I read this one on nights when the plant was quiet, which is most nights, and it is a strange book to read at 3am with a coffee going cold next to a chlorine residual chart. A guy named Hiro Protagonist, black samurai hacker pizza delivery guy, that’s a real sentence in this book, and somehow it works instead of reading like a joke. He wields a katana, he’s the best swordsman alive, he also delivers pizza for the Mafia because the Mafia runs the only franchise that still guarantees thirty minutes. I don’t know how Stephenson gets away with that combination but he does.
The Metaverse stuff still holds up better than it has any right to, thirty-plus years out. People live more of their lives in a shared digital space than the real one, and the book is smart enough to make that funny and sad at the same time instead of picking one. There’s a whole thread about an ancient Sumerian virus that spreads through language itself, nam-shubs, Asherah, linguistic infection as a real mechanism, and I won’t pretend I followed every beat of it on a first read, but it’s clearly built by someone who did the homework instead of hand-waving.
Where it loses me a little is the back third, where the plot swaps out momentum for lecture, long stretches of exposition about ancient languages and neurolinguistic programming that slow the book down right when a thriller should be speeding up. It started so great and then the wheels came a little loose over the last hundred pages, and I’ve heard other readers say the same thing, so I don’t think it’s just me. Still, a book with a protagonist named Protagonist and a skateboard courier named Y.T. who’s tougher than everyone around her earns a lot of slack. Worth the read, worth the patience it asks for at the end.