Books - The Big U

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	Books - The Big U

The Big U (1984) is Neal Stephenson's first published novel, a satire of campus life.

The story follows the misadventures of a socially inept physics student, a pair of gun-wielding lesbians, a hardcore LARP/war gaming club, and other misfits through a series of escalating events that culminates with a full scale civil war raging on the campus.

Told in first person from the perspective of Bud, a lecturer in Remote Sensing new to the university, the book attacks and makes fun of just about every conceivable group at university, though his portraits of the nerds/computer scientists/role players tend to be more detailed than those of factions probably further removed from the author's experience.

The events take place at a fictitious big university consisting of a single building (a central complex with eight towers containing student housing), making the university an enclosed universe of its own. Stephenson uses this fact to take what starts as a mostly realistic satire and move it further and further into the realms of fantasy, including near-intelligent rats and alternate realities merging with ours.

Stephenson has said he is not proud of this book. By the time Snow Crash
was published, The Big U was out print, and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. However, when original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed it to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.

The book was written while Stephenson was at Boston University. The fictional campus' design is based on a BU dormitory, Warren Towers. Located at 700 Commonwealth Ave in Boston, Massachusetts, it is one of the largest, and some would say ugliest, dorms in the US. The character of president Krupp shares a number of similarities with then BU President John Silber. The neon Big Wheel sign plays the part of the Citgo sign just East of the BU campus in Kenmore Square. The Big U's financial crisis and the lost library catalog are based on actual events.

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