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Besides his endings, his couples intimacy scenes are also absolutely awful and the women can be cartoonish. He makes up for everything with his worldbuilding skill though. Authors lean heavily on the parts of writing they're good at. For example, I've been reading Asimov's foundation, and he almost ignores characterization and describing any of the locations in the book. The whole thing revolves around the plot.

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This, so much. Stephenson is a great worldbuilder, but please don't let that guy describe any human emotion other than curiosity / passion for discovery.

Following his stories has always been for me a mix of "oh, this is a cool world / tech / mechanics!" and facepalms over how and why the half of his characters do what they do.

[Stephenson] To this very day, I still cannot purge the phrase "imperial pint of semen" from my brain.

I _HATED_ Foundation as a kid. Only now do I realize that Asimov basically wrote a history book.

Rewrote.

Foundation has been described as a condensed retelling of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Terminus is an outlier and an observer in a universe that goes through the convulsions of the slow, but inevitable breakdown.

"Decline and Fall" has been an inspiration for maybe the first book. Being that it started the series, it set the pieces for the worldbuilding, but not the narrative of the whole saga. The later books are way more exploratory in how a society can / should be reconstructed.

That being said, it's still 1950's science fiction. Good writing, but nowhere near the complexity of Stephenson's worldbuilding or G.R.R.Martin's politics / narrative threads.

Good observation. I wonder if this is a reason the TV adaptations have been tough. Plot seems best enjoyed in written form whereas world building shines on screen.

The TV series is almost entirely disconnected from the novels. It’s like they picked and used some minor details at random and that’s it. It was bizarre.

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