The big U by Neal Stephenson
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. [[email protected]]
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------------------------ -- The Go Big Red Fan -- ------------------------
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 souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical appliances, and his laugh-- a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.