Neal Stephenson is known for enormous, sprawling, infodumpy mega-novels: all-encompassing works that extrapolate technological and social change into the near future or trace them through the past. His breakthrough book, 1992’s Snow Crash, is a cyberpunk technothriller set in part in the “metaverse” – Stephenson coined this term for immersive virtual reality long before Zuckerberg’s Facebook appropriated it. He followed it up in 1999 with the 918-page Cryptonomicon, about Alan Turing, code breaking, maths, finance, gaming and many other things. The 18th century-set The Baroque Cycle (2003-04) is the best part of 3,000 pages long, stuffed with data historical, scientific, speculative, digressive. Reamde (2011), another stonking technothriller more than 1,000 pages long, was extended further with the near-900 pages of 2019’s sequel, Fall or, Dodge in Hell. For Stephenson, more is more.
