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Books like snow crash5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The three parts of The Baroque Cycle were published at six-month intervals in 20 they feature historical figures ranging from Newton and Leibniz to Louis XIV and a very young Benjamin Franklin, bound up in a narrative with the fictional ancestors of the characters in Stephenson's similarly huge, cryptology-centered 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Actually, with every Stephenson book since Snow Crash, you feel that you're reading some new kind of science fiction, regardless of the nominal set and settings of the story. Read that trilogy– Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, collectively called The Baroque Cycle–and you'll have the uncanny sense that you're reading some new kind of science fiction. Talk to him, though, and you still hear the rigorously humble guy of 10 years ago. Meet Stephenson today, and you'll meet a well-muscled, shaven-headed, bearded fellow who's just published a highly acclaimed, massively popular trilogy of 900-page novels set mostly in the 17th century. ![]() It wasn't his debut–he'd published two earlier novels in the 1980s–but the book was such a hit that it put his name on the science fiction map in a way the earlier efforts had not. If you met the novelist Neal Stephenson a decade ago, you would have encountered a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction (1992's Snow Crash, in which computer viruses start invading hacker minds). ![]()
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