For educators i always suggest "The Diamond Age". In the last few years, AI has just catched up enough for non-tech people to take it serious.

I really liked the first half of Fall; Or Dodge in Hell. But it has been the only Stephenson book where i needed discipline not to get enough sleep, but to get through the second half.

I really enjoyed Zodiac. It’s reads like a thriller novel but it’s a little more grounded and less weird than Snow Crash. I think it’s a good entry point for Stephenson novels.

The first half or so of Snow Crash is a great entry point if the recipient already read some cyberpunk and thought "this has something interesting but also has a stick up its arse, it's about time someone ripped the piss out of it" - and I say this as a fan of Gibsonian prose excess.

The only problem is this puts the recipient in a too-cynical, too-stylistically-demanding mode for the rest of Stephenson.

- Posted on my Ono-Sendai Rig, from some kind of Zone, while experiencing Hacker News as some kind of geometric hallucination, under a sky the colour of a television switched off...

Zodiac is the easy introduction because it's the least Neal Stephenson book of the lot: short, minimal infodumps and tangents, and it really doesn't get much nerdier than the protagonist being a chemist [as well as a wetsuit-wearing crime fighter] or much weirder than there being a metal band in there because Stephenson wanted there to be a metal band.

I’ve had good luck on that with Diamond Age, but I feel the need to couple that with a strident warning about how incredibly unsatisfying the ending is (which to me is a recurring thing with his books).

I disliked Fall intensely. I either didn’t finish it, or skimmed the last third of it or so just to try to get a sense of what happened. I think I did finish it, but only because I was on vacation and had nothing else to read by the pool.

I feel that his novels are becoming more and more mainstream friendly, and Termination Shock is my suggestion. The world is very similar to our own, set in the near future (versus The Diamond Age) of our planet (versus Anathem) and is very relatable.

My other suggestions would be REAMDE for people who are into action movies or spy novels, or the first half of Seveneves for space nerds.

I think they are becoming more mainstream friendly as, well, the world has caught up with him, more or less - I find he's a master at grasping what technologies will explode into the mainstream a few years early, then spin a wonderful yarn around that.

Cryptonomicon, REAMDE (to some extent) and The Diamond Age seemed really future-y when released - but now, their basic concepts are all over the media and on people's minds.

REAMDE came out a very short time before awareness of ransomware went from "a handful of people in the hacker world" to "infosec industry starts becoming aware of it".

To more than a few people, it seemed very prescient.

Reamde is much more thriller than SF. My big objection to it is that it was one of those novels where if everything didn't fall right into place again and again, there wouldn't be a story.

I’ve leant my copy of Cryptonomicon to many people who went on to read his other books.

Snow Crash is maybe the most accessible. And, while one of his older books, the association with the metaverse, etc. makes it rather timely.

Try Zodiac. It's not even sci-fi (or if it is, it's _barely_ sci-fi, and only near the end).

If they like the writing style and etc. of that, should be easier to talk them into maybe Cryptonomicon or something next. Cryptonomicon might also be a good entry point, but it's long, so it's a harder sell.

Agree, "Fall" is not one of the more accessible of his works IMO. Neither Anathem, even though it's my favorite of his books. I feel like if Neal Stephenson wanted to write a DND campaign, he'd revolutionize that niche with his incredible world building and excellently pervasive themes.

Diamond Age has been a hit with a lot of my friends, even ones not into scifi.

Agree with you re Fall. Terrible book.

I thought Fall was outstanding; the apes, MOAB, and Ameristan parts were remarkably relevant, and the last part was fun.

I really liked everything about Fall except the main plot. The Ameristan parts felt almost prophetic - that’s the book I wanted to read.

(spoilers) the part where Dodge's e-consciousness conceives of consciousness starting from static was...a tedious read hah. Good summary.

I think the concepts were pretty neat, I agree. However, it felt like two books in one. I will admit that I'm not a fantasy reader -- aside from LOTR, I'm not a big fan of the genre. Spending so much time on that was just not interesting to me. If that entire section was missing, the book would've been extremely compelling.

But to each their own! :)

This seems to be a thing that Stephenson likes: The Diamond Age has apparently deliberate significant changes in style and genre across it, Cryptonomicon is part very-near-future tech thriller and part-1940s spy thriller, Seveneves (as noted elsewhere here) has a big genre change some way through, and arguably The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O also blends a few different genres together, some of them historical. He's certainly more egregious about it in Fall, but it's something he obviously likes doing...

Anathem if you can convince them the to stick through the beginning and learn the words.

Absolutely not Cryptonomicon unless you're sure they're libertarian and male. I reread this recently and I think it aged very poorly for women and liberals because what was once a quirky set of characters in the modern part of the story are now a widespread and polarizing demographic today (our free thinking hero has to deal with some very exaggerated wokeness, and spends a few pages explaining that women aren't as obsessed with tech because they're so good at everything else).

This is not the author to start people who aren't into sci-fi on though. I really love some of his books but I think anyone who can get through one of them is probably already a sci-fi fan. There's more immediately fun books that people can get hooked on like Vinge and Brin or more literary and less tech-describing stuff like Ursula le Guin that appeal to wider audiences and from which they can look for other books with the same themes

Stephenson's take on e-gold might offend some libertarians too! In all seriousness, as I recall it the weirdness about women was mostly in-character views of nerds whose perception of the wider world isn't necessarily supposed to be that reliable, and the male-dominated cast actually makes sense in context. There are other Stephenson books more likely to annoy people in terms of gender roles and digressions about liberals and universities...

But yeah, Stephenson isn't the author to start non-sci fans on (though Vonnegut fans might love Cryptonomicon and spot an influence or two). Atwood's Oryx and Crake is probably my answer to that, since it's classic near future sci fi disguised as literature. The first book is all about near future society and the implications of plausible tech, she just writes about the people in it and doesn't waste words describing the details of stuff they wouldn't know or how it actually works. And the subsequent books are cliche-trope heavy dystopic sci-fi and still probably doesn't feel that way to people who tend to avoid that stuff.

Yeah people don't seem to realize that Lawrence Waterhouse is kind of an unreliable narrator.

Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books, but I also once described it to a friend as "one very long dick joke".

On the other hand, if your problem is with the thin portrayal of women, and you like a more conventional Space Opera kind of thing, Atwood isn't interested in "robots and spaceships and all that" so maybe try Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy ("Ancillary Justice" etc.)

Neal is terrible at writing female characters, which is probably at its most obvious in Cryptonomicon.

he's gotten better at it. I really don't like his more tech bro-ish books but I liked Reamde a lot, which features a pretty good set of characters.

Reamde does still have rape as character development which is... it's one of those tropes that once you notice an author keeps doing it you wince when it comes up again. This is of course in The Big U, and in Snow Crash, and in Diamond Age, and here it is again in Reamde.

I really like Diamond Age, it's probably one of my favourite books, and if that was his only novel which did it I'd say well, fair enough it sort of makes sense in context - but it happens over and over, so that's not great. It's in the same category as Fridging in comics. Twice is coincidence, three times is lazy writing.

Yep, that's something I kind of flagged as a big "oof" as well after reading Reamde and noticing the repeat use in other books :/

I still enjoy his writing, and generally think he isn't a bad writer, but also...

Snow crash