Neal Stephenson is My Favorite Novelist

I have many authors I like a lot, but I think my favorite of all is Neal Stephenson (although Terry Pratchett is very close) Stephenson's output, in number of volumes, is not all that large; per his website he has written:

The Big U (1984)
Zodiac (1988)
Snow Crash (1992)
The Diamond Age (1995)
In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)
Cryptonomicon (1999)
The Baroque Cycle, which consisted of
Quicksilver (2003)
The Confusion (2004)
The System of the World (2004)
Anathem (2008)
Mongoliad (an experimental work with Greg Bear and others; not exactly a book)

He is now working on a new novel Reamde

But these are BIG books. The Baroque Cycle is the length of nine ordinary books, or three very big ones (and was, in fact, published as three volumes and as nine), altogether about 3,000 pages. Cryptonomicon and Anathem are each another thousand.

And they vary a LOT. I will only discuss a few of my favorites.

The Diamond Age (1995) is straight science fiction, set in China. It tells the story of Nell, a child of the lowest social class, who gets a stolen copy of a book and electronic guide intended for an aristocrat. The culture is neo-Victorian, and Stephenson explores the effects of culture on people. I have not read this book in a long time, and will not say much more about it.

In Cryptonomicon (1999) Stephenson tells three tales, set in two time periods: The current day (1999) and World War II, and involving three groups of people. In the WW II period, one focus is Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius cryptographer and is part of a highly secret project involving Enigma, the German code machine, and how to use the fact that the British could read the German codes without letting the Germans know that their codes were broken. A lot of the work of doing this falls into the domain of Bobby Shaftoe, a sergeant in the Marines. It also involves Goto Dengo, a Japanese friend of Shaftoe's, who is building a mysterious bunker system in the Philippines. In the present day, the grandchildren and children of the WWII characters are involved. Randy Waterhouse (Lawrence's grandson) is involved in a scheme to create a data haven on a small island in the South Pacific. This gets him involved with a huge slate of fascinating characters, including Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe (Bobby's son) and America Shaftoe (Bobby's granddaughter).

Reading this novel feels like riding three express trains at once; you get a strong sense that they are all going to meet, but part of the exhilaration is that you don't quite see how.

Stephenson is again exploring culture, including the cultures of America, England, Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Finland and other places. He also has extended discursions into topics from mining to cryptography to number theory to how to eat Captain Crunch cereal to organ playing.

And he is pushing at the bounds of science fiction. It is hard to say that this is SF at all, except that it involve technology and science and that it just feels like SF. In many ways, it's more like historical fiction, especially because it involves real events and many actual people (notably Alan Turing and Winston Churchill, and a brief cameo by a very young Ronald Reagan).

The Baroque Cycle, which consisted of

Quicksilver (2003)
The Confusion (2004)
The System of the World (2004)

is a sort of prequel to Cryptonomicon, set in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Many of the characters have the same surnames as characters in Cryptonomicon. The cast of characters is vast, but there are two people around whom it all revolves (sometimes at a great distance): Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. These two, co-inventors of calculus, were among the greatest geniuses of all time. But two more different people are difficult to imagine. Newton was solitary, cantankerous, paranoid (sometimes to a delusional extent) and just plain weird. He spent a large part of his life trying to fix the exact date of creation by examining the Bible, and believed that the ancients (especially Solomon) knew more than the moderns. Above all, Newton had an ability to focus on a problem that has probably never been matched - he would forgo food and sleep for days at a time; when he was investigating eyesight and optics, he experimented by sticking a needle into the side of his eye and pressing on his eyeball. Leibniz, on the other hand, was social and prominent and interested in everything from law to philosophy to diplomacy to (oh yes) math and physics, and made huge contributions to all these fields.

Other characters include Daniel Waterhouse, friend to both Newton and Leibniz, son of a puritan, member of the Royal Society, and founder of something that sound a lot like MIT; Eliza, who rises from a harem in the Ottoman Empire to being a duchess of two countries; Jack Shaftoe, who sails around the world; Louis XIV (the sun king) and dozens of others.

Then, for something completely different, there's

Anathem (2008). It's not clear that Anathem is even a novel. It reads more like memoirs, or autobiography. But it's the memoirs of someone who lives in a subtly but hugely different world from Earth. Another way of looking at Anathem is as an alternate history novel, but the alteration is that Jesus was never born. (You can recognize analogues of the ancient Greeks, but there is no Jesus-figure). As a result, something very like monasteries developed and never declined, but these are known as maths, and are devoted to the study of math and philosophy.'