The Big U

The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious".

but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Stephenson treats college life as an endurance test, stranding forty thousand students in an eight-tower concrete campustructure.

The novel follows a faculty resident, a physics transfer, and a reluctant student president through administrative mazes and dorm-room stereo wars. Rival residential factions soon turn campus politics into tribal combat, deploying homemade armored vehicles beneath the neon Big Wheel sign.

Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.

• Campus Satire: President Septimius Severus Krupp lectures on Kantian ethics while dodging student pie-throwers and quietly safeguarding corporate entanglements in the executive suites.
• Forced Proximity: In Tower E, an uptight philosophy major and an abrasive business student wage sonic warfare across a taped floor boundary using high-powered stereo stacks and a rattling window fan.
• Hacking: Down in the Computing Center, an eccentric electronics prodigy with a master key and a photographic memory duels a destructive sabotage program known as the Worm.
• Role-Playing Games: The pompous marshal of the university simulation club roams the corridors with a fencing foil, leading live-action dungeon campaigns into the fetid drainage system below.
• Also by This Author: Seveneves, Termination Shock and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.