TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson

In which Mr. Stephenson perfects his particular take on the technothriller. Pity the notional traveller who picks up this book at the airport for a globe-trotting, politics-adjacent James Rollins-y kind of ride and cops a twenty-page disquisition on the biology and habits of the feral hog right between the eyes instead. But, if said traveller survives Stephenson letting his inner Melville out (which, pleasingly, Stephenson intertextually puts his hands up to), said traveller will receive the genuine pleasure of seeing Stephenson start his multiple plot threads and tie them all together in the final chapters, no matter how unlikely any such confluence seemed at the beginning. It’s a wonderful trick of engineering skill, and I certainly chuckled to myself as I watched him pull the stunt off.

(Digression – I decided to spend this winter reading some of the books I’d always meant to, and that’s included MOBY DICK. An appalling gap in my reading. I watch or read the adaptations – Bill Sienkiewicz did a beautiful graphic novella palimpsest of the book – and I assume I know what the book is. I didn’t. At all. Nor did I realise the breadth and depth of its influence on the American novel. But I’m not here to talk about mad old Melville today.)

TERMINATION SHOCK is a giant confection, sure (though, at some 700 print pages, shorter than his usual tomes), and perhaps there will never again be a vast 24-course banquet like THE BAROQUE CYCLE from his keyboard, but when a confection is made with this much expertise and obvious joy — and Stephenson is clearly enjoying himself immensely — you can’t help but admire it and consume it with equal joy. A Stephenson book hasn’t had the sense of smiling to itself on the page since, perhaps, ANATHEM, and on the levels of craft and pace it’s a head above REAMDE, SEVENEVES and FALL. I mean, it’s 700 pages long and I read it in something like eight days, in huge gulps. I found later that I didn’t make any Kindle highlights at all. I was just carried through the book without pause.

(Also, there is no criticism of Mr. Stephenson’s post-BAROQUE CYCLE output here. He did, after all, do the damn thing. He doesn’t have to do it again.)

But, being a technothriller, its foot in the near future will become a footprint in the past soon enough. The inciting incident is a super-rich American who decides to do something for the future, and that’s the era we live in — the zillionaire act of privileged hubris framed in terms of “the future.” Although, I must also note my delight at the tool of the act being a Gerald Bull supergun, something of a retro grace note. On a base level, then, it’s a parable of tech disruption, which is certainly not new territory for Stephenson, but he may never have framed it in such universally accessible terms before.

So, then: an action thriller about a hunter of feral hogs, the Queen of the Netherlands, a Punjabi-Canadian martial artist and a truckstop billionaire who’s discovered a way to pause the climate emergency, in which Moby-Dicks abound and I get to learn a lot about the history of sulphur and, well, the history of anything else Neal Stephenson was interested in over the last couple of years. It feels like it’s probably the state of the art in modern genre writing. I think this serves as an excellent entry point into his work.

TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson (US) (UK)

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.