Critics sometimes gripe that Neal Stephenson's sprawling, discursive, episodic, prop-up-your-laptop-sized novels may be smart, but they need focus and paring back. Too many of his novels have approached, or even run past, the thousand-page mark. In this view, he needs an editor, a groundskeeper, someone to trim his excesses and check his enthusiasm.
Yet part of the pleasure of a large, long Stephenson novel is the sheer expansiveness of his vision, the vastness of his imagination, the marvel of his world building, and the sly comedy he wrings from it. Stephenson's cinderblock-sized books are geeky odes to editorial noninterference.
