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Summary: Finally Reprinted
Review: Stephenson shows his sarcastic best in this first novel. You can see the sociological understanding he has by the way his stereo/archetypal characters at a mythological university behave. The work also foreshadows his later works, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. The scary thing is that he pegged 1984 dead to rights with Hackers vs. Worms, D&D sewer spelunking, and the school club civil wars. I was thankful to get a chance to finally read this one and it was worth the wait.
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Summary: Neal Stephenson's "long-lost" first novel, /The Big U/
Review: Neal Stephenson has gathered legions of fans with his sassy, streetwise SF sagas such as /Snow Crash/ and /The Diamond Age/, but he didn't start there: his first two books were satirical contemporary novels. /Zodiac/, subtitled "the eco-thriller", received some acclaim and modest commercial success, but his début, /The Big U/, sank almost without trace and copies now change hands for startlingly large amounts of money. It's recognizably Stephenson, but in an early, immature form. It's the story of a year in the American Megaversity, the eponymous Big U, an improbably large educational institute with a distinctly diabolical feel. In the Big U's four towers live and work its 40,000 students; it is so vast that it is a world unto itself, with its own government, police force and culture, including multiple feuding tribes. Its huge sewer system is the location for live-action roleplaying campaigns lasting days. Its inhabitants seldom leave the building, and in their incarceration, they go a little crazy. The narrator, Bud, is a freshly-minted associate professor who has the misfortune to be "faculty-in-residence": he lives with the students in E07S. Thus he is privileged to witness the joys of life as a student in the Big U. These include the battle between the Systems of John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein, who share a room and an obsession with hifi, but regrettably not musical tastes; the oratory of Dexter Fresser, whose part in the Stalinist Underground Battalion is only slightly hampered by the vast amounts of drugs he takes; the multiple factions of the Terrorist alliance, such as the Droogs, the Blue Light Specials, the Flame Squad Brotherhood and the Plex Branch of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army (Unofficial). It starts as a romp, a deranged dystopia of university life, and as ever, Stephenson's caustic observations are often hilarious. But the Big U is going wrong. It's reached critical mass, and it's about to explode. Something has to give, and right at the sharp end are the few sane hard-working undergrads who are trying to get an education - and Bud is right in there with them. First novels are often autobiographical, and /The Big U/ has the feel of an impassioned rant by someone who has just escaped from higher education and has some stuff he needs to get off his chest. As Bud says, "This is a history... by writing it I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my bitterness and contempt." One can only hope, though, that the next line isn't as true: "What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest." Although it's plentifully inventive, /The Big U/ isn't as imaginative as Stephenson's subsequent books - it's all too possible to guess at where some of his inspiration sprang from. The story also doesn't fit together quite as neatly as in later work. However, there's much to please fans here, and as ever, some of the characters and events will live in the memory long afterwards. It's a wild ride, and as ever, leads to an unexpected destination.
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Summary: hilarious, immature, and ahead of its time
Review: Picture university life gone wrong: the students and faculty do whatever they want, the computer randomly munches files, giant rats live in the sewers, and the sub-basement holds nuclear waste. In the second half of the book the student population degenerates into bicamerality (as Snow Crash readers know, Stephenson has a thing about Julian Jaynes) and a small-scale war breaks out on campus. The Big U is a hilarious, manic satire on life at a big public university in the United States. Stephenson has great riffs about the nonsensical nature of a large administration, the bizarre varieties of people who wouldn't be able to survive outside of academia, and the architectural ugliness of recently constructed university buildings. Although it's funny, The Big U is conspicuously a first novel: the dialog often fails to ring true, the tone changes unpredictably, and the use of the first person was almost certainly a mistake: most of the book is in third person and the narrator is never developed into a real character. Stephenson's novels feature physically unimpressive male protagonists who are nevertheless intelligent, resourceful, and competent at a wide range of technical activities, especially computer programming. These protagonists are often interested in female characters who are their intellectual equals but are also physically attractive. These two classes of characters combined with detailed, tactical action sequences and at least one lavish multi-page description of heavy weaponry epitomize Stephenson's novels. In other words, he writes books for nerds. The Big U is a fun book. I believe that it tanked when it came out in 1984 not so much because of its flaws but because it was ahead of its time: Microsoft and the Internet had not yet entered the public consciousness and books for nerds were just not yet socially acceptable.
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Summary: Stephenson's right to leave this one by the wayside
Review: A throwaway novel, written in a Randian-cartoonish style (and much of the plot is tedious verisimilitude -- do you really want to relive those juvenile college years?)
Snow Crash worked better; no need to pine for this one.
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Summary: Stephenson's best work nails college life
Review: I was in Russian history class at Oklahoma State in 1985 when my professor pulls out this book and says, "My nephew wrote this." A couple of weeks later, ran across it the book store and brought it home. It was a great read and remains one of my favorite books of all time. It is one of those types of books that you can reread and continue to find something new. If and when it is republished, like Grisham's best and first work "A Time to Kill," Stephenson's reputation will make its reputation become more widespread.
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Summary: A stunning debut by Neal Stephenson!
Review: When will book publishers get it into their heads and re-publish this book? Hopefully, the success of his recent "Cryptonomicon" will prompt a reprint of odd little classic, a book that came out before Stephenson started getting name recognition. People, especially NS's fans, need to know about this book. Even my friend, who was the one who got me to read "Snow Crash", had never heard about this one. I just picked it up at a local library on a lark and was pleasantly suprised! "The Big U" is a maddening (and kind of funny, in a disquieting way) descent into a ravaged and war-torn...college campus? Strange as that may seem, after a little time reading, one almost starts to believe that, somewhere out there, there actually IS a "Big U"! The best way to describe this book: an average overcrowded state university as seen through the eyes of Hieronymous (sp?) Bosch or Dante... Sure, its detractors complain that its a bit dated and while this is true, it does nothing to lessen the impact. It must be read to be believed!
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Summary: Long Live Septimius Severus Krupp!
Review: Hilarious reading! When I discovered The Big U in 1991 I was a junior at Villanova University and I could relate to virtually the whole story. I had briefly borrowed the book from a bookcase in my office; had I known then that it would become so difficult to obtain, I would have bought my own copy at the time. Long live Septimius Severus Krupp! PLEASE PLEASE reissue this book.
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Summary: Interesting, but dated satire of the mega-university
Review: I liked Stephenson's _Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller_ enough to consider assigning it to one of my environmental studies classes, so when I read all the reviews of _The Big U_ I had to check it out. (By the way, though it's impossible to find a copy to buy it only took three days for it to arrive via interlibrary loan.) His take on the mega-university was amusing to me; as a college prof I've read a lot of novels set in academe and love satires like Jane Smiley's _MOO_...this wasn't quite up to that standard. It's very much the work of a young novelist, often too frenetic to be pleasant, too absurd to suspend disbelief, too thin to keep interest-- but it's also a very disconcerting view of higher education and one that rings true to this alumnus of a 38,000 student state university. The final firefight literally gave me nightmares, so it's a good thing I read it after I'd turned in the semester's grades. I'd advise people new to Stephenson to read _Zodiac_ first; this belongs well down on a stack of "academic" novels somewhere near Bernard Malamud's _A New Life_ I'd say. It's probably not a bad idea for a 17 year old contemplating attending a "Big U" to read it though-- it might steer them toward a smaller school, at the very least. I'll be waiting for the library to get me _Cryptonomicon_ next though!
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Summary: Somone needs to get this book back in print!!!
Review: In brief: I read this book when I was 14 yrs old and understood about 10% of it. PLEASE REISSUE THIS BOOK, I WILL BUY 20 COPIES AS GIFTS!
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Summary: Hilarious college satire; slightly dated, still funny
Review: Neal Stephenson takes a big handful of late-century college stereotypes, throws them into a science-fictiony one-building hell of a university gone haywire, and comes out with "The Big U". I, and most of my friends that went to college with me, envisioned Jester Center, the mega-dorm,lecture hall,everything-else building at the University of Texas at Austin, as the book's infamous "Plex" (and even called it that sometimes). Not every school has a building that could double as the Plex, but anyone who ever lived in a large dorm will understand the dueling stereos, the bickering roommates, the confusing signs and numbers, and the other small elements that make the atmosphere of Stephenson's Big U so familiar to college students of that era. And even though some of the book's references, such as tape drives for the computers, ubiquitous Dungeons and Dragons, and Cold War-style Eastern Europeans taking over a secret nuclear waste dump, seem slightly dated in 1999, overall the effect is still very understandable, and very, very funny. A wonderful satire/farce/dark fantasy of how big-college life could have degenerated! (I had no idea there was such a demand for this book; I'd surely consider $500 for my gently worn copy.)
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