Horace Engdahl, meet Hiro Protagonist

I would like to second Dan’s distaste for the blatherings of Horace Engdahl, a name straight out of a Kingsley Amis novel. I would also like to second his appreciation for the writings of Neal Stephenson. It’s true, he can be a bit pretentious. But I’ll stack the first chapter of Snow Crash — an account of a pizza delivery gone to hell — against, say, the first chapter of Underworld — about how a Giants-Dodgers game is a metaphor for the nuclear balance of terror or something — any day of the week.

A few years ago, the New York Times Book Review published a list of the best American novels of the past 25 years. I have no idea what the best one should be. But this might be my favorite paragraph of the past 25 years (also from Snow Crash):

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.