It's the very essence of cult authorship: reading Stephenson feels like being part of an exclusive club, even when everyone else is reading him too.

Combine that information-age insider status with his deadpan ironic prose, which is constantly nudging you to see jokes where you normally wouldn't, and what you get is the sense of being invited into the intellectual penthouse suite, for a brief glimpse of a privileged worldview. The reason, I think, is that Stephenson is like that uber-cool kid who sits down the back of the classroom, saying very little, getting near-perfect marks with no apparent effort while giving off a faint vibe of benign contempt.Įven though cyberpunk was essentially dead and buried by the time his breakthrough novel Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book retrospectively turned him into the movement's crown prince. 'Cult author' seems to be an ineradicable part of Stephenson's authorial persona, even though he clearly isn't one. What's interesting about this argument is the way people keep on feeling they need to make it. I tell you that Stephenson is always described as a cult author, and then I list the number of Stephenson novels that have made it on to the New York Times best-seller list - six, five of them at number one - and then I point out that under any reasonable definition of the term 'cult author', Stephenson's massive mainstream success disqualifies him. The default opening for any review of a Neal Stephenson novel is the 'cult author, but not really' explanation.

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