The Big U

Rating:
Summary: I agree¿only for hard core fans
Review: There is a good reason why this was out of print for better part of 13-14 years...it's not very good....uneven character development, haphazard plot points, extremely annoying shifts from third person to first person voice through out the book, and clearly written by a very young person and not particularly well developed writer. The book ambers along for the first half of the book at a good pace and then completely flies off the rails in the second half. However, you can see a lot of Stephenson's style developed here (and greatly refined in later works). BUT I must admit some warm feelings for the book due to my personal experiences at "American Megaversity". Like Stephenson, I attended Boston University (although a few years after him) and about 80% of the descriptions of life at AM are either dead on or only slight exaggerations of what BU was like. Clearly, Stephenson served time in the same dorm as I did (Warren Towers...three towers facing each other, 500 people in each tower, and constant fire alarms requiring evacuation of the an entire tower) and possibly also worked at food service like I did (where I also ran into a fair number of rather large rats when I did the trash). I especially found the comments on uselessness of student government to be true and very amusing...Kant loving AM President S.S. Krupp = Kant loving BU President J.R Silber Huge Neon Big Wheel Sign = Huge Neon Citgo Sign in Kenmore Square. But if you didn't go to BU in the 80's, then alot of this will be lost to you....So do yourself a favor and go reread snow crash again...That's what I'm going to do to wash out the not so great taste of this book out of my mouth

Rating:
Summary: Just How Big is U?
Review: If you're like me, you're always up for another satire of academic life, but only if it's done well. Well, this is Neal Stephenson we're talking about, so let's get one thing straight -- you will love it. From the amazing talent who brought us Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc. comes this earlier, but equally enjoyable book. Stephenson takes dead aim at Those Who Take Themselves Too Seriously (you know who you are -- or, unfortunately, you don't). Readers who have read other Stephenson books know that the guy is an awesome talent, describing things as no one else can, always hilarious and true. The only thing I could compare to this book would be Brauner's Love Songs of the Tone-Deaf, an academic satire that may be even funnier. Check out also Francine Prose's Blue Angel. Gotta love this stuff.

Rating:
Summary: typical Stephenson romp
Review: A typical Stephenson romp, the Big U is fast paced and surreal. Although the publishers would have you believe this is a satire, it's no more satire of University life than the Deliverator is satire of the Dominoes man and our society at large: that is to say, it's satire, but that's not the point of the book. Stephenson excels at creating a world that seems to overlap with rather than exist in what we call reality, with the non-overlapping part peopled by casual bad-asses who come out of the woodwork as soon as the necessary overarching crisis presents itself. The Big U is no exception. Typical of Stephenson books, the ending is weak, but that didn't stop me from finishing it in 5 hours and recommending it to all of my friends who've enjoyed Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (although i still say Zodiac is his best book, but for some reason i can't get anyone to read it).

Rating:
Summary: Messy fun
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Easily the worst book I've ever finished
Review: Stephenson came highly recommended to me, but I assume this book is from before he became a writer. It baffles me somewhat that this book could even make it to print. I feel I should bash the editor the most. There are plenty of other reviews that break down why, so I won't go into depth, but here's some words/phrases that come to mind about this book: tedious, simplistic, juvenile, virginally awkward, skeleton-in-author's-closet.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful, thought-provoking, Stephenson's best
Review: For many years since its original publication in 1984, The Big U has been out of print. Some rumored that Stephenson himself had refused ever to allow the reprinting of this satirical masterpiece, while others whispered that Stephenson was waiting until he had sold off the last of a garage-full of first editions at inflated prices before authorizing a new printing. And, indeed, until recently if you wanted to own a copy of The Big U, you would have paid a couple of hundred bucks or more and felt lucky to have found one for sale in the first place. Now, however, by the simple expedient of clicking a button you can own a trade-size paperback copy of the book.

The cover of the new edition is somewhat lackluster, and the paper on which it is printed is not of the highest quality. There also appear to be a few misprints (in this assessment I'm going on my recollection of the text from the first edition--I could be wrong). However, the joy of owning a copy of The Big U makes up for small inconveniences like these.

On one level, The Big U is the story of the college for which it is named and of some of the inmates of that college--physics wiz Casimir Radon, student body president Sarah Jane Johnson and her friend Hyacinth, computer geek and gamer extraordinaire Fred Fine, science-shop techie Virgil Gabrielson, drugged-out political activist Dex Fresser, incongenial roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein, college president S.S. Krupp, wino Bert Nix, and our narrator Bud (a young black Ph.D. in remote sensing).

On another level, The Big U is a biting commentary (think Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One) on college life, equally relevant to the late 20th or the early 21st centuries. Roommate problems, cafeteria food, the petty and meaningless wrangling of student government, administration red-tape, and new-agey faculty all receive their share of Stephenson's merciless scrutiny.

If The Big U stopped there, it would already be a classic, and well worth the read. But behind the zany hijinks related by Bud lies another dimension in which Stephenson examines a serious question about the direction in which society is headed--will we survive the current anti-intellectual trends which, to the dismay of many, are more and more visible even within the ivory tower?

The Big U plays with the decay of society in general and of higher education in particular in many ways. In terms of the university itself, over the course of two semesters, the Big U devolves from something not to unlike a big modern university (one is irresistably reminded of UCLA) to a war zone populated by "Terrorists" and "Airheads." Meanwhile, its inhabitants deal with this decay in their own ways. For some, like Dex Fresser, there's not too much difference between his permanently drug-altered reality and the world which The Big U has become. Others, like Casimir Radon, whose idealized dream of university education dies a quick but distressing death when confronted with the reality of the Big U, perceive the decay of the university clearly. Fred Fine, the gaming geek, loses touch with reality and retreats into the personality of his favorite S&S (Sewers and Serpents--a variant on the obvious) character Klystron/Chris (who also lives in a world which is shifting back and forth between two realities, one based on SF, the other on fantasy). S.S.Krupp addresses the question of consciousness and reality in a talk on philosophy, while Bert Nix, a former president of the Big U, now a derelict lost in his own world provides the counterpoint. Even the computer which runs the Big U, the Janus 64, suggests in its name the duality of what the university should be and what it is becoming. At every turn, The Big U asks us to consider what is happening to our society in general and to higher education in particular, yet, like much good SF, it achieves this without becoming dull or preachy.

For those who are interested in Stephenson as a writer, The Big U is also indispensable reading. Questions about consciousness and society are common in Stephenson's works. Those who have read The Diamond Age or Snowcrash will recall Stephenson's later explorations of the theme. In Snowcrash, Stephenson offers us a story about a Sumerian incantation (rather like a computer program with the ability to re-program the human mind) which has been released into a cyberpunk world. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson returned glancingly to the same theme in the sub-plot about the drummers who have achieved a kind of mass consciousness created through sexually transmitted viruses. Whether the world of the drummers is better or worse than ours is an open question; what is incontestible is Stephenson's interest in consciousness and reality, which goes back to The Big U, his first novel.

I'm a fan of Stephenson, obviously, and those unfamiliar with Stephenson's work may be asking why they should care about the opinion of someone who's so clearly partisan. Here's why: The Big U is, in my opinion, not just another Stephenson novel but the best of Stephenson's works. Some of the "historical" exposition in Snowcrash is dull, and The Diamond Age, while good, is terribly long. Both are novels about events that have world-altering consequences. If you want SF drama on the grand scale, read one of Stephenson's later works; you won't be disappointed. But if you want to be entertained and, incidentally, to ponder some of the all-too-real problems that face our society, read The Big U. And then read it again. And again. It's a keeper.

Rating:
Summary: never before, never again
Review: All you cyberpunk folks, if you're going to read this, please don't expect anything as mature or as slick as Stephenson's later works -- it's miles away in topic and style even from _Zodiac_. I can't think how to describe _U_ except as a warped fusion of J.G. Ballard's _High-Rise_ and the 80s teen-trash film _Real Genius_. This is definitely a first novel, although you can see the beginnings of Stephenson's signature style, so be warned: there are a few clunking pages, the book begins hurling believability over the side along about the fiftieth page or so, and as usual Stephenson has the amps on the Didactron turned up pretty high. But I didn't really care; _U_ is deranged gonzo satire, of the kind that Stephenson hasn't allowed himself to write again (although it's echoed in the first pages of _Snow Crash_), and the book succeeds mostly as silly fun.

Rating:
Summary: Apocalyptic Academia
Review: ....P>...It is most entertaining to watch the events that ensue. You can see pieces embedded in the text that will reappear in the author's later works - such as organs and rail-gun technology (UT's Center for Electromechanics has now got a tank-mountable railgun from what I understand - welcome Freshmen). The text is highly entertaining, if not as masterfully structured as "Cryptonomicon".

Rating:
Summary: Clearly a Graduate of His Own Fictional MegaUniversity
Review: Nothing is worse than a book with a promising start that gets progressively more tedious with every passing page. Stephenson's satire on college life degenerates into a miraculously idiotic tale that goes WAY over the top and becomes a blatantly violent, purposeless bloodbath. By the start of the spring semester (the second half of the book), you'll realize you're in the unsteady hands of an alleged author who smugly revels in his own imagined cleverness and who obviously needs to revisit Fiction Writing 101 at his local university. Not interesting. Not funny. Not even remotely amusing. Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: For die-hard fans only!
Review: This is my first journey into the works of Stephenson, and it proved to be my last. I love great stories on the juvenile inner-workings of universities. I love a good satire. However, this book was neither of these things. Too many characters to follow, little emphasis on character development or plot resolution, for that matter. The book peaks in the middle when there is a huge party before semester break. I was thinking, "Wow! This book just started out slow and is getting really intense!" I should've put it down there. The second half of the book seemed to have little organization. The satire was the equivalent of someone dropping an anvil on your head. We. Get. It. The acid trip overtones of the second half of the book seemed to have come out of nowhere. There was little build up to it. Furthermore, the book really read as a vehicle to promote D&D style games. We really didn't need that much detail on every little move in the sewers. A guy gets killed by a rat. Virgil fights them off with a strobe light. Funny, I just summed up 15 pages of crap in 15 words. Too bad Neal couldn't. In summary, this book was terrible. It had about 25 or so pages worth of redeeming value. The Sarah character experienced a little bit of growth and development, and was therefore interesting. The other characters were brought to us by the letter Zzzzzzzzzz.....