characters: Bud, the black PhD candidate; Casimir Radon, a 30-year-old idealistic Junior Physics student; Sarah, a freshman 18-year-old student; Ephraim Klein, a Philosophy student engaged in stereo wars with John Fenrick; Virgil Gabrielson, the uberhacker who battles the Worm; Fred Fine, a major player in the Sewers and Serpents games that occur in the sewers of the Megaversity...and so on. There is no main character of which to speak, but rather an assortment of characters, the above which are about as close as to main characters that I can ascertain. Each character has its own story. Bud tells the story of The Big U to the reader, and plays the part of observer until the end. Casimir Radon enrolls at American Megaversity, but encounters obstacles every step of the way. Problems with regsitering for classes, getting a dorm, proving that he doesn't need to take General Physics I, and oh yeah, he likes Sarah, too. Sarah is an English major who is nowhere near as romantic as Casimir is about college life. She has the unfortunate luck to be assigned to a floor with almost nothing but airheads, and all the trauma thereof. Ephraim Klein's actions against Fenrick amount to petty warfare, until a big prank almost single-handidly brings down the school, which sets off a series of actions that ultimately bring down the school itself. Virgil is mostly pre-occupied with fighting the massive computer Worm, which was responsible at least in part for making Casimir's life miserable for an afternoon. He joins Fred Fine's S&S group, and is also somewhat responsible for bringing the school down. Fred Fine is, well, nutty. With all these characters, and their interactions with each other, it can be hard to trace who is doing what, when, and why. This difficulty was resolved in his later novels, which successfully made clear who was the major player, and who were the supporting actors. |