I’m moving house soon, so it’s time to re-read books and decide whether to keep them. ‘The Big U’ stands up well to a re-read, I must say. Neal Stephenson is a fantastic writer, so this wasn’t much of a surprise. ‘The Big U’ was his first novel and is quite different to his subsequent, often much longer works. It reminds me, in fact, of a mashup between the oeuvre of J.G. Ballard and the TV series Community. The Ballardian connection comes from the lead character being a structure rather than a person. Although the book is narrated by a junior academic, it is dominated by the Plex, a gargantuan university campus of high rise towers and dank basements, all linked by lifts. As in [b:High-Rise|12331767|High-Rise|J.G. Ballard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1358752559s/12331767.jpg|2270643], these structures precipitate an inexorable mental unravelling amongst their inhabitants. The institutions within the university (‘American Megaversity’) also have their place in the collapse into chaos, though, and individual responsibility isn’t ignored. The Community-esque elements are the ensemble cast of misfits thrown together and the humour of the whole thing. Said humour is extremely dark most of the time, to the point that the back cover compares it to [b:Catch-22|168668|Catch-22|Joseph Heller|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463157317s/168668.jpg|814330]. I found the digs at various aspects of student life, Reaganomics, and the media very funny.

The novel is essentially a hyperbolic satire on the American education system. Amongst the bat infestations and 1980s supercomputers (which inevitably age the book slightly), though, there is a thoughtful examination of rape culture. The majority of the characters are male, but the main females Sarah and Hyacinth are handled very well. The ‘Nice Guy’ archetype is deconstructed effectively. The book could also be read as an acerbic comment on America’s obsession with guns, however I genuinely can’t tell whether it was intended as such. Few American authors seem to have much of a sense of irony about widespread gun ownership. Given that at one point a tank is driven through the Plex cafeteria, though, surely Stephenson does. Perhaps a more wide-ranging point about the violence simmering below daily life is being made. That and how easy it can be to improvise weapons with everyday objects.

My own university experience has (so far) been at a collegiate rather than campus institution, so the Plex seems like a dystopian horror structure to me. If you’ve lived in a monolithic block of student accommodation, it might seem more familiar. I love novels which use the idea of physical structures causing a vicious spiral of insane behaviour, which J.G. Ballard is of course famous for. ‘The Big U’ is an excellent entry into the sub-genre and I recommend it to anyone fond of black comedy, urban dystopias, and satires on student life. If you have a phobia of rats, however, read with care beyond the halfway mark. Finally, this novel could make a fantastic film and David Fincher should get on that immediately. ( )

I read this the summer before college, when I was reading every college-related book I could get my hands on. That ended up being mostly Big U (giddy, dark, ridiculous, and hilarious) and Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons (his disdain for his own characters dripped off every word).

Both very useful in my college life. Definitely. ( )

In the future, when an author thinks that his book isn't worth reading, I'm going to take his word for it. The Big U is too over the top to be an enjoyable, subtle satire of the large university life, although it had that potential in the beginning. On the other hand, the melodrama and large scale events are too trivial for the novel to be epic. The overall effect is pretty "meh."
The detail and fact finding that Stephenson is known for is all but absent in this book. The only signature Stephenson move that the Big U contains is the litany of story lines and multiple character narratives, but with uncharacteristic brevity and lack of details, the constant storyline switching is irritating and makes the novel shallower rather than deeper.
Also, Stephenson should know that his fans are the physics majors, hackers and LARPers of the universe and be a little more careful with the negative stereotyping ( )

He should have called it The Big Red Go Fan. That is what this book will always be to me. Like Snowcrash, I will never forget it. Unlike Snowcrash, I did not like it. I LOVED Snowcrash. There was little character development. Then, I want action. There was action, but it was very strange action, which is what one can expect from a Neal Stephenson novel. I don't even remember the end. I should read it again. But I just can't make myself read the last few pages so that I can finish this review. Then why did I give it four stars? Was it well written? Yes. Did it tell the story of a year in the big university? Yes. Four stars. Did it do everything a four-star book does and bring that something extra that makes this book stand out as great? No.
It was very clever. However, it was lost in too many characters and subplots, which were never resolved. ( )

um. What did I just read? ( )

I read this for "completeness" (so I could have read all of Neal Stephenson's work), even though he hates it and had tried to suppress it. Not great, not horrible; if it hadn't been a Neal Stephenson book I might not have sought out another by the same author, but it wasn't so bad to have regretted reading it. What was interesting was seeing how some of the elements (plot and character motivations, style) developed in his subsequent books. ( )

This book made me think. Is it possible to hate a book? This book pushed the envelope. I'm a dedicated Stephenson fan and reader. I've read and liked all his other books. In fact I consider one of them the best book title ever - "In the Beginning There Was the Command Line". It's wonderfully biblical. But this book is not like the others. I've seen video games turned into movies. Those have at least interesting images. This felt like a video game turned into a book. It lost a lot in translation. It was devoid of engaging characters, just caricatures. It had no plot, just incident after incident. Worst of all was it made be think less of the books I had loved reading. There was a formula developing here which you can see in the newer works. Exaggeration, technical detail, computers, engineering, etc. I'm old enough to have lived through the era depicted/satirized here. We used terminals to get to mainframes. But there were limits which this book just loved to ignore. Ignore this book. Somebody must have taken Stephenson aside and pointed him in a better direction - thankfully. I now understand why this book was out of print for several years. ( )

This was a favorite of mine back in the 80s. Recently re-read it (listened to it on audible)- and was just as amused. Things drag a smidge more towards the end than I remember, but I enjoyed it. ( )

A compelling, largely accurate satire of modern higher education that gets progressively more surreal, crazed and violent as it goes along. This was Stephenson's first published novel and you can tell - every apparently pointless chunk of bizarre exposition is actually important, the book is no longer than it needs to be, characters aren't picked up and dropped like a toddler with a toy and the "Guns make the USA Great, everybody should have one, preferably several" bullshit is at least minimally disguised and not the whole point of the story. (Btw, Stephenson, the refutation of your argument on this is splashed all across the news these last few days...I mean years...I mean decades..I mean the last century. Let's face it, reform has been over-due in your country since the end of the era of the Wild West.)

Anyway, the only book by this guy that I've read and thought was better was Zodiac, which manages to remain grounded in reality through-out instead of jumping the shark (or giant rat) like this does. ( )

1st novel by Neal, way weaker than later works ( )

This is not as good as I remembered it being from when I read it last century. But there are hilarious bits throughout. And it is so true, if a bit hyperbolic. ( )

Stephenson's debut novel (which he hated) has many of the same ingredients of his other novels, but it seems like he hadn't figured out how to mix it all together and cook it yet. The Big U is an absolute mess, a broad satire of higher education that gets more ridiculous (and tedious) as it goes along.

The one redeeming factor: for a 30-year-old novel, The Big U is really forward-thinking with its critique of higher education. Especially regarding the vocational/business-minded mentality and flaws of the multiversity. If only the book could've stuck more to that and less to giant rats. ( )

Stephenson's first published work is a bit uneven - the first half is an amusing satire of big campus life, and the second half pulls out all the stops, with an all-out war erupting, complete with mutant rats, nuclear waste, foreign nationals, bizarre cults, lots and lots of weaponry & violence - and of course, some heroic geeks. ( )

The Big U Book Review
Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 12:02AM
modify remove organize post follow up

I picked up The Big U while I was organizing my library, and I decided to see if I still liked it ten years [at least] since the last time I had read it.

It turns out, I do! For me, this is the perfect college satire, on the same level as Thank You For Smoking or Office Space. I read it when I was an undergraduate, and it was hilarious, and a devastating send up of the bizarre world that is the American university. Ten years later, it is still hilarious and devastating. Then I flip to the flyleaf, and I find Stephenson wrote it in 1984.

Stephenson nailed the essence of university life in a way that is still relevant thirty years later. The LARPers. The Goddess worshippers. The terrible cafeteria food. The out of control parties. This is the American university, in all of its glory. American universities have long been at the center of the culture war, fostering, even encouraging, a hothouse culture in which the strangest things can flourish. Add to that a culture that has been intellectually static for the last hundred years, a guaranteed fresh supply of naive teenagers, and you will get a system that loops through the same obsessions, over and over and over.

In the introductory chapter, Stephenson's narrator says:

What you are about to read here is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.

This turns out to have been prophetic. In the Big U, we have all of the current obsessions of trendy politics. Rape culture. Identity politics. Minoritarianism. Endless curricular disputes. Weird religions. There are few things in the book so outrageous that they have not managed to happen in the last thirty years. It is all so ridiculous, and all so pertinent. I liked it the first time because it seemed very much like my alma mater. I like it now because it seems like all the universities in America. If anything, my own university has only grown more like American Megaversity with the passage of time.

It is fortunate this is a book and not a movie, because it prevents you from seeing out of date clothes and assuming everything in the book happened in the past. With a few minor changes, The Big U could easily be set today. The Stalinist Underground Battalion would have to be replaced with Occupy Wall Street, smart phones would have to be added in, and the university mainframe would have to be replaced with the web, but everything else could stay the same.

The first time I read this book, I was attracted to the commonalities to my own life. The character who was a budding physicist. The genius programmers. The awkward fit of so many of the viewpoint characters to the dominant party scene. Even the bit with the university locksmith [in college, I worked as a student locksmith for the university]. It just seemed to fit.

Ten years later, there are a few things I appreciate more now than I did the first time. The cynical university president is someone I can now identify with. The Big U administration made poor choices, but now that I have actual responsibility, I appreciate the heroic virtue that would be required to resist those temptations. S. S. Krupp is bright, decisive, and capable. His only flaw is putting the university's reputation [and lots of jobs] ahead of doing the right thing. I am glad I don't face the same choices, because it is hard to see how I could realistically do better in the same circumstances.

The sexual dynamic that drives many of the viewpoint characters is far more obvious in retrospect. Especially if you were a nerd [who I presume is Stephenson's _target audience]. Teenagers are driven by their hormones in strange ways, nerdy teenagers even more so, and those of us who have survived that phase can only pity them. This too shall pass.

Of all Stephenson's books, this is the one I like best. The first Neal Stephenson book I ever read was Snow Crash. Snow Crash was recommended to me by my freshman year college roommate, and I liked it enough to try more, although I'm not sure its many fans realize it is a dystopia. The Big U was the second. I really liked The Big U, so I tried a number Stephenson's other books, but I never really enjoyed them. Stephenson wrote Zodiac when it seemed like dioxin was the worst thing ever made by humans. By the time I read it, the evidence was a little more mixed. Thus I had trouble taking the plot seriously. I couldn't get through even the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. Maybe this one was a fluke.

I choose to see it as a stroke of genius. Maybe this book couldn't have been written seriously or intentionally, because we are all too identified with sides in the on-going culture war that rages in the universities. Stephenson has a pretty clear side with the left-Libertarians now, but in this book maybe he hadn't quite found his voice, because even characters on the wrong side seem sympathetic, despite some salvos in favor of his clear favorites. As Lincoln and C. S. Lewis argued in their distinctive ways, the sides we are on, and the sides that are really in the right, may not necessarily turn out to be the same. ( )

This book has a unfleshedout black character as the POV narrator. There's rape and violence and unrealistic female characters, and really bizarre treatments of lesbianism. (I think somewhere in there someone became a lesbian because her female friend shot the man who was trying to rape her.) This is not going to be a keeper.

Dated now, but funny and wince-inducingly horrific, especially to someone who was in Ames around the same time. Mostly, a fascinating backward glimpse at the authorial mind that would later create Snow Crash. ( )

I love Stephenson but I could not even get halfway through this. ( )

This book is really good for a first book, and you can see some of the ideas that Stephenson explores in later books starting here. The characters are believable, and the story line interesting if a bit odd. Overall, I really enjoyed this book.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Neal_Stephenson/The_Big_U.html ( )

You can clearly see the seeds of Stephenson's later work - ideas, plot devices, even characters. It is his typical sense of humor, very entertaining (if you are willing to suspend your disbelief) and a good idea or two to think about.

That being said, Its not quite as mature as his later work. If your a Stephenson fan, don't bass this one up. but if you're new to the author, start with one of his better known books. ( )

It's got a major case of first-novel-itis, but this is a damn hilarious campus satire, and a must-read for Neal fans and disgruntled undergrads alike. ( )

This truly is an awful novel. It boggles the mind that an author that went on to write modern classics like Snow Crash, Zodiac (yes, Zodiac dammit. It's a great read) and Cryptonomicon could possibly have written this book, even at an early age. Stephenson knows it's atrocious which makes it a little better, but unfortunately after being out-of-print for many years, he inexplicably allowed Harper to bring it back in 2001. Why, Neal, why??!!!?? ( )

The Big U is the first and least of Stephenson's novels. But if it ultimately fails to cohere, that's only because it was an ambitious attempt--with themes and a voice that Stephenson's fans will recognize from his later work. [2008-08-05] ( )

The story of a big university gone wrong. A great read for anyone attending or planning on attending a large state university. Everything goes wrong as the whole academic system falls down and the school is thrown into warring factions. ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1Z... ( )

Very imaginative novel set in a university environment, with central ideas taken from "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. Due to reasons revealed some way into the novel, the students on campus regress to a more primitive mentality and a tribal society takes shape. Very funny novel. ( )