Probably the most disappointed I’ve been in a book in a long time.

In short: The moon suddenly breaks into seven pieces because of a collision with some unknown thing, and it turns out that Earth has 2 years before it becomes uninhabitable. Science to the rescue!

The first 2/3 of this book is oustanding — not always engaging, but always creative and thorough in the way watching a science documentary is. The story is somewhat unsatisfying but even when it’s not perfect, it’s impressive as hell.

Until about the 600 page mark.

And then, it’s terrible. Unreadable. The experience changes from ‘too detailed but fascinating science documentary’ to ’a 10-year-old tells you every detail about his video game adventures for hours on end’. Just awful.

I couldn’t believe I’d read 700+ pages of a book and decided not to finish it, but after reading the spoilers, I’m glad I did. The last third ruins every bit of goodwill and momentum that builds before it.

Stephenson is not for me, and it’s a bummer. I hated Snow Crash (I don’t think I finished that one either, tried twice), and thought for a while that this was the one that would turn me into a fan.

Nuh-uh. I don’t care how good the book is at its’ best, because all I’ll remember about this is how much the last section felt like an insult.

More than anything it reminded me of Sleeping Giants and its sequels — the first two books of that series were excellent, and the third was so bad it tainted the entire experience. Done with Neal Stephenson, I guess.