Justin Cox Presents:

Surviving The Big U

After I read Snow Crash last year I became an instant Neal Stephenson fan. Crazy characters, even crazier stories, what’s not to like? I’ve since read Zodiac and just finished The Big U.

While everything I’ve read by Stephenson has a slight tinge of insanity, The Big U takes the cake. It’s the story American Megaversity, a massive university complex somewhere in the north east. It’s basically a self contained city that has been built up over years. It follows a number of characters life at AM over the course of one school year. There are the live action role playing nerds, factuality advisors, computer geeks, class presidents, socialist terrorists, Mormon student groups, rail guns and giant heartless rats.

It becomes blatantly obvious when a piano, throwing out the window of one of the residential towers, crashes through the roof of one of the research labs that the school year is going to a bumpy one. I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but just know that as the school year continues to progress, life at American Megaversity continues to deteriorate.

The thing is, as crazy as the story was, it brought back some memories from college life. I did a good bit of throwing random object out of residential tower windows. Never a piano, but there was a desk chair and an entire roll of carpet. Stephenson wrote The Big U in the 80′s after leaving his own college experience behind. I guess it’s safe to say that some things never change.

The Big U is a wild, and almost completely unbelievable story but one that you have no reason to skip. Read it. Now. Better yet, buy it from Amazon and I get like thirteen cents!