The Big U Kindle Edition

I'm a big Neal Stephenson fan and thought I should read some.of the earlier books to be complete. Zodiac was really fun, but this one, while it showed some sparks, was quite a mess. The very long last chapter was quite a drag, and while I guess there was a resolution, the explanations were fairly trite. Yes, university life is silly, but for stuff razzing academia, there were much better bits in Cryptonomicon, Baroque, Anathem and even briefly in D.O.D.O.

I guess this is what you get when you let a brilliant but immature writer try to cover Catch-22 in a university setting. The first half of The Big U is a fun but overbroad campus satire; then Stephenson gets tired of that and shifts the story into a full-out action-adventure in which the groups he set up earlier as amusing satires of real university phenomena become warring factions when law and order breaks down. Although this part is a disappointment from a satirical perspective, it is more inventively written than the first half -- Stephenson's version of such chaos is complex and realistic in the way everyone's schemes are immediately trampled by everyone else's. Stephenson recycled and improved this "every man for himself" chaos in the riot scene in The Diamond Age years later. We also see Stephenson's early interest in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which he later raised to wild heights in Snow Crash.You can see the training wheels -- this is by no means a great novel (as Snow Crash is) -- but The Big U will have historical interest for Stephenson fans, and it is a frothy, fun diversion in its own right.

Neal Stephenson is always great fun, and the Big U is far from an exception. An exciting story that snowballs from minor collegiate drama to life-and-death struggles in an engaging way.

What's really fascinating about The Big U is how early Neal Stephenson hit upon so many of the themes that he follows through so much of his more recent fiction. Others have commented about the interest in computers, programming, and worms--these come in as plot points here, but Stephenson hadn't figured out how to use them in detail without losing the reader, as he did later in Cryptonomicon. The fascinating blend between absolutely ludicrous plot twists, believable detail, and weird, geeky heros is here already. And I noticed some more incidental ideas germinating here; I was struck by how the decaying University, once the epitome of higher education, resembled the decaying palace of Louis XIV, complete with bats and rats and crumbling ceilings and walls. Also, the dumping of cement into the hole occupied by the "B-men" in the Big U was surely a forerunner of two scenes in Cryptonomicon--if you haven't read it, I don't want to spoil it for you here. We are missing a red-headed immortal, but Stephenson was just getting warmed up. Fans should not miss this; but if you haven't gotten bitten by the Stephenson bug, you might want to start elsewhere.

The title should have been Dante's U, as the world Stephenson describes seems to fall deeper into the hell we knew as college. Quite frankly, the only reason this book is of interest is because of Stephenson's later works. I don't know how anyone can take this book seriously or say it has much to do with college in the eigthies. There is so much material from the eighties college experience and this book barely scratches the surface. It starts as a slightly over the top skewering life on the big campus, but to stick to the book's themes, the story turns into one huge (and not so funny) acid trip. The second half of the book is so over the top, nuclear waste, giant rats, and submachine gun toting heroes that it lost all sense of 'fun' or satire. One can see a little genesis of his later writings, especially 'Zodiac', but anyone who is not a fan of Stephenson's is going to be rolling their eyeballs and wondering how he made the huge leap from this to outstanding 'Snow Crash'.

Amazingly prescient

Neal Stephenson's ethnological imagination makes hash of the usual campus clans, clones and clowns in The Big U. A month by month deconstruction of the not-so-typical academic year in a very typical Midwestern University, The Big U is probably most interesting to three different groups: Neal Stephenson's readers, readers of academic satire, and anyone traumatized by a college experience in the '80's.Stephenson readers may be most disappointed in the tenor of the book. Although it doesn't live up to the standards of his later novels, however, The Big U is a microscopic look at the germs of ideas that Stephenson more fully developed in Snow Crash. Most notable of these: the Worm, a powerful computer virus that only one Ubergeek can successfully battle. But the very elements most interesting to Stephenson fans may baffle fans of academic satire, who would probably prefer a straightforward romp, such as Jane Smiley's Moo U.This novel cannot be evaluated outside of the context of the 1980's, when the words "date rape" were just beginning to be uttered. In colleges across the midwest, the world was divided between the Reaganites and those who lived in constant awareness that Missouri housed at least 165 nuclear missiles. Something called AIDS hit the news, and there were some projections that huge numbers of the general population would be dead in 10 years. Anybody who knew what a mouse was was automatically a geek and proud to be one. The Big U is probably most valuable for its sociological grasp of all the factions and campus groups coming to a head in that time.Because I am a Neal Stephenson reader, a fan of academic satire and a survivor of the '80's, I found The Big U a wonderful read, and couldn't put it down. I liked the characters all the way through, stayed interested in the plot, and couldn't wait to find out what happened. I wasn't disappointed, but did find some of the scenes a bit violent. Thus, the four-star rating.

Life on a big campus taken to extremes - great fun

Wie auch Zodiac, kein SF oder Cyberpunkbuch, aber auf alle Fälle ein echter Hammer. Wer hätte gedacht, was an einer (u.s.-amerikanischen) Universität alles passieren kann... Vom typischem Studentenleben bis hin zum Guerilliakampf ist hier alles geboten. Und wenn man glaubt, ads die Geschichte ab einem gewissen Punkt halbwegs grade weitergeht, dann setze Stephenson nochmal etwas oben drauf. Eine unglaubliche, abstruse und auch witzige (mit dem entsprechendem Humor;-)) Achterbahnfahrt durch eine Universität...Viel Spaß!