Scanned and OCR'd by a loyal fan with a loose sense of ethics.
Death to the big-bucks "The Big U" auctions on Ebay!
Please submit all changes/fixes to
[email protected]
Buy Neal's other (reasonably priced) books.
From a recent (4/29/99) interview:
Lomax: Above, you said that you were "no damn good at writing short stories"
What about these days? Do you think you will write exclusively in the long
form? Oh, and what's the deal with the Big U. Will that ever see print
again?
Stephenson: I still find short stories very difficult to write, and I admire
people who can do that. At the moment, novels are working for me and so I
think I'll stick with them. Concerning the Big U... It is an okay novel,
but I'm in no hurry to put it back into the world. There is a lot of other
good stuff that people could be reading.
v0.9 - First public release. Missing introduction quotes/author info.
[
[email protected]]
v0.9.5 - Bugfix. Recreated proper paragraph breaks, formatted to 78 columns,
corrected OCR errors, replace 8-bit characters with 7-bit equivelants,
properly centered what should be, undid hyphenation. [
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-- The Go Big Red Fan --
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The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System
it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk.
Fenrick was a Business major and a senior. From the talk of my wingmates I
gathered that he was smart, yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was
also used, but admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, intolerably
so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded design suitable
for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station before John Wesley
Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with him. Running up one sky-blue
side was a Go Big Red bumper sticker. When Fenrick ran his System-- that
is, bludgeoned the rest of the wing with a record or tape-- he used the Fan
to blow air over the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics
from melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head and
neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the seventh
floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies rock-'n'-roll
