If that gauge also applies to writers, then Stephenson hits the mark: His novels are actually comparable to phone books and they still manage to be entertaining. Sometimes it is said of an actor that he is so skilled, he could read from the phone book and make it interesting. Which is not to say the sheer quantity of his work implies anything negative about the quality. The author of “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon,” and many other similarly imposing books in the past couple of decades, Stephenson seems to know how to do things in exactly one way: all the way. This is not a writer who does things in half-measures. Readers of Stephenson’s previous work definitely know what I mean. There’s just no way he wouldn’t do a good job, you know what I mean? Or, at the very least, an astoundingly thorough job. If the moon ever disintegrates, causing Earth to become a fiery hellscape for several thousand years, and we can select only a few hundred humans to entrust with the survival and repropagation of the species, I vote for Neal Stephenson to be one of those humans.
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