Sometimes you want to recommend a book that will impress someone, or read a book that will stimulate your brain. Here’s a ranking of the books of Neal Stephenson by how much I respect them for their intellectual and literary quality. This page will be incomplete until I finish adding a short description of what makes each book great as I finish reading and ranking each book… Reamde‘s blurb is now joined by Fall, or Dodge in Hell – still a long way to go. Thanks for your patience!

  1. Ananthem
  2. The Baroque Cycle
  3. Cryptonomicon
  4. The Diamond Age
  5. Fall, or Dodge in Hell: a Novel
    The Fall is a complex novel of life after death, the internet after truth, and how humanity’s flaws follow us because they make us who we are.
  6. Snow Crash
  7. Reamde
    As a fun novel, one could read Reamde superficially and have a grand time (read the extended review here). While he doesn’t have the big themes present in novels ranked higher up on this list, one of the characters in Reamde suffers an character arc of misery that explores the different layers of evil from a casually black hat hacker to a rapist terrorist. Some bad people start to look good when viewed from an even more evil perspective… The book also contains interesting explorations of real and virtual worlds and how we can expect their economies to blend in the near future.
  8. SevenEves
  9. Interface
  10. The Cobweb
  11. Zodiac

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 projects are fun, but I just didn’t feel they were up to Stephenson’s typical level of literary quality. Of course, they are still way above average! I’m not trying to slight the other authors because I don’t know their independent work – I suspect group projects always get watered down to some degree.

  • The Mongaliad (with Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo) – This is a side project with a group of other authors. This series is more of a pseudo-historical fantasy series set during the Mongol Empires’ attack on Eastern Europe.
  • 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.