[liamondrop]

What you are portraying as negatives (meandering detours into entirely unnecessary, but hilarious, trivia; absurdly unlikely plot scenarios [since when is anything about Snowcrash a likely scenario?]; etc.) are probably what loom as the largest selling points for fans of Stephenson's work from Cryptonomicon onward. I don't think we buy the books for the "plausability" factor.

Also, the books hardly take themselves seriously.

[waterlesscloud]

The Baroque Trilogy literally changed how I see the way the world works. Those endless detours are worth quite a lot.

[dredmorbius]

The best textbook on modern banking and finance I've ever read.

Which, I realize, is a really damning endorsement of a novel, but I honestly found it fascinating. Once I chewed through enough (roughly half) of the first book to the point that it was engaging.

And yes, its exposition was itself an exploration of the baroque.

[planetguy]

Some of them are. Some of them are truly pointless. Neal Stephenson apparently had a giant map of 18th century London on the wall of the room where he wrote it, and as such apparently feels compelled, on certain occasions when a character goes from one place to another, to name every street he passes on the way. That's not atmospheric or interesting, it's just filler.

[excuse-me]

The point of Baroque architecture and music is to have too much detail at every level to take in - presumably he was trying the same thing in writing.