The Big U

but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time.

The novel sets its collegiate mayhem inside American Megaversity, a colossal eight-tower concrete complex that traps forty thousand students above highway interchanges and labyrinthine sewer tunnels.

Stephenson follows student government president Sarah Jane Johnson through administrative runarounds and dorm hazing while freshman physics major Casimir Radon tinkers with high-velocity electromagnets in the basement.

Rival campus tribes turn the residential towers into open battlegrounds, escalating from stereo volume wars to tear gas and rogue wargaming.

Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.

• Hacking: A rogue software prodigy unleashes the Worm, an insidious machine-code sabotage program that devours campus records from hidden disc drives.
• Satire: Senior John Wesley Fenrick and roommate Ephraim Klein wage acoustic war with a 600-watt stereo system, an uninsulated window fan, and thunderous organ fugues.
• Sci-Fi: Hidden radioactive waste beneath the foundation breeds hordes of eighty-pound mutant rats that swarm the sewer tunnels and flee only from strobe lights.
• Gaming: Student wargamer Fred Fine leads the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and Simulations into live-action sewer dungeon campaigns backed by an armored minitank.
• Also by This Author: Seveneves, Termination Shock and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O..