Sometimes you read a book and it makes you think. This is normal. Brains are meant to think. Sometimes you think so hard it makes you see the world differently. Sometimes you see the world so differently that entire new futures open up before your eyes. Neal Stephenson blows my mind regularly so here is a list of his books from the mind exploding to the merely fascinating. This page will be incomplete until I finish adding a short description of what makes each book mind bending as I finish reading and ranking each book… Reamde was the first book reviewed and I recently added the review of it’s sequel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. Thanks for your patience!

  1. Ananthem
  2. Snow Crash
  3. Fall, or Dodge in Hell: a Novel
    Can we have a mind without a body? If we destroy the veracity of facts on the internet, will we destroy the ability of the uneducated to believe education?  Neal Stephenson addresses these big questions and many more in The Fall.  Prepare to have your understanding of the world probed and challenged!
  4. The Diamond Age
  5. SevenEves
  6. The Baroque Cycle
  7. Cryptonomicon
  8. Zodiac
  9. Interface
  10. Reamde
    Generally, Reamde is a straight-forward action novel with some subtle SciFi elements. While there are some mind tweaking (less than mind bending) twists in the story, Stephenson does introduce a virtual game world similar to World of Warcraft and makes you consider how it blends with the real world to create a separate economy.
  11. The Cobweb

Awaiting Ranking (ie: unread):

  • Atmosphæra Incognita
  • The Big U
  • The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel (with Nicole Galland)
  • In the Beginning…was the Command Line (non-fiction)
  • Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing (non-fiction)

Not Included in the list are the Subetai publishing projects that include Neal Stephenson as one of several authors. These are fun books, but other than some interesting conflicts set up by strange collections of cultures, they are relatively straight-forward.

  • The Mongaliad (with Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo) – A pseudo-historical fantasy series set during the Mongol Empires’ attack on Eastern Europe featuring knights, longbows, Chinese assassins, and a staff possibly made from the tree of life.
  • Cimarronin: The Complete Graphic Novel (with Mark Teppo, Charles C. Mann, Ellis Amdur, Dean Kotz, Robert Sammelin) – A comic graphic novel of a ronin samurai convinced by a rogue Jesuit priest to help smuggle a Chinese princess to seventeenth-century Mexico… Yeah, its as weird as it sounds. Still good though.