It's funny I actually have a different view because I was not a big fan of Snow Crash. I loved Cryptonomicon and liked the Baroque Cycle (yes it could have been trimmed a bit). Snow Crash seemed self indulgent to me, he also seemed to be pandering to his audience too much, his characters were how geeks saw themselves and how they should be in the world, not how their were. Whereas in Cryptonomicon geeks had a lot of power but it showed they were not the masters of their own destiny and superior to all the non-geeks. His main characters ha flaws. He did pull a weird ending out on that one, it did sort of fall flat, I think that is one of his flaws as a writer. I did not read the Diamond Age yet.