Well said. I have similar feelings about Neal Stephenson, though I'd say Gibson's literary skills are a level above.
That's what an ending does.
The implication is that the interesting developments in that world never end, even if the book must.
Personally I find his endings enchanting.
And then vomiting like 700 pages of it.
And then not editing it.
And then releasing it in hardback.
And some people are not into the language stuff and the like. I can understand how it would miss a lot of people. I found it strangely engaging.
> unpleasant experience of being actually angry with an author
Care to say more?
I think the part where the anger really took over, as my main feeling toward and about the novel, was a scene he wrote that exists only to have one character explain another character's motivation "to them"—but actually to us, because we'd spent the last 1/3 or so of the novel with a character whose motivations and behavior didn't seem consistent, like Stephenson had recycled the early-in-the-book character straight into another role that was actually a whole different character, without explanation, without transition, without foreshadowing, without the character themselves seeming to reflect on their own change (which might have justified this scene), without doing the work to make it fit. Moreover, and as a sign of just how "whoops better patch that up without actually putting in any effort" that was, the explanation is entirely lame and unconvincing.
It felt like a chapter that got inserted because test readers or his editor went "WTF?" about all that, and it was just so, so lazy and bad, and retroactively made the treading-water-and-pointless-but-not-offensive middle section of the book worse, to know that, no, it wasn't going somewhere good, Stephenson just wrote it poorly and now, at the end, he's lazily writing his way out of his own mess, rather than fixing it.
(this is the scene between—and I'm a little fuzzy on the characters, as this was years ago—the Chinese emperor-dude and the father who tried to get an off-books Primer for his daughter, from the beginning of the book, with the scene in question occurring, IIRC, near the beginning of what you might call the last act)
Here’s an interesting thread with more books that share this conceit: https://ask.metafilter.com/190234/Help-me-find-novels-set-in...
Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it.
A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently.
But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things.
...
So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.
For me, the endings meme really is that - I don't see what people are complaining about.
The closest thing I've encountered to that in film is the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest. (SPOILERS) It's _very_ abrupt. And yet, when I think about it, it feels masterful -- there's nothing that could have been added between the climax and the ending that would have made it better. Objectively it seems really good, but it's _shocking_ in how abrupt it is, and as a viewer it took me some time to reconcile between "I hate that" and "that's probably brilliant".
It seems to me that that sort of satisfaction isn't what Stephenson is going for, but rather if his works can be said to have any consistent theme it is that narrative threads (plot, history, etc.) overlap but aren't aligned, so no matter when you start or stop at least some of those threads are going to be in the middle.
Like William Gibson he has a prophetic ability to see future technology, and put it to paper.
I find the message very interesting: culture is technology. He has such strong libertarian characters in every novel, he also shows that: "being strong but along makes you weak" (Mel being captured and trussed up). His cultural superiority explanation falls apart slightly in two ways: Victorian culture is lacking (the point of the Mel experiment) and the three girls have completely different outcomes from their "Primer education". (or maybe Victorian culture just needs to evolve).
I'm not sure how I feel about the Victorians battling the (barbarian) Chinese and the very feudal class structure.
There are hints all over the Diamond Age that refer to Snow Crash;
> "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself.
> "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said.
> "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid."
(Anathem hides the central plot elements of the book until at least halfway through, though, which could be offputting on its own if you don't click with the world-building before that. But personally I greatly prefer that to the pedestrianness of a Reamde or Fall or even the front end of Seveneves.)